The Military Air-Scouts (Vitagraph, 1911)
The Military Air-Scouts (Vitagraph, 1911)
Directed by William Humphrey
Starring Earle Williams and Edith Storey
So this is a curious one, not so much because of the plot (what little there is of it) but because of the timing.
Lieutenant Wentworth (Earle Williams) is in love with Marie Arthur (Edith Storey) and hopes to marry her. When war is declared between the United States of America and the United States of Europe, he accepts a dangerous air-scout commission. After successfully sinking the enemy’s fleet of battleships, his plane is shot down. The lieutenant, not badly hurt, returns home and finds Marie ready to marry him.
Now, I’m reading a lot into the story that is never actually portrayed on the screen—especially when it comes to Marie and Wentworth’s motivation—but I think that’s the essence of the plot.
Not dissimilar to The Victoria Cross, you might be saying, but whereas the Crimean War had already happened prior to The Victoria Cross’s release, not so for The Military Air-Scouts and the First World War. Air-Scouts, released in 1911, is set in the not-too-distant future of August 4th, 1914. For those playing along at home, it might interest you to know that Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28th of that year.
Did ancient aliens write this scenario or is it simply indicative of the feeling at the time that the Balkans were a powder keg and war was sooner or later inevitable?
Also interesting to note that the stunt pilot actually flying the plane is a young Henry “Hap” Arnold, who would later become both General of the Army and General of the Air Force in the Second World War—the only man to be a five-star general of two different military services.
My rating: This is a very, very slight film, but I like it purely for the miniatures in the naval battle scene.
Available from Harpodeon.com
Jane’s Bashful Hero (Vitagraph, 1916)
Jane’s Bashful Hero (Vitagraph, 1916)
Directed by George D. Baker
Starring Edith Storey
I’ve said in the past that the release notices placed in trade magazines don’t always correspond in every detail to the film as it was actually released, but I don’t think any that I’ve worked on are quite so different as Jane’s Bashful Hero. First, let’s look at its synopsis in Moving Picture World:
Bashful Willie Wiggins courts Jane Brown, the village belle, but after nearly wearing out the sofa cannot find the courage to pop the question. Jane finally resorts to the old ruse of jealousy. That night the village folks of Mudville are scandalized to see Jane in the arms of a stranger silhouetted against the window shade. The whole town rises up in protest, and Willie, backed by the minister, demands an explanation of Jane. She guiltily denies the impeachment and the crowd, calmed by the dominie, disperse, but Willie camps on the doorstep to catch his “rival.” Jane during the night regrets the scandal her little trick caused and flings the dummy she used into the well. Willie sees this and is horrified, believing it is the body of his rival, whom Jane has murdered. Frantic with excitement, he arouses the whole village. The indignant mob rush to Jane’s home in their nighties and drag her forth dramatically. The sheriff goes down the well, and of course Jane has a good laugh on them all when the dummy is hauled up. Willie now realizes the depth of Jane’s love and pops the question right then and there
That’s almost but not entirely different from Paul West’s shooting scenario for Jane’s Bashful Hero. There’s enough similarity that I don’t think it’s describing an entirely different film, but only just.
Jane Brown (Edith Storey) is a rather homely young woman—looking rather disheveled with messy pigtails and missing a front tooth—and the townspeople regard Willie Wiggins (Donald MacBride) courting her as very much of a joke. Indeed, they gather round to point and laugh at them when they’re together, causing Jane to chase them off, swinging her broom like a sword.
But Willie is too bashful to propose. Conversely, Dutch Louie (Billy Bletcher), the town’s grocer, is anything but bashful. He’s courting her aggressively and would marry Jane that day if she would have him, but she won’t. She wants Willie.
She reads in the newspaper that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, so she plans a dinner and invites Willie over. The meal starts well, but Jane’s playing footsy embarrasses him to such a degree that he confuses the table cloth for his napkin, tucking it into his shirt; and when she begins stroking his hand, he abruptly stands up, pulling Jane’s dinner onto the floor. Mortified, Willie flees from the house.
