I watch a lot of old movies. In fact, given the chance, I'll set the DVR to record just about anything made prior to 1935 (even better if it was made prior to 1934, when the Hays Code really went into effect), and I'm almost never disappointed with what I find.
One of the pleasures in this is discovering large parts of pop culture history that seemed to be, before recently, all but forgotten. Once you begin watching these movies, faces you'd never seen (or heard of) before become familiar, and it's a surprise when you discover how many movies these actors were featured in, and how popular and well-known they were at that time. Warren William is one of them — he made 30 or 40 films as a leading man at Warner Bros. (most often as a heartless, amoral businessmen), yet before I started watching his films on TCM, I'd never heard his name.
Kay Francis is another. Through the mid-1930s, she was the top female star at the Warner Bros., and the highest paid American film actress. She often made more than a half-dozen films each year during that era, she was enormously popular and very famous. Yet again, though, I'd never heard of her before discovering her work on TCM.
In fact, it was a real surprise to recognize her caricature in a 1939 Columbia cartoon, Mother Goose in Swingtime (you can see her here, as the first of the three celebrity caricatures). Almost every studio did cartoons like these, full of popular, well-known celebrities of the day, but this was the only one I've seen that featured Kay Francis (though her career was beginning to decline by 1939, following a bitter contract dispute with Warner Bros. two years earlier).
That decline would bring her to Poverty Row, specifically to Monogram Pictures, where she made her last three films (albeit with star billing and a Producer credit), beginning in 1945. I watched one of those films, Allotment Wives, just last night, lured by the promise of an unknown film noir classic and curiousity. It was said to have been made in the wake of the unexpected success of Mildred Pierce, and several of the reviews I've read struggle to find a parallel in the Mother-will-do-anything-for-her-selfish-daughter story, but that's hardly the point of Allotment Wives. Other reviews want to place this in the pantheon of forgotten film noir, but it doesn't really fit there, either — not if you believe that great film noir ought to have great script and a compelling visual style, neither of which are to be found here. Still, it's fun to see Kay Francis in a less-familiar, less sympathetic role.
(And on the subject of something you'd never heard of — the plot of Allotment Wives is, in itself, a small history lesson. From the TCM synopsis: "Throughout World War II and into peace time, the U.S. government operates the Office of Dependency Benefits, which handles the issuing of allotment checks and family allowances to women with husbands serving in the [armed] forces. However, when evidence of many fraudulent claims for support come to light, Col. Pete Martin of Army Intelligence is assigned to O.D.B. to find the unscrupulous women who have been entering into multiple marriages with servicemen in order to claim their allotments and allowances.")
30 April 2011
26 April 2011
Archaeology
Not too long ago, my wife and I spent several days sifting through her Father's assembled — stuff, that's probably the best word for it. He's more than 90 years old by now, and I think he's saved something from each and every day of those many years, and that stuff has all found its' way into the corners, and closets, and shelves of a very old house. (He hasn't spent the entire 90 years there, but from the amount of clutter, you'd sure think he had.)
It's not a case of compulsive hoarding, not by any means, and not everything has been saved indiscriminately (though that seems to have been more the case as time went on). But it's as though he emptied his metaphorical pockets from time to time, kept what seemed important or interesting, and there always seemed to be something important or interesting.
It was the boxes and bins of assorted papers, some going as far back as the 1940s, that require the most attention. Particularly the boxes from the eaves of the top floor, a long, narrow hallway along one side of the house leading to an unused office. The roof is leaking around the chimney (the house has been unoccupied, so this had gone unnoticed for several months), and several boxes (and their contents) have become damp, even moldy as a result. (A few plastic bins of papers and whatever else are now full of standing water, and we haven't had the chance to go through them.)
