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The Best Arbuckle/Keaton Collection, Volume One
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, bu...
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 knockab...
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 1917 and 1918; 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the 1921 scandal that was inflamed by a publicity-seeking prosecutor and the tabloid press, Arbuckle's films were withdrawn from circulation in America, and the negatives were not preserved.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 Coney Island, derived from non-English sources. All the films are digitally mastered from 35mm, sometimes directly from the nitrate originals.
VOLUME ONE INCLUDES:
- The Butcher Boy (Apr. 1917) with Josephine Stephens
- The Rough House (Jun. 1917) with Alice Lake
- His Wedding Night (Aug. 1917) with Alice Mann
- Oh, Doctor! (Sept. 1917) with Alice Mann and music by Brian Benison
- Coney Island (Oct. 1917) with Alice Mann and music by Eric Beheim
- Out West (Feb. 1918) with Alice Lake and music from vintage recordings in the Columbia Photoplay Series
- The Bell Boy (Mar. 1918) with Alice Lake, Charles Dudley
- Moonshine (Fragment, May 1918) with Alice Lake, Joe Keaton, Charles Dudley
The Boy and the Convict
Le brasier ardent
Early Russian Cinema, Volume Eight, Iakov Protazanov (1912-1916)
Source: www.milestonefilms.com
PROTAZANOV, PROVOCATION AND PUSHKIN
Nothing in Protazanov’s career before his 1912 Tolstoy film would have hinted at its provocative originality. For this dramatized account of the great writer’s last days, despite its interpolation of documentary footage of the real locations and considerable efforts at authe...
Source: www.milestonefilms.com
PROTAZANOV, PROVOCATION AND PUSHKIN
Nothing in Protazanov’s career before his 1912 Tolstoy film would have hinted at its provocative originality. For this dramatized account of the great writer’s last days, despite its interpolation of documentary footage of the real locations and considerable efforts at authenticity, did not cast his widow in a flattering light. As a result, the Tolstoy family took successful legal action to have it banned....
PROTAZANOV, PROVOCATION AND PUSHKIN
Nothing in Protazanov’s career before his 1912 Tolstoy film would have hinted at its provocative originality. For this dramatized account of the great writer’s last days, despite its interpolation of documentary footage of the real locations and considerable efforts at authenticity, did not cast his widow in a flattering light. As a result, the Tolstoy family took successful legal action to have it banned. Undaunted, the producers decided to add an even more controversial “apotheosis” for the export market, which shows the heretic Tolstoy being received into heaven. By 1916, Protazanov had become one of the most commercially successful of Russia’s “kings of the screen,” particularly after The Keys to Happiness (1913), co-directed with Gardin. He was also a leader of what was ironically termed the “braking school” of directors, controlling his actors’ stylized rhythm with a conductor’s baton. Backed by Ermal’ev, and with Mozzhukhin as his regular star, he ranged across all the genres, including literary classics.For his adaptation of Pushkin’s novella, The Queen of Spades, already adapted as an opera by Tchaikovsky and filmed five years earlier by Chardynin (see Vol. 5), Protazanov used all the expressive devices at his disposal. To Mozzhukhin’s intense central performance as the callous young officer, he added novel tracking shots, telling superimpositions, and studio-built exteriors; all intended to create the subjective world of German’s obsession with the secret of the cards. Years later, his collaborators recalled how he “demanded unity between the visual and artistic design work and the film’s overall conception” and how everything was bent towards “revealing the characters’ psychological essence by visual means.” In this “good story faithfully rendered” (Jay Leyda), Protazanov demonstrated the sophistication and strength that Russian cinema had achieved only eight years since its inception.
THE DEPARTURE OF A GREAT OLD MAN (Ukhod velikago startso). Alternate title: The Life of L. N. Tolstoy (Zhizn’ L N Tolstogo). Directors: Iakov Protazanov and Elizaveta Thiemann. Screenplay: Isaak Teneromo. Photography: George Meyer and Aleksandr Levitskii. Art Director: Ivan Kavaleridze. Production Company: Thiemann & Reinhardt. Released Overseas: 1912. Cast: Vladimir Shaternikov (Lev Tolstoy). O. Petrova (Sof’ia Andreevna). Mikhail Tamarov (Vladimir Cherikov). Elizaveta Thiemann (Aleksandra L’vovna). Documentary footage, including some shots of the town of Astapovo where he died, was used in the film. As a result of a petition from Sof’ia Tolstoya and Vladimir Chertkov, the film was banned from distribution and shown only abroad.
