Swedish Silent Film: Lost Film, Found Magazines
My Silent Swedish Film webpage, which covered from the turn of century to the advent of sound, was, before its having been transferred at the last minute, a Geocities webpage. I still have a love for silent film, which skyrocketed after having looked at The Last Tycoon and The Garden of Eden; Photoplay magazine of 1927 mentions Fitzgerald being in the process of writing an original screenplay for Constance Talmadge, it later reviewing his adapted work, "Fitzgerald's novel, with its unscrupulous hero, violates some pet screen traditions." The silent film is in fact a deepening of the novel as an art form. Waldemar Young was credited for writing the scenario of the film Off Shore Pirate (1921), adapted from the short story written by Scott Fitzgerald. If I was not to be present that evening, I jotted down my having noticed that Harvard Film has a free series of screenings open to the public at the University, which if you rebegin this month, includes The Joyless Street (Die Freudlosse Gasse (G.W. Pabst 1925); my copy of the film I no longer have (my former mentor had a yardsale or something or other). Previous screenings have included Danish film star, Asta Nielsen Tragedy of the Street (Dirnetragodre, Bruno Rahn, 1927). Evidently, The Great Train Robbery (Porter,1903) was still being shown in theaters as late as 1926, added to the feature then playing, whereas it wasn't untill Hamlet (Gade, 1920) that sex symbol Asta Nielsen was introduced to mainstream audiences in the United States. Is it possible that when Greta Garbo visited the home of Basil Rathbone in the masquerade costume of Hamlet, it was a tribute, or nod, to Danish Silent Film star Asta Nielsen? As research, the recent European claim that it is impossible to screen two films by Sam Brakage, The Boy and the Sea and Silent Sand Sense Stars Subotnick and Sender, seems to avoid being mysterious as it teeters on being ludicrous, and the present author sees little probability that they have decomposed-what will not be seen at Harvard University, or at the Universities of Sweden or Denmark, is the 1922 film The Beautiful and the Damned directed by William A. Sieter/SydneyFranklin and starring Marie Prevost, if a film accurately reported as being unavailbable for screening, or or the 1926 film The Great Gatsby directed by Herbert Brenon and starring Lois Wilson- within the world of Lost Films, Found Magazines, there are no existant copies of either film, our knowledge of them and curiousity is left for stills taken during the time period; there are no vaults that exist.For that matter, there little likelihood of a copy of The Villiage Blacksmith (1922, eight reels) directed by John Ford going on sale; there are no copies of it anywhere: similarly The Courtship of Miles Standish (Fredrick M Sullivan, 1923) is lost but two pages of full page advertisements of Charles Ray and Enid Bennett were found by the present author in The Film Daily from the year of its first run. Both Anna Karenina (J. Gordon Edward, 1915, five reels), starring Betty Nansen and Stella Hammerstein, and The Scarlet Letter (Carl Harbaugh, 1917) starring Mary Martin, are lost, both filmed by Fox Film.
The characters portrayed on-screen by Ruth Taylor and Alice White may be familiar to present audiences, but the scenario co-written with John Emerson by the author of the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos, and directed by Malcom St. Clair in 1927 is also among the silent film listed as lost film. One novel, One Increasing Purpose, seems intriguing in that it seems only possible that it is missing, filmed in 1926, it was advertised as being the next great work to have been written by A.S.M Hutchinson after If Winter Comes; as good as the drama may have been, it was filmed in England and seems elusive in being included in lists of lost-missing films.
Although only its director, Leslie H. Hiscott, may know the whereabouts of The Missing Rembrant, die hard fans of Arthur Wotner and Ian Fleming can only wonder. The director is not only known to fans of Sherlock Holmes but is also listed as the director of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, under the title Alibi, and of the film Black Coffee.
And yet there are several films that are now lost that appeared not only on the theater marquee, but in bookstores; Grosset and Dunlap having published Photoplay Editions of films rewritten as novels, in including intertextual photos, the illustrated photoplay edition of the novel London After Midnight, written by Marie Coolidge Rask, was published in 1928. Just as lost films have left behind their accompanying movie posters, as well as full page magazine advertisements that serve very much like movie posters when deciding not if we should see the film but what the film was like when first seen, each hardcover copy of an film adaptation into novel included a dustjacket, art that gives information about missing films: within there being Lost Films, Found Magazines. In regard to the 1918 film Mania (Evyen Illes), not only can it be included in Lost Films, Found Magazines, but it has been restored by the National Film Inatitute (Filmoteka Nardowa), who when announcing its premiere wrote, "its contents pertain to universal truths". The film is notable for its starring Pola Negri and the set design to the film having had been being crafted by Paul Leni. One lost film from that same year made in the United States is one of the films of Norma Talmadge, The Ghost of Yesterday (Miller, six reels). It is imperative that the word film study be surplanted by the word film appreciation: it was in 1946 that author Iris Barry cautioned the readers of Hollywood Quarterly through the article "Why wait for Posterity" as to films quickly becoming lost and the need to preserve the "romantic" Greta Garbo film The Saga of Gosta Berling (Stiller, 1925) by saving the prints from deterioration. After explaining that the original two-color technicolor copies of the Black Pirate that had belonged to Douglas Fairbanks and Harvard University, respectively, were in a vault "at the point of final deterioration", and could only be duplicated in black-and-white form, she qualifies that the criteria for screening film need, as with "the early Seastrom films", only be pleasure. "What, really is the point of dragging old films back to light? First, I believe that it benefits the general esteem and standing of the motion picture industry as a whole; for if the great films of the past are not worth taking seriously and are not worth re-examination, then presumably neither are the great films of today. It would be unthinkable if the only books available to literary men and women should be no more than those published in the past year or so." To echo her by my now finding this during the centennial of the two reeler in the United States and of Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller having become contemporaries at Svenska Bio , the biography of actress Greta Garbo penned by the present author on Geocities webpage encompassed the long waiting period before what was to be the last film to be made by Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, which happenned to be during the centennial of the one reel narrative film, "Of the utmost importance is an appreciation of film, film as a visual literature. film as the narrative image, and while any appreciation of film would be incomplete without the films of Ingmar Bergman, every appreciation of film can begin with the films of the silent period, with the watching of the films themselves, their once belonging to a valiant new form of literautre. Silent film directors in both Sweden and the United States quickly developed film technique, including the making of films of greater length during the advent of the feature film, to where viewer interest was increased by the varying shot lengths within a scene structure, films that more than still meet the criterion of having storylines, often adventurous, often melodramatic, that bring that interest to the character when taken scene by scene by the audience."
