Good Mix of Classics on MSUM Campus This Summer

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Movies Editor

Next Monday, June 7, marks the beginning of MSUM’s annual Summer Cinema film series, once again with eight weekly classic films, half silent with live pipe organ accompaniment and half from the “talkie” era. There’s a pleasing blend of comedy and drama, with an emphasis on the comedy and major Hollywood stars.

Kicking off this year’s selection is “The Flying Deuces” (1939) a feature-length comedy starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The dim-witted and accident-prone duo decide to join the French Foreign Legion but soon wish they hadn’t. One of the writers and gag-men was silent clown Harry Langdon, whose screen persona had been very much like that ultimately adopted by Laurel.

June 14 is the last comedy Douglas Fairbanks did with the modern-day character that made him a star before switching to the swashbuckling costume adventures that made him a legend. “The Nut” (1921) has Doug as an eccentric inventor in an odd romantic plot incorporating some of the social commentary his earlier films were also noted for.

On June 21 is the historical sci-fi adventure, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Disney studios’ first major live-action film stars James Mason as the troubled Captain Nemo and Kirk Douglas as the sailor who unwillingly becomes entangled in Nemo’s plot of revenge. The colorful 1954 production incorporates a number of cold-war themes no less timely today and focuses on action, whereas the 1916 original flashes back to Nemo’s past and mixes in a parallel romantic melodrama, pausing the plot for some extensive sequences exploring underwater sea life (to show off the newly-invented underwater camera).

Silent superstar Mary Pickford, co-founder of both United Artists Pictures and the Motion Picture Academy, set aside the pretty little girl image that was a fan favorite to play an unattractive cockney washerwoman in “Suds” (1920), the film for June 28. Pickford plays here mainly for slapstick comedy with an undercurrent of social drama and class differences.

Lon Chaney, Jr. is probably best-remembered as “The Wolf Man” and various other horror film roles, but he was able to deliver an outstanding dramatic performance as Lenny in the Oscar-nominated “Of Mice and Men” (1939), scheduled to run on July 5. An equally impressive performance by Burgess Meredith, strong direction by veteran Lewis Milestone and a powerful music score by Aaron Copeland help make this one of the all-time classics and the best of several screen versions of John Steinbeck’s moving story.

Movie pioneer D. W. Griffith is know by some only for his controversial and influential 1915 epic “The Birth of a Nation,” but he achieved his greatest artistic and critical success with the intimate little melodrama “Broken Blossoms” (1919), a tender tragedy dealing with interracial romance, child abuse, and social hypocrisy. “Broken Blossoms,” which will screen July 12, stars legendary Lillian Gish with Richard Barthelmess and Donald Crisp.

Numerous silent film stars show up in the 1947 Technicolor musical comedy “The Perils of Pauline,” the film for July 19. The lively Betty Hutton stars as Pearl White, who became the first major female star of action-adventure serials back in the mid-1910s, whose best-remembered hit was a chapter-play whose title gave its name to this film. This movie, however, is more a nostalgic salute to the early years of moviemaking inspired by actual events, than an accurate recreation of it, although the same actor who had played the villain over 30 years earlier shows up to repeat his role!

The last movie of this year’s Summer Cinema series is Buster Keaton’s classic silent comedy “Seven Chances” (1925), showing July 26. The plot takes the tried-and-true situation of a person who must be married within a few hours to qualify for a huge inheritance and incorporates increasingly larger and wilder gags to perplex Keaton’s stone-faced character. Eventually he’s pursued by thousands of women hoping to help him win his fortune and at one point is chased down a hill by huge rolling boulders (a gag George Lucas lifted for one of his Star Wars prequels).

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If You Go

What: MSUM Summer Cinema Series

Where: Weld Hall, MSUM Campus

When: Mondays, June 7-July 26, 7:30pm

Info: 701.237.0477