Fred Thomson was a silent film actor renowned for his roles in westerns. An early death at age 39 prevented him from establishing a more durable legacy in Hollywood.
Synopsis: A family tries to adjust to unstable housing situations in Los Angeles, to an outrageous extent.
Adventurous and inventive gags with a charming family unit. Humorously distressing that the dog does not reappear after the balloon bit! (Potential content warning that there is a gag centered on the wife’s weight but it’s not malicious.)
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Michael (1924)
[letterboxd | imdb | kanopy (us)]
Synopsis: Aging artist Claude Zoret and his apprentice/model, Michael, live a contented life together until the machinations of an impoverished Russian noble and a jealous friend drive them apart.
To begin, this is a queer love story and it is also a tragedy. But, it’s important to note that the tragedy is not derived from the queerness itself, which sets Michael apart from many other queer romantic dramas. Benjamin Christensen’s performance as the heartbroken artist is spectacular. Dreyer’s direction is as great and as heartfelt as it always is. You kinda can’t beat the cinematographic team-up of Karl Freund and Rudolph Maté. It’s available on kanopy, which you may have free access to through your local library!
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Rafiki (2018)
[letterboxd | imdb | tubi (US)]
Synopsis: Two young women in Nairobi, Kena and Ziki, start a romance despite intense homophobia in their community. To further complicate matters, their fathers are political rivals in the upcoming local election.
The characters of Rafiki were all well wrought—both the leads and the supporting characters. Of the supporting roles, I especially appreciated Kena’s friend Blacksta and her parents. The setting made the story more compelling, from the community and class differences in the neighborhood to the different residents’ relationship with church-going.
All that said, I did feel like the plot was a little too simplistic given the complicated nature of the characters’ relationships and feelings. There are a lot of valid approaches to balancing out the different aspects of storytelling on film, but in Rafiki the balance just felt a bit off. Regardless, I still recommend checking it out, albeit with the warning that the main characters are physically assaulted in the film and it’s executed pretty viscerally.
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Slayers Great (1997)
[letterboxd | imdb]
Synopsis: In the further misadventures of Lina Inverse and Naga the Serpent, the sorceresses get tied up in a family feud that culminates in a battle between an aggressively cute Lina golem and an improbably proportioned Naga golem.
We’ve been watching the Slayers OVAs in chronological order and it’s been fun seeing Lina and Naga’s relationship develop as they keep finding themselves in disastrously goofy situations.
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Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen (1983)
[letterboxd | imdb | kanopy (US)]
Synopsis: An ethnographic documentary about ethnographic documentary. Trịnh T. Minh-hà travels to Senegal to make a documentary about Senegalese women, but instead interrogates the work of ethnographic filmmaking and particularly the way African women are captured in the eurocentric gaze.
Like Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza (1973), which I talked about last month, this film is part of a broader discourse and has significant extra-filmic context, so it’s not one to recommend freely. However, I feel like Reassemblage is so formally interesting that you could get a whole lot out of it even if you’re not fully tuned into the conversation Minh-hà is having about ethnography. Stylistically, Reassemblage is fantastic work. The rhythm of the editing with the sound, narration, and dialogue is so sophisticated and often revelatory. (Content warning for dead animals.)
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Just Around the Corner (1921)
[letterboxd | imdb]
Synopsis: An ailing widowed mother has one hope before dying: that her adult children have some promise of a stable life after she’s gone. Unfortunately, her good-hearted and overly-trusting daughter has taken up with a caddish “ticket speculator.” As their mother’s condition deteriorates, the siblings are in a rush to find solace for their mother.
A solid melodrama from Frances Marion with endearing characters. I will say that the manner in which Fred Thomson’s character as “The Real Man” is incorporated was unexpected. I also find it pretty cheeky that Marion cast her real-life husband as a character credited as “The Real Man.”
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Thundering Hoofs (1924)
[letterboxd | imdb]
Synopsis: A cowboy finds himself at odds with a two-faced bandit. The cowboy falls for a young lady visiting from Mexico, but her father has been bamboozled into promising her hand to the bandit. The cowboy and his trusty horse travel to Mexico to save the señorita and expose the bandit’s true identity.