Whether or not there were pirates off the coast of Boston, the naval battles of the War of 1812 were immortalized, not only in the poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, but in the film Old Ironsides (twelve reels), starring Ester Ralston, directed by James Cruze in 1926; it is a film that there has always been a copy of and not in need of restoration, but like The Black Pirate, which employed technicolor, the film is more renowned for its early use of Magnascope than its story of the high seas. Three years before James Cruze had directed Hollywood (eight reels) for Paramount, which featured cameos by Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. The film has not been seen since it was first reviewed by Robert E. Sherwood, the printed article one of the only ways of our knowing its subject, "James Cruze treated Hollywood as a fantasy rather than a grimly realistic drama...Miss Drown, as Angela, was wistful, appealing and supremely pathetic. Her wide eyes seemed to increase in depth and in softness with each fresh disappointment...She is a tremendous success in this her first picture." Sigrid Holmquist had made only three films in Sweden before not only arriving in Hollywood, but appearing, as herself, as one of the many actors and actresses that appear in cameo in the 1923 film titled Hollywood. Included mong the lost films in which Dorothy Gish starred is The Ghost in the Garret (Jones, five reels).
Swedish Silent Film
Helen Hancock had only months earlier in Pantomine praised Swedish Silent Film star Lars Hanson in the article How About those Viking Ancestors, A little Talk about Swedish Matinee Idols. Like Greta Garbo, Mary Johnson travelled from Sweden to Germany. Mary Johnson had starred with Gosta Ekman in the first film directed by John W. Brunius, Puss and Boots (Masterkattan i stovlar) in 1918 for Film Industri Inc Scandia. The film was co-written by John W. Brunius and Sam Ask and was the first in which actress Ann Carlsten was to appear. The following year Scandia merged with Scandia to team Charles Magnusson with Nils Bouveng to run AB Svensk Filmindustri. Having been an actress for several films directed by George af Klerker, Mary Johnson was also that year to appear in the Swedish silent film Stovstadsfaror, directed by Manne Gothson and photographed by Gustav A. Gustafson. Appearing with Johnson in the film were Agda Helin, Tekl Sjoblom and Lilly Cronwin. Actress Mary Johnson returned to the screen to act for director John W. Brunius and cameraman Hugo Edlund in 1923 for the film Johan Ulfstjerna in which she starred with Anna Olin, Einar Hansson and Berta Hilberg. To add a sense of the film as a vehicle for the actress, author Forsyth Hardy has written, "Brunius could work effectively on a large canvass." Significantly, that same year Johnson starred for silent film director Mauritz Stiller and cameraman Julius Jaenzon in the film Gunnar Hedes Saga, in which she starred with Pauline Brunius, Stina Berg, and Einar Hansson. The film was an adaptation of the novel Herrgarssagen. When reviewed in the United States during 1924 while screened as The Blizzard although the film was reported as an adaptation of "The Story of a Country House", the review featured two stills and the subtitle "Swedish Production is Entertaining."; it ran, "This is highly dramatic and interesting, with several excellant scenes of reindeer swimming across a wide sream and following their leader blindly. The stampede is most realistic and well filmed. The rest of the film is quite ordinary and drags near the end." Einar Hanson appeared as Gunnar Hede on the cover of Filmnyheter during 1923; it is an issue in which there article that reads "Mary Johnson, var Svenska Filmingenue framfor kameran". On reviewing Sir Arne's Treasure/Snows of Destiny in 1922, Exceptional Photoplays wrote, "Mary Johnson, if she has a chance to become known on the American screen, will show us what it is to be lovely without being vapid, with the magic of a child and the magic of a woman- tenderness and sweetness that is not chiefly a product of simpering smiles and fluffy curls."
Motion Picture Magazine during 1923 wrote, "Sigrid Holmquist has come to Lasky's to appear in The Gentlemen of Leisure. She is a Swedish Mary Pickford" Holmquist had appeared under the direction of Lau Lauritzen in 1920 in the film Love and Bear Hunting (Karlek och Bjornjakt) before coming to the United States to appear in the film directed by Joseph Henabery and also during 1923 appeared in an adaptation of the Kipling novel The Light that Failed (George Melford) with Jaqueline Logan. She had also appreared in the 1922 film The Prophet's Paradise directed by Alan Crosland. As many as 19 films have been listed as lost and as having been directed by Peter Urban Gad, the husband of the earliest of silent stars of the silver screen, including Die falsche Asta Nielsen (1915), in which Nielsen plays both her double, Bolette, and herself. By 1922, Danish Silent Film director Peter Urban Gad had finished directing what would be his last silent film produced in Germany, The Ascension of Hannele Mattern (Hanneles Himmelfahrt), actress Margate Schlegel fulfilling the title role. If only to characterize Gad as an artist or intellectual, author Thomas J. Sanders writes, "Most emphatic was the prominent Danish author and director Urban Gad, who in early 1919 identified monumentalism, brutality and sentimentality as America's dominant film traits and advised German producers to focus on internal consistency and substance." Bela Belaz introduces the new subjects and new characters of the "form language" with a discussion of Urban Gad, "Urban Gad, the famous Danish film producer, wrote a book on film as far back as 1918...According to him every film should be place in some specific natural enviornment which must affect the human beings living in it and plays a part in directing their lives and destinies." Belaz, in Theory of Film: character and growth of a new art, looks at "photographed theater", and that including Scandinavian Film, as no longer being only the "photographed play", that nature itself could be included in the cast of players by the "dramatic features through the present action of the immediate effect of nature on the moods and feelings of human beings which sometimes excersise a decisive influence in their fate." Although The Silent Cinema, authored by Liam O'Leary, is a "Pictureback" and includes numerous stills from films that are lost and represents them as though they were available for screening at the time of its 1965 printing, it not only presages internet writing with its combination of filmography and chronology, but astutely alerts us that while becoming an even more vesatile drama actress, Asta Neislen had found new directors with whom to film. During 1922, she appeared in an on screen production of the writing of Stendhal with Vanina (Vanina, order die galgenhochziet), directed by Arthur von Gerlach and photographed by Fredrik Fuglsang.
