There are 15 films being presented by Turner Classic Movies on Wednesday, December 14. All of them come from the archives of the George Eastman House— a result of decades of acquisition, conservation and preservation. For this blog entry,  I am highlighting the ‘30s films being shown that day.

PAYMENT DEFERRED (1932)

PAYMENT DEFERRED (1932) is one of my personal favorites in the TCM lineup. I consider it a proto-noir, in that the protagonist (the fabulous Charles Laughton) experiences the same type of dilemma, decision and destruction that characters such as Walter Neff of DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) and Christopher Cross of SCARLET STREET (1945) endured in the golden age of noir. The plot follows Laughton, a bank clerk, as he struggles to keep his family financially afloat. He has news about an impending shift in the money markets but has no capital to take advantage of it. A long-lost nephew (an early appearance by Ray Milland) shows up on his doorstep but has no interest in Laughton’s proposal. Before Milland leaves, Laughton plans and executes a cold-blooded murder, stealing Milland’s money and burying him in the back yard. Laughton makes a killing on his investment, but is haunted by the body in the garden. It has little of the stylistic effects that are the hallmarks of the noir look, but the themes are the same and Laughton’s performance is grand. Like many of the MGM films we have here, the originals came to us early in our professional life. A nitrate picture negative and a nitrate track negative were received in 1967 and our print was taken directly from these in the 1970s, as was a new Fine Grain Master. Airs at 6:15 pm.

In 2007 Fox produced the mammoth and impressive “Ford at Fox” DVD Box Set, boasting 24 of the director’s films in one beautiful package. One of the films in the set, THE WORLD MOVES ON (1934), came directly from our material. We received a nitrate positive from Fox in 1972 and performed our own preservation in 1989, creating new pic and track negs and a new print. For the new preservation, Fox decided to use the old track neg, but went back to the nitrate to create a new pic neg and, with those elements, a new print. The story starts in 1825 New Orleans and follows the lives and loves of the Girard family over several generations, through the first World War and the stock market collapse to the present day. The cast is led by Madeleine Carroll, Franchot Tone and Reginald Denny. Airs at 2:45 am.

The shortest film featured is a 1937 documentary entitled THE SPANISH EARTH and directed by Joris Ivens, a well-known Dutch director that was deeply influenced by Russian greats Eisenstein and Pudovkin. The company that sponsored this film, Contemporary Historians, was formed by group of American writers and intellectuals, including Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker and Archibald MacLeish. The film follows loyalist forces and the land-working people of Spain as they struggle to survive the onslaught of Franco’s army, and as released was narrated by Ernest Hemingway. Our print was a pre-release positive that still retained the narration by a 21-year-old Orson Welles. We got our original material, a nitrate positive print, back in 1958, and performed a standard preservation, creating new pic and track negs and a new print in 1985. Airs at 9:00 am

We’ve covered nearly 20 years of film history, from an early feature released in 1918 to a documentary released solidly within the sound era. The last four films will take us all the way into the mid-‘60s, rounding out a fascinating slate of preserved wonders.

I’ve been taking a little time to write about all the films being broadcast on Turner Classic Movies ‘Tribute to George Eastman House  on December 14, and wanted to continue with the films that come from the very interesting period of transition from silent to sound, 1929-1931.

THE VALIANT (1929) was an Oscar-nominee for both its writing and the lead performance by Paul Muni. He would be nominated 5 more times, including I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932) and THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA (1937), and won for THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR (1936), but is likely still best-known as the original SCARFACE (1931). In this film he is an accidental murderer who gives himself up to authorities but refuses to reveal his name to keep from shaming his family. Our preservation of this title comes from a nitrate positive that came into the collection in 1972. The preservation was done in 1983, when we produced new picture and soundtrack negatives and a new print. Airs at 7:30 am.

THE TRESPASSER (1929)

One of our favorite silent stars is Gloria Swanson, and we are proud to have the film of her first speaking role in THE TRESPASSER (1929). In it, Gloria plays a lawyer’s stenographer who gives birth to a son after a short, annulled elopement. Her employer helps her out, which causes a scandal, suggesting that she is a “kept woman.” Swanson would work only rarely in the next 20 years, leading up to her magnificent star turn in 1950’s SUNSET BOULEVARD. The film was produced by Joseph Kennedy, with whom Swanson was having an affair. Kennedy had a short run in Hollywood, producing 10 films from 1926 to 1930. We had several elements of THE TRESPASSER to work with, including some elements that came from Swanson herself in 1967. We took the best of these elements in 2002 and created new sound and picture negatives and new prints. Airs at 10:00 am.

The next two films are early examples of the musical on film. THE LOTTERY BRIDE (1930) features operetta star Jeanette MacDonald in a bizarre musical melodrama which sees her enter a Norwegian marathon dance contest, help an Italian aviator escape from jail, be jailed herself, become a lottery bride, bought by her sweetheart but given to his brother, and finally lead a rescue party to save her sweetheart from a dirigible crash in the Arctic Circle in glorious two-color Technicolor. Two under-rated comedic actors give healthy support in the form of the romantic couple Joe E Brown and ZaSu Pitts. The George Eastman House cut of the film is longer than the version currently out on DVD and features the Technicolor ending, which is missing on the DVD. This preservation was completed thirty years ago, beginning with a nitrate positive, which created new negatives and a new print. Airs at 1:30 pm.