A gang of kids is forever pulling nasty practical jokes on Jane. She shoos them off when one of them dresses as a mustachioed home intruder. Leaving the mask behind, Jane gets an idea: maybe the way to spur on Willie is to make him jealous. With the mask and some old clothes from the attic, she builds a scarecrow rival, which both Willie and Louie see Jane petting and kissing in silhouette on the window shade that night.
A detective from the big city arrives in town with a wanted poster for Banker Bill, the notorious and at large bank robber. It isn’t him, but he looks rather like Snub Pollard, with a large mustache as his defining characteristic—just like Jane’s scarecrow. Willie and Louie both see the poster and react accordingly: Louie reports to the constable (Edward Elkas) that Jane is harboring the fugitive, hoping to dispose of his rival, while Willie rushes to Jane to tell her that the coppers are out to arrest Banker Bill and she had better hide him.
Jane dumps the scarecrow down the well, which Louie spies from around the corner. The constable, looking to impress the detective, comes to arrest Jane when she won’t say where the fugitive is hiding. Willie, meanwhile, dumps a bottle of ink on his face and fashions it into a crude mustache, parading in front of the constable and pretending to be Banker Bill. The constable isn’t fooled. Louie tells them he’s really hiding down the well. They pull up the bucket, and with it, the scarecrow. In shock, Louie falls down the well himself, and Willie, just now discovering his initiative, finally proposes to Jane.
So, as I said, there are enough similar points in the Moving Picture World synopsis that I don’t think it’s summarizing a different film altogether, but the overall plot it describes is vastly different from the real Jane’s Bashful Hero.
The real Jane is a fun enough film, though. Very well edited, and as always, Storey is a remarkably fine actress.
My rating: I like it.
Available from Harpodeon.com
A Regiment of Two (Vitagraph, 1913)
A Regiment of Two (Vitagraph, 1913)
Directed by George D. Baker and Ralph Ince
Starring Sidney Drew and Harry T. Morey
What! A review! I thought this blog was dead!
I mentioned, lo these many years ago, that I thought that the Sidney Drew short The Professor’s Romance had more than enough material and could really have stood being a two-reel production. Well, A Regiment of Two is a Drew two-reeler that I recently worked on and it really lacks the material for even one reel.
To ensure themselves a regular boys’ night out, Ira Wilton (Sidney Drew) and his son-in-law Harry Bennett (Harry T. Morey) have pretended they’ve joined the 13th regiment and, as military men, they’ve got to drill every Friday. In reality, they’re down at the stag night at the Tigers Club, dancing with Mademoiselle Zoric, “The French Top”. But that storyline is dropped almost before it starts.
We now join Conrad Meltzer (Charlie Edwards), the very German boyfriend of Lena (Josie Sadler), the Wiltons’ cook. I think they meant to get Kate Price for the Lena role. The part is right up her alley and Sadler even looks a lot like Price. Melzer is a plumber and happens to be on-hand with Lena in the kitchen when the water main springs a leak. Rather than fix it now, he picks up a convenient piece of kindling and jams it in the hole. “I put plug in der pipe und it lasts until tomorrow und I’ll fix it up goodt den!” he says to Lena.
(That might be the first time I’ve ever seen “tomorrow” rendered as one word. It was usually hyphenated “to-morrow” well into the ‘30s.)
Laura (Edith Storey), Ira’s daughter, is in on the ruse and helps to keep it up. She’s in love with Jack Brent (E.K. Lincoln), who really is a corporal in the 13th regiment. And I think they meant to get Wallace Reid for the role. It fits in with his characters at Vitagraph to a T and Lincoln even looks a bit like him. Anyway, Laura’s mother (Rose Tapley) favors Lord Dudley (Ralph Ince) and tries her best to marry the two, even though Dudley is simply impossible.
While Ira and Harry are dancing the night away with Mademoiselle Zoric, Meltzer’s quick fix fails and the pipe positively erupts water, flooding the kitchen and adjoining dining room ankle-deep. Laura, Mrs. Wilton, and Mrs. Bennett (a young Anita Steward when she was still Anna Stewart) send Dudley into the fray. After his initial bumbling attempts with a pillow, he at last finds the wedge-shaped bit of kindling and shoves it back in.