In Germany, Marlene Dietrich by 1927 had begun to appear on the the screen in lead roles more often, her having that year starred in the film Cafe Electric (Gustav Ucicky). Not entirely ironically, while more and more films from Europe were becoming introduced to writers in the United States, two films from Germany that were filmed complicitly without subtitles yet still having a clear narrative development and depiction of plotline without expository or dialoge intertitle were being written about in the United States, Backstairs (1926), filmed by the stage director Leopold Jessner, a film about a young girl whose is in love and a mailman who witholds love letters written to her because he himself is in love with her, and Shattered (Lupu Pick,1921), scripted by Carl Mayer. Not only did Photoplay Magazine spy on Hollywood, but in 1929 it reported the release of Mata Hari: The Red Dancer, with Magda Sonja in the title role, the film directed in Germany by Fredrich Feher.
The Street of Sin (1928, seven reels) starring Fay Wray and Olga Barclanova was begun by Stiller and finished by the director Joseph von Sternberg. Kenneth MacGowan writing about the film notes, 'The film was more distinguished for its players-Jannings and Olga Barclanova- than for its script by Joseph Sternberg. Sternberg's work on Stiller's film has been credited as having secured his position as the writer and director ofthe silent films The Last Command (1928) with Evelyn Brent and The Case of Lena Smith (1929) with Esther Ralston. During 1928, actress Olga Barclanova also appeared in the films The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni, ten reels), The Dove (Roland West, nine reels), Forgotten Faces (Victor Schertzinger, eight reels), Avalanche (Otto Brower, five reels) and Three Sinners (Rowland V. Lee, eight reels). Three Sinners, with Warner Baxter was the second film to pair Olga Backlanova and Pola Negri, their both having appeared in the film Cloak of Death in 1915. During 1928, Fay Wray appeared in the films Legion of the Condemned (William Wellman, eight reels), The First Kiss (Rowland V. Lee). It was the year she began her lengthy first marriage to playwright screenwriter John Monk Saunders. Legion of the Condemned also that year appeared in bookstore. The Grosset Dunlap Photoplay Edition advertised John Monk Saunders as having been the author of Wings and published the film as a novel rewritten from one narrative form into another by Eustace H Ball, with illustrations from the film. Ball himself was an author, his having written the mystery novel The Scarlet Fox and had previously adapted into novel form the photoplay of the Douglas Fairbanks film The Gaucho. Pola Negri during 1929 had starred in The Secret Hour (eight reels), directed by Rowland V Lee.
An emailed newsletter from Norway reported that Silent Film actress Fay Wray had died early during the month of August, 200 4. The silent film actress and first of the screaming screen feminists of the horror genre had appreared in numerous silent films before having been cast in Eric von Strohiem's The Wedding March (1928), beginning with the films Gasoline Love (1923) and The Coast Patrol (1925).
King Vidor in 1924 paired John Gilbert and Aileen Pringle in two films, Wife of the Centaur, with Kate Lester, and His Hour. Conrad Nagel would that year team with Aileeen Pringle for the film Three Weeks. Nagel would appear on the screen with Eleanor Boardman for the 1924 film Sinners in Silk (Henley) and then the following year for The Only Thing, directed by Jack Conway. Silent Film actress Norma Shearer, in 1924, was starring in Broadway After Dark (Monta Bell, seven reels) with Anna Q. Nilsson, The Snob (Monta Bell, seven reels) with John Gilbert, Empty Hands (Victor Fleming, seven reels), Married Flirts (Robert Vignola, seven reels) with Conrad Nagel and The Wolfman (Edward Mortimer, six reels) with John Gilbert. The next year she starred in Pretty Ladies (Monta Bell, six reels), one of the films that she had been given by being a contract player at the MGM studio, it having afforded her a cameo role. The film was based on a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns and had featured Conrad Nagel. Also that year Shearer appeared in the films Waking Up the Town (James Cruze, six reels), Lady of the Night (Monta Bell, six reels) and His Secretary (seven reels). She continued with Conrad Nagel the following year in The Waning Sex (seven reels) and appeared in Upstage (Monta Bell, seven reels). While Mauritz Stiller was in movie theaters with Hotel Imperial, Photoplay Magazine reviewed Monta Bell's direction of Norma Shearer in Upstage as "delightful. When an interviewer had asked Conrad Nagel if he had been in love with Norma Shearer, Nagel equivocated, 'Every man who knew or worked with her was in love with her. She had an unusual grace and tact, and she was very sensitive to other people's feelings.' Pola Negri appeared in two films directed by Dimitri Buchowetski during 1924, Men, with Robert Frazer and Lily of the Dust.
1922 was a year during which Gustaf Molander's second film, Amatorfilmen, the first film in which actress Elsa Ebbengen-Thorblad was to appear, brought actress Mimi Pollack to Swedish movie audiences. Molander had made the film The King of Boda (Tyrranny of Hate, Bodakungen) in 1920. It was the first film to be photographed by Swedish cinematographer Adrian Bjurman and starred Egil Eide and Wanda Rothgardt. Karin Molander had in 1920 starred in two films by Mauritz Stiller, in When We Are Married (Erotikon) with Lars Hanson, Tora Teje, and Glucken Cederberg, and in Fiskebyn. She also that year appeared in the film Bomben, directed by Rune Carlsten. And yet Karin Molander would only later be mentioned to audiences in the United States, Photoplay Magazine noting in 1926 that she was no longer in Sweden and no longer married to Gustaf Molander, "With Lars Hanson came his wife, Karin Nolander, leading woman in the Royal State Theater of Stockholm and billed as 'Sweden's most beautiful woman' She hasn't appeared on the screen yet, but it shouldn't be long now with so many good Scandinavian directors over here." Pictured together, a 1927 photocaption from Photoplay Magazine read, "When Mr. and Mrs. Lars Hanson worked for Swedish companies, Mrs. Hanson was popular on the European screen as karin Nolander. But now that her husband has made a hit in this country, she has retired and decided to let his gather all the glory for the family." Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine had been secretary to Dante Gabriel Rosetti during the last year of the painter's life, his novels having been adapted to the screen by George Fitzmaurice, who filmed Barbara LaMarr in The Eternal City (1923) and by Hugh Ford, who filmed Katherine McDonald and Katherine Griffith in The Woman Thou Gavest Me (1919.) Cinematographer Charles Van Enger not only photographed the 1924 film Name the Man, directed by Victor Sjöstrom, but also that year photographed the films Lovers' Lane (Phil Rosen, seven reels) with actress Gertrude Olmstead, Three Women (Lubitsch, eight reels) with May McAvoy, Forbidden Paradise (Lubitsch, eight reels) with Pola Negri and Daughters of Pleasure (six reels) and Daring Youth (six reels), both directed by William Beaudine.
