Film rarities again draw crowds to Syracuse

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

I’m sitting in the Holiday Inn in Liverpool, NY, near the Syracuse Airport as I begin to write this, just a little over an hour after the last film ended at the 31st annual Cinefest festival of rare and classic films. Screenings began at 9 a.m. Thurs., March 17 and continued until around 5 p.m. Sun., March 20. There were 29 features, 17 shorts, plus lots of trailers and film clips for the few hundred film fans from around the world who attended. Movies covered the period from the 1910s through the 1950s with most from the 1920s and 30s.

There was a very strong program with a variety of genres and studios. Standing out was the new restoration of “The Story of Temple Drake” (1933), a long-unavailable adaptation of William Faulkner’s “Sanctuary” that was notoriously controversial when it came out and is noted for its brilliantly moody cinematography by the masterful Karl Struss. Miriam Hopkins is excellent as a party-loving southern belle forced by a rainstorm to take refuge at a remote farm used as a hideout by bootleggers, where she is raped by a gangster and brought to work at his bordello. Later her old boyfriend, a noted lawyer, wants her to testify in a murder case that would expose the life she’s been living and disgrace her aristocratic family.

Another standout was the latest restoration of Hungarian director Paul Fejos’ romantic masterpiece, “Lonesome” (1928), with Barbara Kent and Glenn Tryon as lonely working-class New Yorkers who accidentally meet, fall in love, lose each other and ultimately find each other all on one Saturday afternoon. Also starring Barbara Kent (who amazingly is still alive), was the gripping and equally visual western melodrama, “No Man’s Law” (1927). What is especially unusual about this film is that the main villain was played by a deadly serious and unexpectedly ominous Oliver Hardy and the girl’s father was played by James Finlayson, both much better-known for slapstick comedy, especially after Hardy was paired with Stan Laurel later that year. “No Man’s Law” is actually available on DVD from Grapevine Video and “Lonesome” is planned for release by the Criterion Collection within the next year.

Paramount’s impressive romantic melodrama “Mannequin” (1926) was the first major adult role for Dolores Costello, a child star 10-15 years earlier from a famous theatrical family, who later married John Barrymore and became the grandmother of Drew Barrymore. “Mannequin” starts in the early 1900s with a young lawyer husband and wife (Warner Baxter and Alice Joyce) quarreling and their simple-minded nursemaid (ZaSu Pitts) running off with their baby to raise it as her own. Twenty years later the girl (Costello) becomes a model, falls in love with a reporter, accidentally kills a sleazy admirer who has broken into her apartment, and is then put on trial. Meanwhile, her boyfriend has been writing scathing editorials about courts frivolously acquitting beautiful women charged with murder (obviously inspired by the same recent real-life case that resulted in the play and film “Chicago”), and unbeknownst to anybody but the audience, the judge is her real father!

Two of this year’s best films were rarities from the now mostly forgotten Triangle studio that thrived for only a few years in the mid-1910s. “Sunshine Dad” (1916) and “Happiness” (1917) are two very different styles of comedies. “Sunshine Dad” is free-wheeling, frenetically-paced, and often bizarre satire of movie stereotypes that calls to mind the even more bizarre “Mystery of the Leaping Fish” made the same year at the same studio. DeWolf Hopper plays the profligate playboy father of serious young businessman Eugene Pallette, who disobeys his son’s advice and finds himself in an incredibly complex plot involving a stolen jewel, a mystic cult, a rich young widow and any cute young girls he can pick up on his son’s meager allowance.

“Happiness” is a gentle situation comedy about a lonely, rich girl whose guardian aunt wants her to maintain her upper class reputation, resulting in all the kids at college snubbing her as a snob, except a shy boy who is hiding the fact that he lives in a tenement and is putting himself through school by taking in laundry with the little girl who lives downstairs from him. Things pick up considerably when the girl starts to help out with his laundry, and a rival (a very young John Gilbert) informs the aunt that her niece is frequenting a house of ill repute.

Yet another notable title was “The Biscuit Eater” (1940) a touching story of a young boy and the beloved dog he saves from being killed as the runt of the litter of purebred pointers, with a portrayal of race relations that is very much non-stereotyped and moving performances by child actors Billy Lee and Cordell Hickman.

A few other of the many memorable films included “Burglar By Proxy” (1919) with Jack Pickford and Gloria Hope, “The Hushed Hour” (1919) with Milton Sills and Blanche Sweet, “The Devil’s Lottery” (1932) with Elissa Landi and Victor McLaglen, “What Price Glory?” (1926) with Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe, “Wolf Song” (1929) with Gary Cooper and Lupe Velez, “Kentucky” (1938) with Loretta Young and Walter Brennan in Technicolor, “Music in the Air” (1934) with Gloria Swanson and John Boles, “The Great Barrier” (1937) with Richard Arlen and Antoinette Cellier, as well as many more.

The Syracuse Cinefest every March is one of several annual festivals of classics that every film fan should make an attempt to attend, not only for the rarity of the titles, but for the experience of seeing them on a big screen with a crowd of hundreds of appreciative viewers. A similar festival is set for Memorial Day weekend in Columbus Ohio, with others this summer and fall in Rochester NY, Rome NY, Hollywood CA, and Massillon OH.

Questions and comments: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)