667 results for your search

D.W. Griffith is properly esteemed as the "Father of Film" from his years of discovery making short films at the pioneer Biograph Company and for such pioneering features as The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm, but his later films - several of them lost or almost unavailable - are often dismissed as back efforts of a talent in decline. Griffith's 1928 comedy-drama The Battle of the Sexes belies this perception.

The story involves a middle-aged magnate (humanitarian Jean Hersholt, whose film performances extended from Greed to Dr. Christian) who makes a fool of himself when he strays from his loving but frowsy wife (Belle Bennett, so unforgettable in Stella Dallas) and children (Billy Bakewell and Sally O'Neill) into the cynical arms of a gold digger (Phyllis Haver) and her dishonest lover (Don Alvarado). As these characters are hurt and healed, Griffith expertly draws fine lines between tragedy and comedy, and his skill makes all the difference between emotional satisfaction and formulaic melodrama. Like so many of Griffith's earlier films, there must be elements of autobiography in this one, for the 53-year-old filmmaker's sympathy is all with the middle-aged philanderer whose relationships with women are no less myopic than Griffith's own.

Coming in the year of transition to sound, The Battle of the Sexes was originally released with synchronized recorded music, including an obligatory song. Griffith is reported to have been critical of the music, which has been lost in any case, but compilers Rodney Sauer and Susan Hall worked the song into the new score prepared for this edition and recorded in digital stereo by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. The image has been digitally mastered from a vintage print made directly from the original camera negative.

From 1913 to 1916, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle rose from the ranks of bit player to writer, director and star of comedies for Mack Sennett's Keystone Film Company. Because of Sennett's belief that actors were interchangeable, he lost Arbuckle to producer Joseph M. Schenck, who not only paid the comedian handsomely, but also permitted him complete creative control. To help in the new venture, Arbuckle recruited Buster Keaton, popular star of a knockabout vaudeville act; Keaton took a large pay cut to act in motion pictures, and Arbuckle welcomed his ideas and taught him all he knew about making movies. This volume of the video collection presents films that Arbuckle and Keaton made for Schenck between 1918 and 1919; they are presented chronologically so we can watch Buster grow from Arbuckle's bit player to his full partner.

Following the 1921 scandal that was inflamed by a publicity-seeking prosecutor and the tabloid press, Arbuckle's films were withdrawn from circulation in America, and the negatives were not preserved. The films in this collection were gathered from international archives and private collections. The English intertitles are new, and except for Back Stage, derived from non-English sources. All the films are digitally mastered from 35mm, sometimes directly from the nitrate originals.

VOLUME TWO INCLUDES:

• Good Night, Nurse (Jul. 1918)
• Back Stage (Aug. 1919) with Molly Malone, John Coogan
• The Hayseed (Oct. 1919) with Molly Malone, John Coogan
• The Garage (Dec. 1919) with Molly Malone, Harry McCoy and music by Robert Israel.