King Vidor in 1924 paired John Gilbert and Aileen Pringle in two films, Wife of the Centaur with Kate Lester, and His Hour. Norwegian film director Tancred Ibsen, while briefly in Hollywood, worked on the set design to the Vidor film His Hour. Monta Bell that year directed John Gilbert in The Snob (seven reels).
In Sweden, Karin Boye was publishing her second volume of poetry, Hidden Lands, her continuing in 1927 with the volume The Hearths. She had published her first work, Clouds two years earlier, a year when Swedish poet Birger Sjoberg had published Frida's Songs.
In 1925, Edmund Goulding began directing with Sun-Up Sally (six reels), starring Conrad Nagel and Irene and Sally (six reels), starring Constance Bennett, following the two films with Paris (six reels). Notably, Clarence Brown in 1925 directed Rudolph Valentino in the film The Eagle, which is of interest not only for its introduction of the pull-back shot, a tracking shot moving away from its subject similar to the present day zoom-out, but it was also one of the first films for which Adrain had designed the costumes, the other that year having had been being Her Sister From Paris.
Basil Rathbone, who co-starred with Greta Garbo, under the direction of Clarence Brown, in the sound version of Anna Karenina, wrote of his aquaintance with her in his autobiography, In and Out of Character. "I first met Miss Garbo in 1928 when Ouida and I were invited to lunch with Jack Gilbert one Sunday." Rathbone and his wife had been present at the premiere of the film Flesh and the Devil. Of his starring in film with her, he wrote, "And so upon the morning previously arranged I called upon Miss Garbo. The house, a small one, was as silent as the grave. There was no indication it might be occupied." Rathbone had also appeared in silent films- Trouping with Ellen (T. Hayes Hunter, seven reels) in 1924, The Masked Bride (Christy Cabanne, six reels), starring Mae Murray, in 1925 and The Great Deception (Howard Higgin, six reels) in 1926. Rathbone and his wife had been present at the premiere of Flesh and the Devil. Anna Karenina (1914), filmed by J. Gordon Edwards, had starred Betty Nansen. On learning that Greta Garbo had already had the film Mata Hari in production, Pola Negri deciding between scripts that were in her studio's story department chose A Woman Commands as her first sound film, in which she starred with Basil Rathbone. Of Rathbone she wrote in her autobiography, 'As an actor, I suspected Rathbone might be a little stiff and unromantic for the role, but he made a test that was suprisingly good.' Directed by Paul L.Stein, the films also stars Reginald Owen and Roland Young. Ronald Colman had begun as a screen actor in England as well with the films The Live Wire (Dewhurst, 1917), The Toilers (1919), Sheba (Hepworth, 1919), Snow in the Desert (1919) and The Black Spider (1920). Like Basil Rathbone, William Powell had also appeared in silent films, among those being Romola (Henry King, 1924 twelve reels) with Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and The Beautiful City (Kenneth Webb, 1925) with Dorothy Gish. William Powel also appeared with Fay Wray and Richard Arlen in the 1929 silent Four Feathers directed by Merrian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack.
And like Rathbone, another Sherlock Holmes, Clive Brook who appeared in the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Basil Dean) and in the title role of Sherlock Holmes (Howard) in the film of 1930, was appearing in silent films during the early 1920's, including Woman to Woman (Cutts 1923) and Out to Win (Clift, 1923). As part of an interesting study, Clive Brook had appeared in the mysteries Trent's Last Case (1920), directed by Richard Garrick and based on the novel by E.C. Bentley and The Loudwater Mystery (1921), based on the novel by Edgar Jepson, before his appearing with Isobel Elsom in the 1923 film A Debt of Honor directed by Maurice Elvey. One of the most sought after lost, or missing films, listed by the British Film Institute as having been filmed but not surviving today in an existing print is The Mystery of the Red Barn (Maria Marton) dircted by Maurice Elvey in 1913. The following year Elvey was to direct the mysteries The Cup Final Mystery and Her Luck in London. Elvey later directed Norwood in The Sign of the Four and in the silent Sherlock Holmes film The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Interstingly, Julius Jaenzon had filmed The Dangers of a Fisherman's Life, An Ocean Drama (Fiskarliv ets farer et Drama paa havet as an early Norwegian silent film under the direction of Hugo Hermansen. Salsvinnapolttajet (The Moonshiners, directed in Finland during 1907 by Teuro Puro and Louis Sparre, is presently considered a lost film. The photographer is listed as having been Frans Engstrom. Interestingly enough, author Marguerite Engberg writes that photoplay dramatists were instructed to limit the use of inter-titles and thereby depict narrative as visual whenever possible. To parallel this, a steady number of guides on creative writing that can be found in the category of Photodrama or photodramatist appeared in the United State between 1912 and 1920, whether or not many seem more lurid than the films themselves- to arbitrarily look at them, to find a sense of meaning as to what early photo-drama plot was, there is Photodrama: the philosophy of its principles, the nature of its plot, its dramatic construction, from 1914, written by Henry Albert Phillips. It contains a chapter on Visualization: "Visualized action takes first and foremost place in the photoplay; all other matters are harmonious trappings and devices or illusion that decorate creaking machines with esthetic realities. Inserted matter, unless artisticlly used, becomes theatric instead of dramatic. The volume continues on to examine subjects like how characterization in the short story and photoplay differ and how there is a necessity within plot to create an "obstacle", the author striving to "analyze photo-drama, to embody it as a new and complete for of drama-literary art."