That took the whole reel. How does it continue into the second? It doesn’t!
Jack receives a telegram telling him that the 13th is being mobilized to “suppress the recent outbreak” in Panama. Laura is worried about her beau’s safety, but Ira and Harry are elated. While they’re “mobilized”, they’ll be rusticating on a fishing boat out on the lake.
They’re resting at ease on the dock, a cold drink in their hands, when they read the news: “Thirteenth Regiment Completely Annihilated”. That puts them in a rather awkward situation. They dress up in bandages, an arm sling, and an eye patch and go home with rousing stories of their heroism and narrow escape ready on their lips.
But it turns out that the tales of the regiment’s demise were greatly exaggerated. Jack returns and Meltzer, too—injured, but not from the shooting—he’s got gout. Harry pulls Jack aside to tell him to backup their heroic claims and Ira slips a little cash into Melzer’s hand to convince him to do the same. And so Ira and Harry “earned for themselves everlasting fame as two of the bravest warriors of the campaign”.
So, the two halves of this short have precious little to do with one another. Lord Dudley even disappears after the first reel ends. There was story enough in Ira and Harry’s pretended enlistment in the second reel, but the burst pipe plot of the first is a single joke stretched very, very thin. Sidney Drew is always delightful, and he wears outrageous false mutton chops here, and it’s a pleasure to see Edith Storey in anything, although she has little enough to do in this film.
My rating: Meh.
Available from Harpodeon.com
Maine Silent Film Festival 2023
It’s happening!
…though not in Farmington.
Unfortunately, irreconcilable differences with the venue have led to the cancellation of the Farmington Silent Film Festival this February. The henceforth Maine Silent Film Festival will play at a more professional venue in the summer of 2023. The structure of the festival and we have returned to the original film lineup.
The Emery Community Arts Center, a subsidiary of the University of Maine at Farmington, objected to the initial LGBTQ+ program, particularly the trans feature of the evening, very likely the earliest screen emergence of trans representation. The film is a product of its era and not without objectionable content, but within the context of our present era, erasing trans history is exactly what is being attempted. Libraries are being defunded for including trans material and drag performers are being threatened with death—even here in Farmington, they had to cancel performing at this year’s Pride for fear of their safety.
Though the lineup was changed and the film was no longer scheduled to appear at Emery, they continued to object to the film merely existing and, little more than six weeks out, we were forced to canceled the event.
UMF wishes to stress that they support the LGBTQ+ community however much their actions belie that.
The festival is now set for July 24th and 25th at the historic Alamo Theatre in Bucksport, Maine:—
Enchanting, Part Six
Enchanting
Part Six
I’ve seriously looked into resurrecting the Super 8mm distribution side of the business, because I do love film more than you can imagine. Fifty foot digests (let’s say three minutes and a half minutes), color, sound. On Super 8, those digests would cost a minimum $100 to break even. I am not making a penny— bare minimum. There is a single lab — a single lab — in Germany still making prints from Super 8 negatives. They could name their price, but they’re nice and are being realistic. I might could just about swing black and white silent prints for $40. That’s shooting on expired stock that might not hold out. And, of course, doing all the processing myself. Film is expensive, yo. Back when I used to do B&W digests for $50 and people complained that they could get so much more for so much less in ‘70s — yeah. Yeah, you could. The days of cheap film are over, never to return.
One thing I should have said, lo these many years ago when I first reviewed A Florida Enchantment, was how it differed from the novel. I’m borrowing liberally from my post on silentphotoplay.com without shame.
The film largely follows the book faithfully, down to some of the male and female divides shown already seeming a bit old-fashioned for 1914. It does make some very notable changes.
More than twenty years had passed since the book was published, and by that point the war was nearly fifty years in the past. It wasn’t as relevant to the film as it was to the book, so all mentions of it or of slavery are dropped. Major Thornton, for example, was a Confederate officer in the novel and Captain Oglethrope was a 1790s slave trader and his encounter with Quasi is much less friendly than the story the film relates. Dropping all of that doesn’t affect the plot and was the right thing to do. Bowdlerizing the Quasi story does leave out an important element, that the magic tree was burned with the village and the four seeds enclosed are the last.