THE QUEEN OF SPADES (Pikovaia dama). Director/Screenplay: Iakov Protazanov. Assistant Director: Georgii Azagarov. Photography: Evgenii Slavinskii. Art Directors: Vladimir Balliazek, S. Lilienberg, W. Przybytniewski. Screen version of the story by Aleksandr Pushkin. Production Company: Ermoltev. Released April 19, 1916. Cast: Ivan Mozzhukhin (German). Vera Orlava (Liza). Elizaveta Shebueva (The Countess as an old woman). T. Duvan (The Countess as a young woman). Polikarp Paviov (Her husband). Nikolai Panov (Count Saint-Germain).
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Early Russian Cinema, Volume Ten, The End of an Era (1917)
Source: www.milestonefilms.com
Traditional accounts of Soviet cinema have always stressed its difference from the Russian cinema of the Tsarist period, implying in the process that this earlier phase was actively hostile to social change. Not so, as we begin to realize from the tantalizing fragments that have survived. Indeed commercial produce...
Source: www.milestonefilms.com
Traditional accounts of Soviet cinema have always stressed its difference from the Russian cinema of the Tsarist period, implying in the process that this earlier phase was actively hostile to social change. Not so, as we begin to realize from the tantalizing fragments that have survived. Indeed commercial producers were keen, as ever, to exploit topicality; and the eight months between 1917’s two revolutions of February and October saw a remar...
Traditional accounts of Soviet cinema have always stressed its difference from the Russian cinema of the Tsarist period, implying in the process that this earlier phase was actively hostile to social change. Not so, as we begin to realize from the tantalizing fragments that have survived. Indeed commercial producers were keen, as ever, to exploit topicality; and the eight months between 1917’s two revolutions of February and October saw a remarkable upsurge of “revolutionary” sentiment. The Revolutionary, released in April, actually provides a link into the post-October period, since its writer and star, Ivan Perestiani, went on to direct one of the few genuinely popular early Soviet classics, Red Imps, in 1923.
In 1917, the journal Teatr noted sardonically: “The film studios have come up with a number of pictures tailored to ‘the moment.’ They have paid their dues to society though they have taken their cut too. The Revolutionary and The Provocateur were produced hastily in two or three days and are distinguished neither by their plots nor by any originality in their production.” It went on to record, however, that The Revolutionary “is a vivid example of agitational cinema, and that it drew applause when shown.”
For Luck also marked a transition: a tragically early end to the career of Bauer, who died after an injury sustained while on location in the Crimea for this film; and an early appearance by the future pioneer of Soviet montage, Lev Kuleshov. Kuleshov was already working as an art director with Bauer, when he was asked also to play the part of Lee’s hopeless young suitor. The central scheme of the film — a daughter and mother both in love with the same man — and the extraordinary intensity brought to the final scenes, in which the daughter’s psychological blindness becomes physical when she is rejected, show Bauer at the height of his subtle powers.
Behind the Screen is no more than a fragment of the major two-part film, A Life Destroyed by Pitiless Fate, released in November 1917, by which time most of the personnel involved in it would have already moved south on their way into emigration. Its film studio setting, therefore, has a coincidental poignancy, a farewell to the Russian cinema by two of its greatest stars, Mozzhukhin and Lisenko.
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Easy Street
Maison du mystère, Episode 4, L'Implacable Verdict
Serial films, or ciné romans were well-established in France before World War I, where they are most closely identified with writer-director Louis Feuillade. These melodramas for adult audiences were unlike American serials that were targeted primarily at youngsters. At Albatros, Russian émigré producer Joseph...
Serial films, or ciné romans were well-established in France before World War I, where they are most closely identified with writer-director Louis Feuillade. These melodramas for adult audiences were unlike American serials that were targeted primarily at youngsters. At Albatros, Russian émigré producer Joseph Ermolieff produced three serials in 1921, all adapted from roman-feuilletons by the phenomenally successful Jules Mary, a specialist in...