Roman Novarro, who had starred with Greta Garbo in the film Mata Hari under the direction of George Fitzmaurice, in 1924 appeared in two films directed by Fred Niblo, Thy Name is Woman and The Red Lily. In 1925 the actor appeared in the films The Midshipman (Christy Cabanne, eight reels) and The Lovers Oath (six reels). Novarro is quoted as having said, 'It wasn't enough for her to satisfy the director. Often -despite his OK- she asked for a scene to be retaken because she didn't think she had done her best.' Between the films The Primitive Lover (Sidney Franklin, seven reels, 1922) and The Lady (1925), Frances Marion had written the screenplays to The French Doll (1923), Song of Love (Chester Franklin, eight reels, 1924), based on the novel Dust of Desire and starring Norma Talmadge Secrets (Frank Borzage, eight reels, 1924) and Tarnish (George Fitzmaurice, seven reels, 1924). Technicolor and artificial lighting were used in tandem for the first time in 1924 by director George Fitzmaurice to bring Irene Rich, Alma Rubens, Betty Bouton and Constance Bennett to the screen in the film Cytherea (eight reels). Screenland magazine noted that the scripts filmed by Fitzmaurice were often submitted by his wife, and that Ouida Bergere, more frequently remembered, or referred to, as the lover of Basil Rathbone, "was a successful actress before she began to write for pictures." The present author almost found it of more personal interest that there was an author named Faith Service that wrote for Motion Picture Classics more than anything. During 1920 it featured a portrait of the film director George Fitzmaurice and his relationship to the screenwriter, but also included a fictionalized version of the script to the silent film On With the Dance, its scenario written by Ouida Bergere. Faith Service regularly appeared in the magazine as an author that adapted the photoplay into the short story, with the subtitle "fictionalized by permission" or "told in story form, her having typed out the plots to the films Victory Miss Hobbs, Remodeling a Husband and The World and His Wife and She Loves and Lies, it being to the present author fascinating that the stills to films that now may be lost appear next to their transposition into a differeton art form. That year Gladys Hall fictionalized the scenario to the film Way Down East, condensing its charactizations into a handful of pages, the spectator of 1920 reading what would soon be on the screen in front of them, perhaps while viewing the star as a commodity within the extra-textual discourse of the fan magazine but with the familiar art form of the magazine short story installment. About the director Fitzmaurice, the Motion Picture Classics published, "For Fitzmaurice owes his remarkable ability to attain beautiful pictures- admirable in light, shade and grouping- to his early training as a painter, Maurice Tourneur owes his skill in the same field to the same source......En passme it is interesting to note the commraderie of Fitzmaurice and his wife, known to the scenario world as Ouida Bergere. 'We work together on every production,' explains the director." Faith Service was also distinguished as having been published in Photoplay magazine. Is the Mystery of Room 643 a Lost Film? There are many photoplays that during their first theater run were adapted from screen images into third person narrative, original screenplays that were published as magazine fiction after rewritten by magazine staff writers that, with stills from each film, have been preserved in regard to their storyline, characterization and that still exist as they did on celluloid and silver nitrate. The Essanay Film The Return of Richard Neal (1915), starring Nell Craig, and earlier chapters with Francis X. Bushman staring as in "adventures of the private investigator" are not listed as lost, but presently some lists they are not found to be existant. The film appears in story form , with several film stills,in Picture Stories Magazine. It has caught the attention of the present author that Edna Mayo may be an actress with which modern audiences could have been be more familiar with; her Essanay film Stars, Their Courses Change (1915, three reels) seems to be unlisted as being missing while having had appeared in Motion Picture World Magazine- in light of there having been the documentary The Unknown Chaplin, both films would appear to currently be lost. There is every indication that the film Ponjola, starring Anna Q. Nilsson is missing from compendiums on lost film, although it appeared in full page magazine advertisements it seemingly to have been left unlisted. It also appeared in a Photoplay Edition published by Grosset and Dunlap the year of its release, the dustjacket of the 1923 novel rewritten from the screen by Cyntheia Stockley reading, "Illustrated with scenes from the photoplay. A First National Picture". Of course not every film made by the Stoll Film Corporation is lost and missing, but as it seems like a smaller studio, two films from 1923 appear to be unlisted, The Tidal Wave (Hill) and Bars of Iron (Thorston). Any film featured in Picture Stories Magazine during 1914-1915 could be later found to be a lost film. His Last Chance was featured as a work of fiction as novelized in Picture Stories Magazine and does not presently appear to be included in list of films that have been lost; the magazine cover advertises the periodical as being the "Illustrated Films Monthly". The title reads "Adapted from the IMP drama by Rosa Beaulaire", but neglects to name the actors and actresses in the stills and the name of the director of the film. The same issue includes the photoplay On the Verge of War in short story form with only "Adapted from the 101 Bison Film by Owen Garth. The Riddle of The Green Umbrella on the other hand credits Alice Joyce as a girl detective "from the two reel Kalem detective story" who is solving the murder of a professor; the film is not listed as being lost and is absent from lists of films that are decidedly not lost. The Triumph of Venus, advertised in the pages of Photoplay during 1918 is another film that seems yet to be put on lists of missing silent films. What I did happen to find in the pages of Photoplay Magazine was the six page novelization of the chapter-play, or serial, The Eagle's Eye directed by George Lessey and Wellington Player in 1918. With the novelization of the photoplay are published stills from the film, stills that show frames from a silver screen flicker that no longer survives. The lost silent film starred actress Marguerite Snow.
During 1925 actress Vilma Banky was filming for George Fitzmaurice rather than Victor Sjostrom, who featured her in his first sound film, A Lady To Love, that being before her Hungarian accent purportedly had contributed to an unacceptance on the part of movie going audiences. The Great Goldwyn, an early biography on producer Sam Goldwyn written by Alva Johnston, gives an account of her having been brought to the United States States, "He discovered Miss Banky when he saw her picture in a photograph shop in Budapest. This was a feit, because when the photograph was sent to Hollywood, the Goldwyn executives could see no possibilites in her. She arrived in Hollywood herself a few days after her photograph. Miss Banky was bewildered on her arrival in Hollywood. 'I thought I was being tricked,' she told an interpreter, 'I didn't believe the man was Goldwyn untill he gave me two thousand dollars.'"