A big difference, and one that explains a lot of the gaps in the film’s logic, is that in the novel, Fred actually is cheating on Lillian with Stella Lovejoy. Lillian and Bessie catch them, much is made over the difference infidelity makes when the perpetrator is a man versus a woman. That is a large part of the reason why Lillian swallowed the first seed.
If you’ve read much Archibald Clavering Gunter, you know he’s not really a comic author. You might think so at first blush: he’s got a light tone, he’s satirical, he’s fond of complements that are dripping with sarcasm, but for all that, he treats his subject matter fairly seriously. The difference from the film to the novel that turns everything on its head is that it isn’t a dream. That’s where the four seeds element comes in that the film sets up but then abandons. Lillian takes the first, she gives Jane the second, and then Fred takes the third. And I don’t know why screenwriter Marguerite Bertsch didn’t change it to three but the film is done after that. In the novel, Lawrence dreams of what would happen if the public knew about the last seed. He imagines the newspaper ad — millions offered—richest widow in New York in negotiations—the queen who wants to be a king — etc. Frederica is miserable living as woman and is going broke because no one will trust a “doctress’s” care. While Lawrence and Bessie are boarding the ship on their honeymoon, Frederica finally convinces Lawrence to give up the seed by asking what would happen if Bessie should ever stumble onto it. At that, the doctress immediately changes back to a doctor as the tugboats pull the ship off the shore.
The tagline of A Florida Enchantment, the film, is “The Funny Phantasy”, but the book’s not so fantastic. It’s really trying to examine the different ways society treats the sexes and the different reactions society has to one sex behaving or presenting as another. Namely, that gay women are disapproved of but accepted, while gay me are condemned, and Gunter is trying to point out the hypocrisy in that. The film does that too, of course, but it muddles it a bit in trying to make it more of a comedy than it wants to be. The book is satyric but not really a comic.
That the film was really only funny in its first half was really the public’s response to it, too. One contemporary review — I think it was the Variety one — thought the film was only funny up to Lillian’s transformation and then the comedy all seemed forced onto the plot.
The changes to the film’s plot probably came from the earlier Broadway stage adaptation. In terms of page count, A Florida Enchantment isn’t a long book, but it’s awfully involved with the setting changes from New York to Florida and back constantly. Simplifying things to make them easier to stage with only one New York act makes sense. And it didn’t help that Gunter’s hypocrisy was the accepted view at the time and audience wouldn’t have liked it. We can’t know, though, what the play is like because it’s presumed lost.
There’s been some question over the years about what exactly Lillian/Lawrence’s relationship with Bessie is supposed to represent. Whether its what it looks like today — a look at someone who’s transgender seeking a straight partnership—or if, trying to look at it through what may be Gunter’s lens — the gender-bending is more of a code meant to show discovering one’s lesbianism and marrying another woman. There are arguments to be made for either position, but speaking of coding, the names Lawrence and Clarence were seen as extremely gay in that era. Think Bruce in the 1980s. Calling the character Lawrence was certainly not unintentional.
Available from Harpodeon.com
Enchanting, Part Five
Enchanting, Part Five
Nothing but a quick note to drop while the nor’easter outside replaces all the snow that had melted: aside from the score, which I’ve only just begun, A Florida Enchantment is complete. I’ve got about a reel and two-thirds scored. Difficult scoring features, but I’ve a working library of about four hundred compositions and I can lay my hands on a thousand more. That’s a considerably more expansive music library than most theatres had. Download will be available as soon as the score is. Blu-Ray and DVD will be a bit later. There’s a lot to consider with those, what with the cover art and blurbs and such.
I’m only, what, three or four years late on this project? Eight, you say? Well, for me, that’s still remarkably on-time.
Juggernauting 10
Juggernauting
Part 10
There’s been some… interesting information added to The Juggernaut’s Wikipedia page. Namely, the cost of the wreck scene.
