Harold Lloyd will forever be associated with Safety Last! because of a single image. Even people who have never seen a Lloyd film are familiar with the iconography of a bespectacled man hanging off the hands of a collapsing clock on the side of a skyscraper high above teeming city streets. It is one … [Read more...] about Safety Last!
Sadie Thompson
Sadie Thompson had the great Raoul Walsh as director and costar, but studying the history of the film leaves little doubt that Gloria Swanson has a strong claim as its auteur. She jumped through hoops to acquire the property, fought the censors to get it produced, cowrote the script with Walsh, … [Read more...] about Sadie Thompson
Rotaie
Italian Director Mario Camerini’s legacy has been tainted because he made films under the Mussolini regime. Film director and critic Carlo Lizzani wrote of Camerini as “sweetly slumbering through the 20 years of Fascism.” While Camerini spent much of the later Fascist era directing light, socially … [Read more...] about Rotaie
Rosita
A consummate actress and creative producer preoccupied with her image, thirty-one-year-old Mary Pickford longed to create an important cinematic work of art. Having forged an unparalleled career as “America’s Sweetheart,” Pickford now sought mature, sophisticated roles that would acknowledge her age … [Read more...] about Rosita
Retour de Flamme, 1900-1928
Saved from the Flames: A special presentation by film collector Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films Turn-of-the-century Paris was the amusement capital of Europe, if not the world. All manner of spectacle and diversion commanded the attention of Parisian society, from diorama and panorama displays and … [Read more...] about Retour de Flamme, 1900-1928
The Red Kimona
She swore that she hadn’t meant to kill him that New Year’s Eve of 1915. Gabrielle Darley had brought the pistol along for self-defense and it had been tucked in her fur muff when it fired the fatal shot into her lover, Leonard Topp. Her defense attorney, Earl Rogers, offered up a hole in the muff … [Read more...] about The Red Kimona
The Real Stan & Ollie
My father, who worked as an usher in a Detroit movie theater in the 1930s, loved Laurel and Hardy. And, perhaps, so did your father or grandfather, or even your brother, who may have had their poster hanging in his college dorm. Famous or not, mostly male but some female, Laurel and Hardy fans are … [Read more...] about The Real Stan & Ollie
The Rat
Devastatingly handsome and abundantly talented, Welsh-born Ivor Novello was one of Britain’s most dazzling matinee idols of the 1920s. Like his friend and contemporary Noël Coward, Novello was a writer, producer, actor, composer, a star of stage and screen—a multi-hyphenate before that term existed. … [Read more...] about The Rat