In Sweden, Par Lagerkvist that year published the novel Guest of Reality (Gas hos verkligheten). It is an account of the events of his childhood an his claim of his reluctance to accept religous ideals. In Sweden, Olaf Molander directed Lady of the Camellias (Damen med kameliorna, 1925), starring Ivan Hedqvist and Hilda Borgström and photographed by Gustav A. Gustafson. Forsyth Hardy writes, "The film derived some distinction from the delicately composed interiors and from the touching performance Tora Teje gave in response to Molander's skilled direction." In 1926 Molanderfollowed with Married Life (Giftas), starring Hilda Borgström and Margit Manstad, also photographed by Gustav A. Gustafson and in 1927 with Only a Dancing Girl, which he wrote and directed. Gustaf Molander in 1925 directed the film Constable Paulus' Easter Bomb (Polis Paulis' Easter Bomb). William Larsson that year directed the films Broderna Ostermans huskors and For hemmet och flickan, with Jenny Tschernichin and Elsa Widborg in what would be the first film in which she was to appear. John W. Brunius in 1925 directed the film Charles XII (Karl XII), photographed by Hugo Edlund and starring Gösta Ekman, Pauline Brunius and Mona Martenson. Its screenplay was written by Hjalmar Bergman and Ivar Johansson. Many of the scenes of Brunius' film were shot on the actual historical locations and battlesites, it having had been being one of the most expensive films to have been made in Sweden up untill that time. Gosta Ekman had earlier been seen as leading man in the United States, as a "romantic type" In Pantomine magazine it was surveyed that, "he plays the impudent, but loveable adventurer to life and his slender blonde figure lends itself most admirably to graceful interpretations of this kind." Photoplay magazine saw Ekman in a similar way, describing him in 1923 as "the Swedish shiek" (the Swedish Valentino) and predicted his soon aquiring famem in the United States, as it did that year with Sigrid Holmqvist. Photoplay reported, "Arriving with him from Stockholm was Edith Erastoff, the wife of Victor Seastrom, the Swedish director who is now working for Goldwyn. Miss Erastoff played opposite Mr. Ekman at the Stockholm Theater....'A beautiful boy,' says director Seastrom, 'Too beautiful- but he is a great actor and never hesitates to conceal his good looks for a character part which demands make-up.'" The magazine that year speculated that "in all probability" Ekman woulod appear on screen in a version of "Three Weeks", concievably opposite actress Theda Bara. In Sweden, in 1925 Ragnar Ring directed the film Tre Kroner (1925), following the next year with the film Butikskultur. Ett kopmanshus i skargarden starring Anna Wallin and Anna Carlsten was written and directed by Hjalmer Peters, its photographer Hellwig Rimmen.
In Finland, the film The Northeners/The Bothnians (Pohjalaisis) was recently screened for the first time since its first run release in 1925. Directed by Jalmari Landensue, the film was photographed by a camerman that would film on several occaisions for the directors Konrad Tallroth, Erkki Karu and Teuro Puro. In Germany, Scandinavian film director Svens Gade positioned actress Asta Nielsen in front of the lens in Hamlet (1920). Directing in the United States in 1925, his films included Fifth Avenue Models adapted from the novel The Best in Life by Muriel Coxen, Siege and Peacock Feathers (seven reels) with Jacqueline Logan; in 1926 they were to include Watch Your Wife (seven reels), Into Her Kingdom (seven reels) with Corinne Griffith and Einar Hanson and The Blonde Saint (seven reels), adapted from the novel Isle of Life by Stephen Whitman and starring Lewis Stone and Ann Rork. Gade would later become a scenario writer rather than director, one instance being Symphony for Universal, directed by F. Harmon Weight.
During his absence from Europe, Dadaist Hans Richter photographed avaunt-guard silent film during 1925, including Ghosts Before Breakfast, and Filmstudie. Richter is not specificlly referred to in the 1922 issue of Vanity Fair Magazine that published legend Tristan Tzara with the article Some Memoirs of Dadaism, an account of the movement which has undertaken to free French art from its classical rigidities, but as a chronicle of the Tzara's 1920 return to Paris it explores Dadaism as an international endeavor while introducing Dadaist meetings, which were to include Paul Eluard, Andre Breton (A Tempest in a Glass of Water), Louis Aragon (The Glass Syringe), and Hans Arp (Clean Wrinkles), as Dadaist Theater, and therefore Dadaist Festival. If it is seen that Modernism in art was removed from cinema, also writing in Vanity Fair was Edmund Wilson, who wrote The Aesthetic Upheaval in France, the Influence of jazz in Paris and the Americanization of French Literature and Art. "For the younger artists in France have competely thrown overboard the ideals of perfection and form, of grace and measure and tranquility, which we Americans are accustomed to think of as their most valuable possession." Although it was in 1928 that Germaine Dulac filmed The Seashell and the Clergyman, written by Antonin Artaud, her film The Smiling Mrs. Beudet brings her work back into 1923. Duchamp, whom the present author has long admired for the paintings Nude Descending a Staircase would eventually turn from the meanings imbued within the human figure is the poetic meanings, associations, it can geometricly, within plane and shadow, hold, to a more plastic ready-made interpretation of angle and curve, his having filmed Anemic Cinema in 1927, leaving spatial questions of the human form delineated by action to Jean Cocteau with The Blood of the Poet, a film of which the present author is as equally fond. Paul Rotha adds the appellation Absolute Film to Abstract Film, "The abstract film is a primary example of unity of filmic purpose." A series of abstract visual images could be brought into visual abstract patterns with abstract forms that were in movement, seen through the relations of mercurial geometric figures to each other. "The screen is a blackboard to Eggeling." Rotha refers to the films Light and Rythym (Bruguiere and Blaketon), Light and Shade, and Montparnasse (Desalv). The Flood (Louis Delluc, 1923), while being a catalyst to the experimental film of the period, is attributed with having been "derived from the Swedes" (O'Leary). The film still lauded Delluc as a proponent of the experimental film and he has been referred to as one of the first film critics, his having written about the theater, untill inveigled toward the film by his hife, actress Eve Francis. In her volume Let's Go to the Movies, Iris Barry wrote, "There is a lady called Gertrude Stein, who writes books composes entirely of words; meaning is a thing she avoids. She has her enthusiasts, who conted, quite rightly, that writers must make patterns in words and that old words must be pressed into new meanings...She is in fact the same case as the absract films as Paris, which equally scrupulously avoid meaning." Long ago, the present author was fond of her novel Ida.