The scene cost somewhere between nothing and infinity dollars. All the numbers you read in magazines — $10,000, $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 — are a bunch of hooey. If there’s one single thing that can be said of Vitagraph founders Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton, they never met with a lie big enough that they couldn’t say it with a straight face. Remember that whenever you read any publicity material from Vitagraph.
I included a chapter (well, most of it — the parts dealing with The Juggernaut, anyway) from Oren Clayton Reel’s The Life of Earle Williams, and you can rest assured it’s suffuse with lies, too, but it’s colorful at any rate.
(One lie immediately springs to mind: They had to have guards posted to prevent rival independents from shooting footage of the wreck for their own films, but it’s not like they took it with them when they finished. The train stayed wrecked in the lagoon until it was pulled out as part of a scrap metal drive in the Second World War. Were the guards posted until that time? Actually, it’s not too hard to find bits and pieces of it even now, like the two I’m looking at on the table over there.)
If you want accurate numbers, try to find out what an outmoded railroad engine and three old-fashioned passenger cars cost in 1914. (It was released in 1915, but shot the year prior.) The bridge I can’t imagine amounted to a great deal.
That Reel book, incidentally, was a real coup — I got it for well under $175. Usually sells for $250.
Newsflash: Nonsense Copyright Laws
Newsflash: Nonsense Copyright Laws
Do you remember, when I was discussing how sane and sensible US copyright law was compared to the EU, how I said that all of Chaplin’s films were still under copyright in the UK? Because I forgot and they’re raising a stink about Behind the Screen because Chaplin’s decedents are a litigious bunch who’d rather like to subsist on their father’s and grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s dime (…eh, shilling or whatever) than do anything useful themselves. A bit like how Sonny Bono thought the proceeds from Sonny & Cher should, in perpetuity, devolve to his family. Don’t blame Mickey Mouse for copyright extensions in the US (well, do blame Mickey Mouse, but not as much), blame Sonny Bono.
Me, personally, I’m fine. I’m an American individual running an American company, and as far as America is concerned, Behind the Screen has been in the public domain since 1944. YouTube… well, it might not be on YouTube. The preview will, Curiously, the preview was claimed by Paramount, because they own The Celluloid Closet, which used roughly the same clip that I used. Their claim is specious. The claim for the whole film is from the Charles Chaplin estate itself, based in Britain.
Updates are forthcoming.
Update:
Paramount backed off almost immediately. They usually drag it out for 29 days. It’s refreshing. The preview is in the clear. I’m sure the Chaplin estate is in conference with their lawyers, realizing they can’t get any money out of me, but strategizing what they can do. If only they miss the 30 day deadline, too.
Update the Second:
Well what do you know, they did miss the deadline to file. I’ve won by default.
Behind the Screen (Lone Star, 1916)
Behind the Screen (Lone Star, 1916)
Directed by Charles Chaplin
Starring Charles Chaplin
There are LGBT silent films, actually more than you’d imagine. The one I’m talking about today is a Charlie Chaplin two-reeler, Behind the Screen. I sourced it from three prints: primarily from a 35mm nitrate print I got from Italy, a 16mm positive that nearly every copy comes from today (I only needed the last shot from that), and an 8mm positive than had rather attractive titles (I needed those as none of the 35mm titles were in English and the 16mm are horrible replacements. I don’t think they’re original, but they’re original-ish, and look a lot better than the boring old actually original ones.)
Behind the Screen is interesting because the stage boss doesn’t need any more hands and Edna Purviance wants to break into pictures, so she disguises herself as a man and takes a scab job when the others strike. Only Chaplin knows she’s a girl and much comedy ensues when the boss sees Chaplin kissing the scab.
This is the second LGBT Chaplin film. The other is the one-reeler The Masqueraders, also called (and I know it more as) A Woman, which isn’t… really all that LGBT at all. No more than any film where a man is confused for a woman. Behind the Screen, now, has real LGBT themes.
Now I’ve had sickness and illness and illness and sickness. Left kidney failure and double pneumonia. All right now, mostly — just a broken rib from coughing — but I have fallen behind in my projects. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I were healthy.
