More Rare Classics Draw Crowd to Small Ohio Town

MASSILLON, OHIO – Yet again I spent last weekend watching rare films from the 1910s through the 1950s – a total of 18 features and 24 shorts that screened from Thursday night through Sunday afternoon in a restored classic movie theatre, this time in Massillon, Ohio for the 19th annual “Cinesation.”

While several are available on DVD or periodically turn up on cable TV, most are rare archival or private collectors’ prints, some of them one-of-a-kind.

One of the surprise hits of the weekend was a 1930s screwball comedy with music, but not from any of the Hollywood studios, though its plot might have been made by any of them. A young jazz musician lives above his classic music-loving landlord, and both happen to have the same last name, which causes some predictably entertaining mistakes when the landlord’s pretty young niece arrives to visit. This 1937 Polish film, “Pietro Wyzej,” known in the U. S. as “The Apartment Above” and “Neighbors,” starred Eugeniusz Bodo, one of Poland’s most popular comedians, who was able to escape the Nazi occupation but unfortunately died in a Soviet labor camp during World War II.

One of the best features shown was “Rich Man’s Folly” (1931), starring George Bancroft and Frances Dee in the touching story of a dysfunctional shipbuilding family that is an updated reworking of Charles Dickens’ “Dombey and Son.”

Interestingly, another film concerned the personal problems of a shipbuilding family, the 1916 Triangle-Fine Arts adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play “Pillars of Society.” One of the earliest surviving films of director Raoul Walsh, with a screenplay credited to D. W. Griffith, it’s a bit slow-starting but builds to an impressive cross-cutting climax that is nicely opened up in ways impossible on stage. It stars Henry B. Walthall, Mary Alden, and Josephine Crowell, all of whom appeared in Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” the year before.

A film involving ships on a much lighter note was the delightful pre-code comedy, “Pleasure Cruise” (1933) with jealous husband Roland Young secretly following wife Genevieve Tobin on a solo vacation he insisted she take.

Another surprise hit of the weekend was an independently produced pre-code comedy, “Take the Heir” (1930), which was made as a silent after all the major studios had already converted to sound. Although a version was produced with talking sequences and a synchronized music score, all that survives is this all-silent version, which remains highly entertaining thanks to assured direction by Lloyd Ingraham and the subtle facial acting of stars Edward Everett Horton, Frank Elliott and Dorothy Devore. Horton plays the butler of a hard-drinking bankrupt British aristocrat, and the two impersonate each other so Horton can impress those responsible for his employer’s potential lucrative inheritance from an American relative.

A big hit of the schedule was the rarely screened sophisticated romantic comedy, “Her Night of Romance” (1924), starring Constance Talmadge and Ronald Colman, whose plot bore a number of similarities to “Take the Heir.” Colman is the impoverished British lord this time, whose lawyer wants him to marry a rich American heiress so he can keep his estate. The romantic developments and misinterpretations are very much like an Ernst Lubitsch comedy – not surprising as the script was by Lubitsch’s main screenwriter Hans Kraly.

“The Pony Express” (1925) is a big-budget historical epic of action, adventure and political intrigue, slickly directed by James Cruze (who did the popular “The Covered Wagon” two years earlier), and acted by Ricardo Cortez, Betty Compson, Wallace Beery and George Bancroft (in a drastically different role from that he played in “Rich Man’s Folly”).

Two films featured Japanese matinee idol Sessue Hayakawa, best-known today as the prison commandant in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” His first starring film, “O Mimi San” (1914) is a slow but interesting half-hour drama of political intrigue and star-struck romance in medieval Japan. “The Devil’s Claim” (1920) was produced by Hayakawa’s own company and is an intriguing tale starring Hayakawa as an Indian novelist who uses his own exotic affairs and experiences to inspire the popular serialized novels he writes for American magazines. Future superstar Colleen Moore has an interesting role as a jilted Persian lover.

The Mary Pickford vehicle “M’liss” (1918), based on the popular Bret Harte short story, is a fine screen version of the popular tale about a wild daughter (Pickford) of a failed gold miner (Theodore Roberts) who falls for a new schoolteacher (Thomas Meighan), while schemers try to cheat her father out of an inheritance. It’s also one of the few movies of the weekend that is available on DVD (it’s the bonus feature on Milestone Video’s release of Pickford’s “Heart o’ the Hills”).

“The Great White Trail” (1917), on DVD from Grapevine Video, is a incredibly convoluted and highly entertaining old-time melodrama starring Doris Kenyon. It’s got lovers’ misunderstandings, amnesia, insanity, an accidentally abandoned child raised by others, sex slavery, gold prospecting and about every possible coincidence and plot device one might imagine to bring the separated parents and child almost together over and over until the inevitable happy resolution, but its skilled direction, beautiful photography and solid performances somehow make it work.

A few of the short films, mainly the cartoons, are also available on DVD, but it was great to see them in old original prints shown on a big screen. Notable was the crystal-clear and razor-sharp 35mm print of Robert Benchley’s hysterical “The Treasurer’s Report” (1928), which had been struck in 1929 and makes the contrasty out-of-focus version generally available all but unwatchable.

The next major festival of classic films is the annual “Cinefest,” scheduled for mid-March in Syracuse, NY. Any serious film buff should start making plans to attend now, as its hotel space quickly sells out!

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