Audiences in 1925 viewed Mary Pickford in the silent film Little Annie Rooney (William Beaudine, nine reels). Among the films in which flapper Clara Bow appeared in that year were Eves Lover (Roy Del Ruth, seven reels), The Scarlett West (John G. Adolphi, 9 reels) and The Keeper of the Bees (James Meehan, seven reels). During 1925, Sally of the Sawdust (ten reels) and That Royal Girl (ten reels) would both team W.C. Fields and Carol Dempster. Both films were directed by D.W. Griffith.
n regard to D.W. Griffith still filming during the 1920's and Thomas Ince having been part of Triangle, it may have been that the photodramatists of the silent era in the United States had by 1925 seen a transformation. In a volume entitled Modern Photoplay Writing, published in 1922, Howard T. Dimick wrote, Thus the present era might be called the era of the detailed synopsis, which has evolved out of the era of the scenario." It concludes his thought from the previous sentence, "The modern playwright submits his story in the form of a detailed synopsis, amounting in length to a short story, casting the dramatic form, establishing the events, developing the characters, introducing the atmosphere, but minus all dialogue and moralizing not pertinent to the demands of the mechanism it is intended for, the camera." He adds that previously the scenario had been submitted to set the dramatic form and that the synopsis would not be able to veer from the dramatic line as developed, whereas in a more modern era, the synopsis had become a dramatic form of continuity. In a slightly earlier volume, Scenario Writing Today, published in 1921, Grace Lytton crawled to page 146 before adding the chapter Writing the Brief Synopsis or Outline and discusses the part played by the scenario editor, "Your brief synopsis is your card of introduction to the scenario editor...An outline of the plot is really all that is indispensible." Interestingly, she adds to the synopsis and scenario, continuity, but claims that, "The continuity will be written in the studio and if you send it one it will probably not be used" while optimisticlly claiming continuity writing, the adding of a full developed novel like description after the scenario and synopsis, to be a valuable thing to study in that its practice imporved scenario writing.
A director that had worked with Griffith, Jack Conway, who had himself dropped out of highschool, would direct Jack Pickford in the 1926 film Brown of Harvard with Mary Brian, Mary Alden and Francis X Bushman. Ever since, there have been various murders and questionable characters surrounding the University. Sometimes sinister, it often boil down to that as a University, it has its own unique way of whether it does or doesn't know whom is attending, and or whom isn't. Conway was also to direct the film Soulmates that year. In the United States, in 1926, Dorothy Gish would begin filming with Herbert W. Wilcox, under whose direction she made the films Nell Gwyn (1926) with Randle Ayerton and Julie Compton, London (1927), with John Manners and Elissa Landi, Tip Toes (1927) with John Manners and Mme. Pompadour (1927), written by Frances Marion and starring Antonio Moreno. It was in 1926 that Lillian Gish, while filming La Boheme (King Vidor, nine reels) with John Gilbert, had met Victor Sjöström. Lillian Gish was quoted by an early biographer as having said that it was on the set of La Boheme that she began working with Frances Marion on the continuity behind The Scarlet Letter. Photoplay Magazine in 1926 added a photocaption to a still from Victor Sjostrom's film, for they had trouble getting Lillian to put torrid temperature into her La Boheme scenes. Here is Lillian sending hot looks to Lars Hanson. Quoted by Liberty Magazine during 1927, Lillian Gish said, "King Vidor directed La Boheme, and one of the best cameramen in my experience, Hendrik Sartov, lent his aid...We finished it on a Saturday, and without waiting for my weeks holiday, we began The Scarlet Letter on Monday."
The present author uploaded one google.video, as a test film, it covering only the first four minutes of the film, but it was one of those directors that become a favorite on reputation, rather than the availability of the entire catolog of film, he being James Kirkwood, who was married to silent film actress Gertrude Robinson before marrying Lilla Lee.
In the United States, Fox Studios in 1927 continued their films of the Great West, pairing Tom Mix with Dorothy Dwan in The Great K and A Train Robbery (Lewis Seiler, five reels).