You know, almost all summer and autumn, it’s poured down rain on the weekends. Comes the very last day the train is scheduled to run before shutting down for the winter. It’s beautiful, not a cloud in the sky, and for late October not too cold. You could not ask for better filming conditions. Head up to Phillips… and the train broke down before I got there. No more rides until next year. Oh well.
I shot the Chester Greenwood parade on 35mm with my silent-era camera. Greenwood, who you may or may not know, was the inventor of earmuffs (along with a host of other things, but earmuffs are all he’s known for) and a Farmington native. I shot 100 feet of film, which works out to approximately a minute and forty seconds. I figure film development and video transfer of the negative will cost about $150. To make a print of the negative that I can actually project will be around $100 more. And that isn’t including title cards, which will have to be shot separately. (I will develop those myself, though, using the same process that I’ve always used to develop titles — namely, a high-contrast stock pushed two stops and developed in high-contrast D-19 to provide an almost literally black and white image with no shades of gray at all.) It’s all so very expensive. The short I shot for the last Florida Enchantment DVD ten years ago was nearly three times as long and, all told, cost a bit under $400. In future, I may have to go with 16mm. I don’t want to, though — I love 35mm, and it has the authenticity I crave.
I think it’s true that I’ve never shot on video — not since the early ‘90s at any rate. Whether 8mm, 16mm, or 35mm, I do prefer film. Plus, the expense keeps you rather mindful of wasting time. Take a vacation home movie. On video, you can drag it out for hours and hours and nobody in the world wants to watch that. Let’s say I’m shooting on Super 8mm: unless the trip is rather short or boring and I can do with less, I tend to take 34 minutes’ worth of film — that is, ten cartridges. I tend to edit it down to maybe 25 minutes afterwards, and that climbs back up to 30 minutes after I shot and insert the titles.
Same goes for stills, really. Unless it’s very, very dull and mundane, I shoot on film. Typically with one of my half-frame cameras, so a 36 exposure roll of film turns into 72 exposures — more if you load it in darkroom and needn’t waste the first few inches. (Half-frame, or four-perf, film is exactly the same as motion picture film. Full-frame, or eight-perf, is what most still cameras take.) I like film. What can I hold with digital? Nothin’, that’s what. Any photolab can handle half-frame pictures just fine, but I always develop and print my own stills.
I said before that the last seizure I had caused a bit of damage. My bed is repaired and now my clock is at what I consider the best clockmaker in New England. It’s a Gustav Becker clock that I love dearly. I do like good furnishings. If a piece has stood the test of time for 150 or 200 years, then it’s a good piece. It won’t fall apart on me in the coming decades. Wheat from the chaff, you know. It will be a month or more before he’s finished overhauling my clock. Was I talking about a film? I find Chaplin rather… repetitive isn’t the right word, but samey? I find his jokes all rather samey. There are so many good comedians beyond the canonical ones, but sticking strictly to them, I rather like Lloyd more. But that may just be my general aversion to slapstick. That scene with Charlie kissing the “stagehand”? Two or three minutes out of a thirty minute film.
My rating: Meh.
Queen Elizabeth (Famous Players, 1912)
Queen Elizabeth (Famous Players, 1912)
Directed by Henri Desfontaines and Louis Mercanton
Starring Sarah Bernhardt
Working on this film at the moment while I score another. I should say, our print of it is a horrid little 8mm thing, but I’ve never seen one better. The Library of Congress’s is, if anything, worse.
“Famous players in famous plays” was Adolph Zukor’s slogan. He was an early proponent of feature-length pictures when he founded Famous Players, which later would morph into present-day’s Paramount Pictures. Behind Universal, they’re the oldest Hollywood production company, and the only one to still produce films in Hollywood. Queen Elizabeth was their very first release.
Sarah Bernhardt was certainly famous enough. Next to perhaps Eleonora Duse, there was no more famous actress alive, and I say only perhaps next to her. She made a few films next to Duse’s one: Cenere in 1916. Bernhardt reportedly saw in Queen Elizabeth her one chance to immortal fame when she made it in 1912. Famous Players had taken over production of the film when Pathé Frères, who had been bankrolling L’Histrionic Film, backed out. So it is a French production, but American made, and it premiered at the Lyceum Theatre in Manhattan. Still an operational theatre, I might add. One of the few left on Broadway dating back to the old days.