First off: I’m absolutely not a Western gal.
My initial feeling after watching this was that it was just okay (though I immediately loved Silver King.) And the contemporary response was similar: that Thundering Hoofs was entertaining enough, but nothing spectacular.
Then, for “How’d They Do That,” I watched some Tom Mix—some partially and one feature in its entirety. That feature is regarded as one of Mix’s best. My feelings on that film made me reevaluate Thundering Hoofs.
The stunts might not have been as ambitious, but the film captures what a well-rounded performer Fred Thomson was. The filmmakers also did an exceptional job communicating that Silver King the horse is a full-blown character in his own right. I’m sure that sounds ludicrous and it is. It’s a big reason the movie was enjoyable to watch as someone who doesn’t care for Westerns. I, for one, have never seen it implied on film that a horse gave a man a christian burial. No really.
Anyway, watching this added to my disappointment that most of Thomson’s films are lost, because if Thundering Hoofs was middling quality for him, I’d love to see his best. (Content warnings for minor, less-than-enlightened presentation of a Chinese cook and some of the Mexican characterizations.)
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Wedding in Galilee / Urs al-jalil (1987)
[letterboxd | imdb]
Synopsis: A Palestinian man petitions the Israeli governor to allow an extension of their imposed curfew so that they can celebrate his son’s wedding. The governor and his staff agree only on the condition that they attend the wedding. Understandably, this creates tense situations in the community and the man’s family.
Easily the best new-to-me film I watched this month, and maybe one of the best I’ve watched all year. This is my first Michel Khleifi film and I look forward to checking out more. It’s a beautiful, stressful work of art, exquisitely constructed. Highly recommend this one.
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As always, if any of these films catch your eye, but you need specific trigger/content warnings, don’t hesitate to ask for them!
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This month I didn’t have the best overall luck with new-to-me films (honestly, it was a crappy month all around.) Revisiting Wings (1927) and Cobra (1925)was fun tho.
Honorable mention to End of the World (1931), which is kind of a mess in its surviving form though still visually interesting. It has that quality that you can sometimes feel when the cut of a film that gets released is not the filmmakers’ vision. And, knowing now that End of the World was significantly cut down, I don’t have much doubt that what Gance had originally created must have been much stronger.
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As for the blog, I highlighted the work of a mess of stunt performers of the silent era in the second installment of “How’d They Do That”
Risking Life and Limb for $25
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That post ended up delayed as the original article I chose for the series had a subject with no known surviving/accessible films! But, I compiled my research and posted about her separately:
Stunting into Stardom: Winnie Brown
Those posts together meant an unintended Western theme infiltrated the blog via my intended Stunting theme! There’s one more post on the topic of Westerns that’ll be up this month, but I promise we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming after that.
Although, I’ve been reading Unthinking Eurocentrism, where, in the chapter “The Imperial Imaginary,” the authors note that between 1926 and 1967 a quarter of Hollywood features were Westerns. That sort of made me realize that, even though this is not solely a Hollywood history themed blog, it’s an oversight that I’ve never shared any work on Westerns.
Anyway, thank you for your patience with me if you are also not a Western person!
As for themed gif/still sets I made this month:
Daredevil of the Movies / Filmens Vovehals (1923)
Poplar Tree / Тополя (1996)
And I also shared additional gifs from the movies featured in “Risking Life and Limb for $25”:
Wings (1927)
The Trail of ‘98 (1928)
The Great K & A Train Robbery (1926)
As for the coming month, the next installment of “Lost, but not Forgotten” is incoming and I’ve made a lot of progress on my Salomé cosplay.
One of the great “power” couples of silent Hollywood, Fred Thomson and Frances Marion were counted among Cinemaland’s most popular pairs during the ten years they spent together in the heady twenties before their fairy tale existence was shattered by Fred’s sudden and tragic death on Christmas Day 1928 at age 38.