So it became a more urgent matter, to find anything of historical or sentimental value before any further harm could come to it — especially family photos. Several photo albums had already been damaged by water, though the photos contained in them were, thankfully, intact. Other photos have been carelessly and indifferently stored and all but forgotten — hidden among correspondence and magazine clippings and postcards and an airline boarding pass (from the 1950s!) and mimeographed pages from fanzines and I-don't-know-what-else.
And so much of it was of interest, because it was so old — and often so unexpected. A 1953 letter from a friend overseas who had fallen on hard times, along with the receipt for $1,000 sent to him by telegraph. A postcard with one single line, commenting on the recent death of an well-known author, but with no indication of who that author might have been. Newspaper clippings. Press passes. Business cards. A ticket to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play at Ebbets Field.
And we were obliged to look through all of it, every last scrap. It wasn't like an archaeological dig, where objects of interest from a given era were in close proximity with one another, or at least followed some sort of reasonable progression as you dig deeper. Something of value might be hidden just about anywhere. School class photos from the 1930s were found, inexplicably (though beautifully preserved) in a random plastic bin among what seemed to be junk mail and magazines from the late 1980s. We'd have a second look at boxes we had already sorted through, or thought we had sorted through, only to find something unforgettable we'd somehow missed. The discoveries were exciting and gratifying, but the fear that we've overlooked something of value is maddening.
The photos were still in good condition, more or less the same condition they had probably been in for decades. The color prints had faded, but the black-and-white prints hadn't — even the paper hardly seemed to have aged.
And that got me thinking. My son, and his children, and generations going forward, they may never have the opportunity for discoveries like these. Most photos these days are taken and stored in a digital format, and probably won't offer the amazing experience of sifting through a box of ephemera and stumbling across an uexpected photographic print that's fifty, or sixty, or even seventy years old. And digital files can't be stored so indifferently — they'll need maintenance, much more maintenance, if for no other reason than to make sure they're in a format that current technology (whatever it is) can still access. I can't imagine they'll withstand the ill effects of a leaky roof as gracefully.
It's not a case of compulsive hoarding, not by any means, and not everything has been saved indiscriminately (though that seems to have been more the case as time went on). But it's as though he emptied his metaphorical pockets from time to time, kept what seemed important or interesting, and there always seemed to be something important or interesting.
It was the boxes and bins of assorted papers, some going as far back as the 1940s, that require the most attention. Particularly the boxes from the eaves of the top floor, a long, narrow hallway along one side of the house leading to an unused office. The roof is leaking around the chimney (the house has been unoccupied, so this had gone unnoticed for several months), and several boxes (and their contents) have become damp, even moldy as a result. (A few plastic bins of papers and whatever else are now full of standing water, and we haven't had the chance to go through them.)
So it became a more urgent matter, to find anything of historical or sentimental value before any further harm could come to it — especially family photos. Several photo albums had already been damaged by water, though the photos contained in them were, thankfully, intact. Other photos have been carelessly and indifferently stored and all but forgotten — hidden among correspondence and magazine clippings and postcards and an airline boarding pass (from the 1950s!) and mimeographed pages from fanzines and I-don't-know-what-else.
And so much of it was of interest, because it was so old — and often so unexpected. A 1953 letter from a friend overseas who had fallen on hard times, along with the receipt for $1,000 sent to him by telegraph. A postcard with one single line, commenting on the recent death of an well-known author, but with no indication of who that author might have been. Newspaper clippings. Press passes. Business cards. A ticket to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play at Ebbets Field.
And we were obliged to look through all of it, every last scrap. It wasn't like an archaeological dig, where objects of interest from a given era were in close proximity with one another, or at least followed some sort of reasonable progression as you dig deeper. Something of value might be hidden just about anywhere. School class photos from the 1930s were found, inexplicably (though beautifully preserved) in a random plastic bin among what seemed to be junk mail and magazines from the late 1980s. We'd have a second look at boxes we had already sorted through, or thought we had sorted through, only to find something unforgettable we'd somehow missed. The discoveries were exciting and gratifying, but the fear that we've overlooked something of value is maddening.
