Rare Films Highlight Cinefest 2010

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

(SYRACUSE, NY) This article is being written in airports and in the air on my way back to Grand Forks from the 30th annual Cinefest convention of classic films. Several hundred film archivists, scholars, collectors, and fans gathered in Syracuse, N.Y. from across the country and around the world, to watch rare films at all-day screenings running from 9 am until after midnight, starting last Thursday through 5pm on Sunday.

There were over two dozen full-length features and over a dozen shorts, plus special programs of trailers, shorts, and film clips introduced by experts.
Saturday there was a field trip to nearby Rome, N.Y., for 35mm screenings at the historic 1928 Capitol Theatre of a number of films recently preserved and restored by various archives. One of those was the public re-premiere of a film not seen since its release in the late 1920s. An alternate program of five relatively common features ran on 16mm at the hotel for those who didn’t go to Rome.

Several titles had been shown at previous festivals over the past 30 years, but very few of the weekend’s films are available on video. Some of the highlights are as follows.

LITTLE CHURCH AROUND THE CORNER (1923) Kenneth Harlan is quite effective as an idealistic young minister in this expertly crafted melodrama of love, labor relations, religious faith, mining disasters, and rural Americana. A memorable sequence shows a split-screen of a crowd of miners underneath and holding up the fashionable ballroom floor in the mine owner’s home, while the preacher lectures the owner (whose daughter he loves).

GIRL WITHOUT A SOUL (1917) For one of his best surviving films, John Collins directs his wife Viola Dana in a dual role as twin daughters of a violin maker, one musical and ambitious who falls for a slimy city slicker, the other more wild and worldly but in love with the honest town blacksmith who is later accused of stealing the church’s organ fund.

THE LADY LIES (1929) While obviously stage-based, this New York-made early talkie overcomes its theatrical origins due to a reasonable number of camera setups and memorable naturalistic performances by stars Walter Huston and Claudette Colbert, with nice support from Charles Ruggles, Betty Garde, and child actors Tom Brown and Patricia Deering. Besides some very frank innuendos in a number of comic moments, the typical romantic melodrama of a wealthy widower’s “scandalous” relationship with a shopgirl also benefits greatly from the pre-Code inclusion of numerous uses of “hell” and “damn” to spice up even casual conversation and to intensify the teenage son’s anger at his uptight uncle.

CONRAD IN QUEST OF HIS YOUTH (1920) Thomas Meighan is fine in this nostalgic story of a middle-aged veteran of India service who returns to England hoping to rekindle the happy childhood relationships he had with his cousins, an old girlfriend, and a youthful crush, but finds they’ve all changed. Later he meets a stranded chorus girl and decides to help her, not realizing she’s actually an aristocrat trying to revisit her own humble but exciting youth.

DOLL HOUSE MYSTERY (1915) Chester and Sidney Franklin directed this superbly edited two-reeler (which luckily has survived in a pristine copy). A little girl decides to use her daddy’s pretty bond certificates to decorate her playhouse, and naturally the ex-con single father next door is suspected.

FRECKLES (1935) Virginia Weidler steals the show as Laurie Lou, an extroverted little girl who lives near a logging camp and helps the title character (played by Tom Brown) romance schoolteacher Mary Arden and foil a band of criminals hiding out in the woods.

GENTLEMEN OF POLISH (1934) Vaudeville veterans Shaw and Lee lend their peculiar personalities to this frequently hilarious short that has them as hucksters of an all-purpose bottle of polish who crash a swanky party punctuated by musical numbers filmed for but left out of the feature “Hollywood Party.”

EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE (1927) This was George O’Brien’s first role after “Sunrise” and is a good example of his dramatic appeal. He’s the son of a woman married to a New York barge captain but they never tell him who his real father is before their barge is struck by a ship and sunk. O’Brien escapes the wreck and finds his way to the East Side, where he’s adopted by a Jewish family (especially daughter Virginia Valli) after defeating some bullying Irish gang members. Then he rises to fame as a boxer unknowingly under the patronage of his real father (Holmes Herbert), who also has him tutored to become an engineer. Plenty of class conflict works its way into the plot, as well as romance, a subway collapse, a shipwreck, and more.

ROARING RAILS (1924) This standard but slick railroad melodrama is held together by Harry Carey and a very young Frankie Darro, getting off to a rousing start during WWI, then jumping to a few years later when Carey is fired from being a locomotive engineer because his boy distracted him and caused a train wreck. Later he finds work laying tracks for a railroad that a rival railroad is trying to sabotage. The incredible action-packed climax with a train racing to find a blind boy locked in a cabin during a red-tinted forest fire was raised to true classic level by the thundering pipe organ accompaniment of Philip Carli squeezing every bit of sound he could out of the instrument and emotion out of the scenes.

THE WHITE DESERT (1925) This story of wintertime mountain railroad construction bears some plot similarities to the management-labor problems in “Little Church Around the Corner,” but with snow and an avalanche replacing the mine collapse, made more vivid by the excellent surviving print. It’s beautifully shot and edited with spectacular location scenery and good miniatures.

ARE PARENTS PEOPLE? (1925) The lovely original Kodascope print really added to the enjoyment of this domestic comedy deftly directed by Mal St. Clair and sort of a precursor to “The Parent Trap.”  Perky Betty Bronson is a teenager caught in the middle of the pending divorce of parents Florence Vidor and Adolphe Menjou, and decides to bring them together by getting into trouble and then taking up with a handsome young doctor. There’s also a great scene when a visiting movie star acts out his favorite scenes for a bewildered Florence Vidor.

ORCHIDS AND ERMINE (1927) This may be Colleen Moore’s best as well as most typical vehicle, with some hilarious witty title cards, fun and lively performances, and the first screen appearance of Mickey Rooney as a lecherous midget! The beautiful Kodascope print made the standard story of a working class girl falling for a millionaire in disguise that much more enjoyable.

WINGED VICTORY (1944) While overlong, under the direction of George Cukor Moss Hart’s wartime play becomes one of Hollywood’s best World War II propaganda films, a vivid look at wartime American sentiment and the Army Air Corps. The first half, showing hopeful cadets training to become pilots, could easily be trimmed from over an hour to about 15 minutes or so. The second part, however, from the newly commissioned bomber crews’ last night before deployment through their service in the South Pacific, has some powerfully dramatic moments, notably a scene with three wives discussing their situation in a small apartment, a scene of Christmas at the island air base, and a scene with the base anxiously awaiting the main characters’ plane, which is late returning from a mission.

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