The brilliant architect Wallace Neff transformed the Thomson’s dreams and needs onto the barren hillside converting it into a kingdom unto itself and an enchanted one at that. As Frances was to write:
“In a short while our hill resembled a gigantic wedding cake. pine trees studded every tier, while on top rose a huge house with a drawing room two stories and a half high, rare tapestries on the walls, an Aeolian pipe organ, and windows overlooking five acres of lawn. Beautifully laid out on the terrace were a tiled barbeque, an aviary, and a hundred-foot swimming pool. Fred and his horses and I had gone Hollywood!”
Reporter Grace Kingsley breathlessly recounted a visit to a party Frances threw for her lady friends at the Enchanted hill in 1927, “We were being ushered into the lofty hall and into the great living room, with its wide view of the surrounding country, which you look at through those beautiful arched windows and which gives also a view on the other side of the long Italian garden, with its colored walls, its fountains and many-hued flowers. If there was a feminine star missing that day from Frances’ party I don’t know who it could have been.” Kingsley went on to prove her point by naming such luminaries as Lillian Gish, Colleen Moore, Norma Shearer, Gloria Swanson, Hedda Hopper, Theda Bara, Mabel Normand, Claire Windsor, Mary Astor, ZaSu Pitts, Peg Talmadge, Janet Gaynor, Bessie Love and Marie Dressler among those in attendance. “Somewhere in the Fred Thomson-Frances Marion home is a big pipe organ,” she continued, “and somebody was playing it as we visited together – a charming, distant harmony that lent a still more beautiful atmosphere in an already entirely delightful occasion.”
Ten days before Christmas, as the couple gazed down at the twinkling lights of Beverly Hills far down in the distance, she noticed her husband had a slight limp. She asked him if the leg he broke the previous year in an on-set accident was troubling him. “No,” he replied. “I stepped on a rusty nail and it bothers me a little. Nothing to worry about.” He died Christmas Day in his wife’s arms. A victim of medical misdiagnosis with his tetanus believed by doctors to be a gallbladder problem.
In 1997 the estate was sold to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Allen paid $20,000,000 for the legendary estate and then quickly ordered the entire Enchanted Hill and its outbuildings, Silver King’s mahogany-floored stable; the guest house; Cowboy’s House; the two riding rings; tennis court; acres of mature and lush gardens; and the 100-foot swimming pool to be bulldozed into oblivion. More than a decade later, it sits as a vacant, weed-covered lot.
Cast: Mary Pickford, Evelyn Dumo, Fred Thomson, Eddie Phillips, Albert Prisco, Raymond Bloomer, George Rigas, Jean De Briac. Screenplay: Frances Marion. Cinematography: Henry Cronjager, Charles Rosher. Art direction: Stephen Goosson. Film editing: Stuart Heisler.
Watching Mary Pickford in The Love Light is exhausting. She is continuously on, rough-and-tumbling with her brothers, gamely sending them off to war, grieving their deaths, rescuing a sailor from drowning, hiding him from the villagers, flirting with him, discovering to her horror that he’s a spy and that he may have made her the inadvertent cause of her brother’s death, sending him off to the mercy of the villagers and his death. And just when it seems like she can’t suffer (or act) any more, she has his baby (they were secretly married), goes mad and sees it adopted by another woman, gets it back, loses it again in a fiendish plot by the other woman, goes mad again, regains her sanity when her childhood boyfriend comes home from the war blinded, teaches him how to cope with his blindness, and eventually rescues her child from the clutches of the other woman by boarding the storm-tossed vessel in which the woman had tried to abduct the baby. It’s one of those soaped-up melodramas we think of as typical of silent films, but it works, mostly because Pickford is amazing, but also because Frances Marion was such a skilled director and writer. Marion later became the first woman to win an Oscar for something other than acting, with her award for writing The Big House (George W. Hill, 1930), though by that time she had given up directing. (As a writer, the IMDb credits her with 188 titles, though some of those are remakes of her earlier films.) Still, it’s primarily a showcase for Pickford’s special brand of hard, determined acting. She resembles in her determination such later stars as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, though they lacked Pickford’s façade of softness (a softness masking steel). Davis would, of course, somewhat cruelly parody Pickford later in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962). One great plus to The Love Light is the fine cinematography of Charles Rosher and Henry Cronjager.