The photos were still in good condition, more or less the same condition they had probably been in for decades. The color prints had faded, but the black-and-white prints hadn't — even the paper hardly seemed to have aged.
And that got me thinking. My son, and his children, and generations going forward, they may never have the opportunity for discoveries like these. Most photos these days are taken and stored in a digital format, and probably won't offer the amazing experience of sifting through a box of ephemera and stumbling across an uexpected photographic print that's fifty, or sixty, or even seventy years old. And digital files can't be stored so indifferently — they'll need maintenance, much more maintenance, if for no other reason than to make sure they're in a format that current technology (whatever it is) can still access. I can't imagine they'll withstand the ill effects of a leaky roof as gracefully.
12 April 2011
Kindled
I finally bought an iPad — I stood in line for a few hours to (hopefully) buy one the evening the iPad 2 went on sale. Ostensibly this is a development tool — you can't really develop for a device that's nothing more than a simulator on your desktop computer — but really, I'd just been anxious to use one, after reading about them for the past year.
More than anything else, I find I'm using it for reading. Mostly in Instapaper, which is where I read virtually all of the various newspaper and magazine articles I come across in the course of a day — sooner or later. (They tend to accumulate.) Instapaper provides a very pleasant, mostly distratction-free reading experience, so very comfortable that it's led me to be kinda curious about eBooks.
I discovered that our local library has an eBook lending service (via the county's library system). Once I paid a small fine (left over from 2007), I was able to find a few items of interest — but unfortunately, the selection seems thin. If I want to read eBooks, I'll have to make a few uncomfortable compromises.
I've written before of my love of books — you know, real, physical books. The kind you hold in your hands, feel the pages flip through your fingers. Paper that discolors over time as it sits on a shelf. I don't mind reading books on a digital device, but I haven't yet made peace with the idea of reading them only on a device, owning them only as an idea, rather than as an object. Oddly, I don't have this problem with other forms of media — I just can't seem to get past this with a book. Not yet, anyway.
I've installed the Kindle app for iPad, though, and it is as beautiful and pleasant a reading experience as I could hope for. Amazon foolishly, recklessly, allows free downloads of the first chapter of a book as a sample, and I will (probably) consume as many of them as I can.
More than anything else, I find I'm using it for reading. Mostly in Instapaper, which is where I read virtually all of the various newspaper and magazine articles I come across in the course of a day — sooner or later. (They tend to accumulate.) Instapaper provides a very pleasant, mostly distratction-free reading experience, so very comfortable that it's led me to be kinda curious about eBooks.
I discovered that our local library has an eBook lending service (via the county's library system). Once I paid a small fine (left over from 2007), I was able to find a few items of interest — but unfortunately, the selection seems thin. If I want to read eBooks, I'll have to make a few uncomfortable compromises.
I've written before of my love of books — you know, real, physical books. The kind you hold in your hands, feel the pages flip through your fingers. Paper that discolors over time as it sits on a shelf. I don't mind reading books on a digital device, but I haven't yet made peace with the idea of reading them only on a device, owning them only as an idea, rather than as an object. Oddly, I don't have this problem with other forms of media — I just can't seem to get past this with a book. Not yet, anyway.
I've installed the Kindle app for iPad, though, and it is as beautiful and pleasant a reading experience as I could hope for. Amazon foolishly, recklessly, allows free downloads of the first chapter of a book as a sample, and I will (probably) consume as many of them as I can.
11 April 2011
More Than A Secretary
For some reason, I find I can't take seriously the idea of George Brent as a leading man past, say, 1934. But I wonder why I haven't seen more of Dorothea Kent, who is brings a bright spark to the traditional "dumb blonde" role. (It's too bad the name "Maizie" seems to have been mostly forgotten after the 1940s.)
And Jean Arthur? I could just listen to her forever.
And Jean Arthur? I could just listen to her forever.