It’s the days of the Spanish Armada threatening the coast of England and Elizabeth (Sarah Bernhardt) must lead her people — and she leads them to triumph. She’s in love with Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex (Lou Tellegen), but there’s a problem there. Devereux, it seems, is in love with Catherine Carey, the Countess of Nottingham (Nita Romani) and her husband (Max Maxudian) is more than a little jealous. It’s pretty much the plot Elizabeth followed eighty-some-odd-years later.
A fortune teller sees the tragedy ahead and warns Elizabeth of it. The Queen tries to forestall it, giving Devereux a ring which she says he need only return and it will redeem him no matter his crime. The ring, needless to say, goes missing when the Earl of Nottingham appears on the scene. Devereux draws nearer to execution and Elizabeth can’t help but puzzle over why he simply doesn’t produce the ring. He’s too proud, she concludes. Devereux ascends the scaffold as Elizabeth eats her heart out and very soon finds himself without a head.
“After the death of her lover, Queen Elizabeth never had another happy moment and gradually faded away,” a title tells us. So it ends rather markedly different from Elizabeth, where she proclaimed herself in no need of a lover and, indeed, married to England. Her long reign is reduced to simply fading away. Queen Elizabeth jumps forwards many years at the end to Elizabeth’s own tragic end — caused, we’re assured, by the death of Deverux. I say many years — it might be only the next day, so far as the film suggests.
Elizabeth in Les Amours d’Élisabeth, Reine d’Angleterre was one of Sarah Bernhardt’s more famous parts. At nearly seventy in 1912 — Bernhardt was 68 — she was rather old for the virgin queen, but she made it work. She certainly made it work better than Le Duel d’Hamlet, a short she’d made twelve years prior, in which she portrayed her iconic role as the thirty-year-old Danish prince at fifty-six. I believe I reviewed one other of her films already, La Dame Aux Camélias, which she’d made the year before Queen Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth is far and away the better production insofar as filmmaking technique goes. Queen Elizabeth actually looks like a movie — a primitive one, even for 1912, don’t get me wrong — but a movie nonetheless. Camélias is a filmed stage play and makes no bones about it.
Still, watching Queen Elizabeth doesn’t really convey what made Sarah Bernhardt famous to begin with. In Cenere — “Ashes” — you absolutely do know why Duse was considered one of the greats. And even Duse denounced Cenere as a poor effort on her part. It’s frustrating, really, all these glimpses of Bernhardt in one film or another and not a single one of them capturing the great actress side of her. I’m convinced there was such an aspect to her — a few people may be mistaken, certainly, but hundreds upon hundreds held Bernhardt to such lofty heights.
My rating: I really have to say “meh”. As a Bernhardt film, it’s her best, but I can’t in good conscience muster up a good rating,
The out-of-towners are still here — the ones who fled to here to escape COVID-infested cities. I think they expected it to be a cheap to live in rural Maine. No, it’s not. Not at all. Our growing season is so short, nearly all of our non-milk groceries have to be imported from other states. And as far as rentals go — if they’re looking for places that will wave the first and last month’s rent and have no security deposits, as I’m told is the case in many southern cities desperate for workers — it’s no wonder so many find themselves homeless on arrival here. Landlords can charge whatever they want and there will still be a waiting list to get in the apartment. Even if we were desperate for workers, I can’t see people caring all that much. We’re “laid back”, but not in the western beachcomber sense, rather in the “can’t be bothered if you live or die” sense, And if it’s anything like the possums you read about in news articles who arrive here clinging to the underside of trains (we’ve no possums here — they’re most frightful looking beasts — little goblin things), there’s little worry, because they won’t survive the winter. Already I imagine those living in Bonney Woods or especially those down by the river are rethinking their life choices. It dips well under freezing at night now and struggles to reach the fifties during the day. And, if they did make it through the winter, I’d really hate to be down on the intervale when thaw comes. They’ll very literally be underwater. Under very cold water. With the vaccine roll-out, I’d have thought they’d gone back home.
Those Awful Reviews 