During 1923, Universal Weekly, a magazine published by Universal Jewel and Universal-Super Jewel films, featured advertisements for two of the reigning movie queens at Universal, Priscilla Dean, who was appearing in Drifting, and Virginia Valli, appearing on screen in A Lady of Quality. It claimed that "millions will read this advertising in The Saturday Evening Post." and included outlines for particular Exploitation Campaigns. During the summer of 1925, Lon Chaney was on the magazine's cover for the film The Phantom of the Opera. The author Ian Conrich sees the film made in the United States by Universal Studios between 1923-1928 as being horror-spectacular, full legnth films that, along with the films of Douglas Fairbanks, tried to near the large-scale production standard of Griffith. Silent film pioneer D. W. Griffith had already by 1922 promised audiences entering the dark of the silver-nitrate screen's public sphere of reception One Exciting Night, a film purportedly built more for atmosphere and devices that would gradually become standard in mystery film than for plot twists and complications, its emphasis having been on trap doors that lead to hidden passageways known only to ghostlike persons. After starring in the film, Henry Hull was interviewed by Picture Play magazine and said, "But on the screen without my voice and without artificial disguise, what would I be. i wondered. 'But we don't photograph the face,' Mr Griffith assured me, 'we photograph the thought, the soul.'" Carol Dempster, who appears in the film was known to audiences as having been paired with John Barrymore in the film Sherlock Holmes. By 1923 Silent Film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau had already made The Haunted Castle and Nosferatu, his continuing with Phantom and Driven from Home. The former cast Lil Dagover with Frieda Richard, and actress who filmed under the direction of several, in not numerous, silent filmmakers and appeared in Robert Dinesen's film Claire (Die Geschichte eines jugen madchens, 1924). Whether or not pertinent to every Nosferatu-Vampyr hollywood tale, if the idea of a precise, fully descriptive shootingscript intiated by silent film director Thomas Ince can be rediscovered from the photoplay, paricularly if it can be reconcieved passed any nouveau roman or nouvelle vague notion of film poetry only as an avaunt guarde act, it is interesting, without feeling that Griffith worked entirely without a script or that Ince wrote novels in the form of picture plays, that author Kenneth Macgowan associates Murnau with his camerman Karl Fruend and scriptwriter Carl Mayer in a way that makes theirs a reinterpretation of the ideas of keeping a shootingscript and of adding within it cameramovements that popularized the use of cameramobiltiy. "Mayer's scripts were detailed. They indicated every shot...In order to visualize action nad movements as he wrote, he used a camera viewfinder, a device that shows what ones shot will cover." From these script camera instructions Freund added subjectivity, reinterpreting the shootingscript with point of view. Still, it is certainly evident that by 1927, the horror film and art film would merge in eerie, atmospheric silent film essay on shadowplay and the black and white tones of mood and suspense, Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary. To add to the mystery of silent film director Rubert Julian, the sound remake of the film The Cat and The Canary entitled The Cat Creeps (1930) is lost. Stills from the film show actress Helen Twelvetrees in the lead role. From a screenplay adapted from the novel by the Universal/Jewel script department, director Rupert Julian in 1925 would throw swirling silver shadows across the screen waiting untill Mary Philbin would remove the mask of the Phantom of the Opera. The Mystery of the Yellow Room, written by Gaston Leroux had been filmed earlier, in 1919, with Joseph von Sterberg as its assistant director, the film written and directed by Emile Chautard. Behind the mask and costumed in red during the tinted sequences, silent film actor Lon Chaney not only filmed on the famous Phantom of the Opera backlot, but he also appered in front of the camera at MGM, where he that year starred with Gertrude Olmsted in The Monster (Roland West, seven reels) and with Mae Busch in the silent film The Unholy Three (Tod Browning, seven reels). Mary Philbin later appeared in the 1928 silent Drums of Love (D. W. Griffith, nine reels) and in the 1929 silent The Last Performance (Paul Frejos, seven reels). Before becoming known to audiences as the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, Clive Brook would appear with Jetta Goudal. After running advertisements for the film Phantom of the Opera, The Reel Journal, a sister publication to New England Film News, announced that the two would be paired together at DeMille studios under the direction of Rupert Julian during 1926 in the film Three Faces East, whereas Universal was to be filming The Radio Detective, "a mystery story by Arthur B. Reeve, as a chapter-play" Upon being invited to follow a story that began in Victorian-Edwardian London, 1925 Silent Film audiences were also that year thrilled by the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle as they were led by Challenger on an expedition into The Lost World through the magic lantern silent film. In 1925, Bela Lugosi had appeared on theater marquees starring in the film The Midnight Girl (Wilfred Noy, seven reels), with Lila Lee and Garreth Hughes. Lila Lee would appear under the direction of Scott Pembroke in the film The Black Pearl (1928,six years). Although two years earlier, he had appeared in the film Silent Command (J. Gordon Edwards, eight reels), it may be noted that Bela Lugosi appeared of the screen under the direction of F. W. Murnau while in front of the lens of Karl Fruend in the silent film Dr. Jeckell and Mr.Hyde/The Head of Janus (Der Januskopf, 1920), filmed in Germany. Lugosi would in 1929 on screen appear under the direction of Tod Browning with Conrad Nagel in The Thirteenth Chair, a mystery made more spine tingling by the appearances of actresses Lelila Hymas, Margaret Wycherly, Helene Millard and Mary Forbes. That year, The Last Warning, from the play by Thomas F. Fallon, would conclude the career of film director Paul Leni. Universal had entered the film Dark Stairways (Robert F. Hill) with the actress Ruth Dwyer into the filming of mystery in 1924. Photoplay in 1929 reviewed The Thirteenth Hour, an MGM entry, "Another mystery yarn with secret panels, trapdoors, underground passages and a series of other mysterious what-nots", only to later add Paramount's Something Always Happens, "It's dangerous business, girls, to pray to for something to "happen". You might get such a surprise as Esther Ralston gets when she finds herself in this haunted house of musty stains, sliding panels, walking chairs, ect." Not only is it uncertain from where magician Harry Houdini screened silent film in 1927, but the name of his director is shrouded in a cranking up of the kem light, he being listed as producer of his silent film. When he appearred in the the film The Grim Game (1919), serial "cliffhangers", adventure films much like the Danish melodramas and silent Sherlock Holmes, were still being made, the title of his being The Master of Mystery. He continued with the silent film Terror Island (1920), The Soul of Bronze (1921), The Man From Beyond (1922) and Halldane of the Secret Service (1923). Not only was there Houdini, the query Does Rudy Speak from Beyond- Natacha Rambova Talks of the Spirit Messages she claims to have recieved from Valentino appreared in Photoplay Magazine during 1927 from the pen of Fredrick James Smith. In 1935, the magazine International Photographer quoted cameraman Bert Longworth, ""Only by the correct usage of lights can photography be raised to the standard of art.'" The magazine continued, "His first job in motion pictures was with Universal. Among the pictures he shot the stills on were The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. After three years he transferred to M.G.M. Studio where he was the first man to take portraits of Greta Garbo and covered her two early hits Flesh and the Devil and The Temptress." An issue of Film Fun during 1922 also pointed out the same need for lighting to be essential to film-making, "Lighting is one of the most important elements in the making of a good picture... In Sweden, they have only four months during the year in which the sun shines and during that time they work eighteen hours a day. The Swedish pictures have a peculiar luminousity which we do not seem able to obtain in this country and it is probably due to the intense brightness of the sun." Included in the article are stills from the Swedish Silent films Synovia of Sundown Hill, The Dawn of Love and A Gay Knight.
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