Serial films, or ciné romans were well-established in France before World War I, where they are most closely identified with writer-director Louis Feuillade. These melodramas for adult audiences were unlike American serials that were targeted primarily at youngsters. At Albatros, Russian émigré producer Joseph Ermolieff produced three serials in 1921, all adapted from roman-feuilletons by the phenomenally successful Jules Mary, a specialist in the genre, who penned many a famous melodrama around the theme of the miscarriage of justice - a theme that must have had special appeal for the unjustly displaced technicians and artists of Ermolieff's Moscow and Yalta studios.
The first two serials have not left a trace in the annals of film archives. But The House of Mystery (La Maison du mystère), Ermolieff's third serial, (begun in the summer of 1921 and not completed until 1923) by Alexandre Volkoff (with fellow studio director Viatcheslav Tourjansky providing some important and uncredited second-unit work), is a triumph of the genre and a complete delight that not only survived, but also was restored in its original ten-episode format by the Cinémathèque française.
The involved plot of La Maison du mystère centers around Julien Villandrit (Ivan Mosjoukine) and his star-crossed courtship to Régine de Bettigny (Hélène Darly), that inspires bitterness and jealousy in Henri Corradin (Charles Vanel), Julien's long-time associate and secret rival in love. For Mosjoukine, who contracted typhoid fever during the course of production, it remains one of the ultimate consecrations to his multifarious talents as actor, writer, and even make-up artist. But the film also opened doors for Vanel (Les Misérables, The Wages of Fear, Diabolique) who gives the "Curses! Foiled again!" school of melodramatic villainy a new lease on life), and the astonishing Nicolas Koline.
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Maison du mystère, Episode 9, Les Angoisses de Corradin
Serial films, or ciné romans were well-established in France before World War I, where they are most closely identified with writer-director Louis Feuillade. These melodramas for adult audiences were unlike American serials that were targeted primarily at youngsters. At Albatros, Russian émigré producer Joseph...
Serial films, or ciné romans were well-established in France before World War I, where they are most closely identified with writer-director Louis Feuillade. These melodramas for adult audiences were unlike American serials that were targeted primarily at youngsters. At Albatros, Russian émigré producer Joseph Ermolieff produced three serials in 1921, all adapted from roman-feuilletons by the phenomenally successful Jules Mary, a specialist in...
Serial films, or ciné romans were well-established in France before World War I, where they are most closely identified with writer-director Louis Feuillade. These melodramas for adult audiences were unlike American serials that were targeted primarily at youngsters. At Albatros, Russian émigré producer Joseph Ermolieff produced three serials in 1921, all adapted from roman-feuilletons by the phenomenally successful Jules Mary, a specialist in the genre, who penned many a famous melodrama around the theme of the miscarriage of justice - a theme that must have had special appeal for the unjustly displaced technicians and artists of Ermolieff's Moscow and Yalta studios.
The first two serials have not left a trace in the annals of film archives. But The House of Mystery (La Maison du mystère), Ermolieff's third serial, (begun in the summer of 1921 and not completed until 1923) by Alexandre Volkoff (with fellow studio director Viatcheslav Tourjansky providing some important and uncredited second-unit work), is a triumph of the genre and a complete delight that not only survived, but also was restored in its original ten-episode format by the Cinémathèque française.
The involved plot of La Maison du mystère centers around Julien Villandrit (Ivan Mosjoukine) and his star-crossed courtship to Régine de Bettigny (Hélène Darly), that inspires bitterness and jealousy in Henri Corradin (Charles Vanel), Julien's long-time associate and secret rival in love. For Mosjoukine, who contracted typhoid fever during the course of production, it remains one of the ultimate consecrations to his multifarious talents as actor, writer, and even make-up artist. But the film also opened doors for Vanel (Les Misérables, The Wages of Fear, Diabolique) who gives the "Curses! Foiled again!" school of melodramatic villainy a new lease on life), and the astonishing Nicolas Koline.
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The Open Road: A Cinematic Postcard of Britain in the 1920s