DELICIOUS (1931) is the first film that George and Ira Gershwin wrote music for. And they wrote it for the beautiful Janet Gaynor and her frequent co-star Charles Farrell (7^th HEAVEN, SUNNYSIDE UP, LUCKY STAR and 8 other films). They star as immigrants coming to America on the same ship from Europe. They find love, but are from different classes, which keeps them apart, but in America anything is possible and after several misunderstandings and two botched deportations, they are married. DELICIOUS was a 1999 preservation project that started with a Fine Grain Master, which produced the new negatives and a new print. Airs at 4:30 pm.

Are you excited yet? I know I am. But I still have 7 more films to tell you about! Next, I’ll tackle the decade of the 1930s and leave the rest for last.

The films featured on Turner Classic Movies’ Tribute to George Eastman House (December 14) span nearly fifty years, from the Teens to the Sixties, illustrating just how diverse the motion picture collections are at the museum. Our preservation efforts have been ongoing nearly since we opened, starting with BEN-HUR in 1950 and continuing today. We’re very pleased that TCM has recognized our legacy of hard work and is assisting us in our ultimate goal of making these films available to our audience. In the upcoming days, I’d like to take some time to tell you a little about each of the titles airing on TCM and let you look behind-the-scenes at a working motion picture archive.

THE SILENTS

The first film playing in the salute to George Eastman House is the 1989 restoration of the 1918 version of THE BLUE BIRD. The film was based on the play L’Oiseau Bleu by Maurice Maeterlinck and produced by Famous Players-Lasky, which later became the modern Paramount Pictures. It was one of the American films of French director Maurice Tourneur, whose career shifted back to France at the end of the silent period. Tourneur is likely best known as the director of the Mary Pickford films POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL (1917) and PRIDE OF THE CLAN (1917), the first feature-length adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1920), as well as producing Jacques Tourneur, the director of OUT OF THE PAST (1947) and CAT PEOPLE (1942). The preservation began with a 35mm nitrate positive loaded with beautiful color tints that add to the fantastical feel of the film. We printed new negatives and made sure that the color remained in the new prints that were reconstructed from multiple sources. The results are gorgeous, and the score by Mont Alto Orchestra complements the images. This will be a TCM premiere, but if you like it, you can buy this version on DVD from Kino. Airs at 6:15 a.m.  

HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1920)

 William Desmond Taylor’s HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1920) was the first adaptation of Mark Twain’s seminal American classic, and the last in a loose trilogy of Twain films directed by Taylor. Taylor may be best-known now for his notorious murder and the careers it ruined, but he was quite a prolific director in his own right. Much was made of the 2009 premiere of this film at GEH, and it has shown in San Francisco, Chicago and Pittsburgh since then. Again, we worked from a tinted nitrate positive, but this print had Danish intertitles (the words on the screen in between the action), which made it difficult to understand. We asked one of our Selznick graduates, Ulrich Ruedel, to do a rough translation of the intertitles, then Anthony L’Abbate, our Preservation Officer, took these translations and adjusted the language to that of the Twenties, and used Twain’s original text for much of the dialogue. In order to re-construct the titles, Anthony used the 1920 version of DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE as a template for typeface, background and spacing. One of the best uses of tinting in the film is the scene in which Huck, attempting to steal some butter, hides it under his hat. Seated near a fireplace, Huck and the butter both heat up, the butter dripping through his hair and down his face. All of these shots of Huck are tinted red, visually supporting the heat and nerves that he is experiencing. A brand-new score by Mont Alto Orchestra was commissioned for this screening.  Airs at 9:15 p.m.

ROARING RAILS (1924) is another recent restoration similar to HUCKLEBERRY FINN. A tinted nitrate was the basis of the preservation, but it had Dutch subtitles. We asked another Selznick graduate, Elisa Mutsaers, to do a rough Dutch-to-English translation, and Anthony worked his magic again, utilizing resources from our Paper, Poster and Stills Collection to re-create the PDC (Producers Distributing Corporation) logo for the new intertitles. ROARING RAILS is what Variety would call a “meller,” industry for “melodrama.” In a very large nutshell, “Big Bill” Benson is a World War I veteran who adopts a French war orphan and struggles through poverty upon losing his job as a train engineer. Moving West, he finds another job, but his son is blinded in a sabotage attempt. Not having any money, he takes the blame for a murder he didn’t commit to save a rich man’s son who has promised to pay for the operation his son needs. “Big Bill” is played by Harry Carey, a veteran of over 200 films, many of them Westerns, 29 with John Ford. He is also the father of Harry Carey, Jr., himself a veteran of 150 films. World-renowned accompanist Dr. Philip Carli, a Rochester resident and frequent Dryden Theatre collaborator, recorded an all-new score for this film on the Moller organ at the Capitol Theatre in Rome, NY. Airs at 1:15 a.m. 

A PAGE OF MADNESS (1926)

A PAGE OF MADNESS (KURUTTA IPPEIJI, 1926) is the only foreign film in the tribute. The story of a man who takes a job at an insane asylum to be near his wife, who is a patient, and how their daughter’s engagement affects the family, is told with no dialogue, only images and a percussive score that drives the action as well as underlines the cacophony of confusion that threatens to tear the woman apart. The film’s director Teinosuke Kinugasa is not as well-known in this country as his contemporaries Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, but directed over 100 features in his native Japan, including JUJIRO (CROSSROADS, 1928), JOYU (THE ACTRESS, 1947) and JIGOKUMON (GATE OF HELL, 1954), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. This film was originally preserved in the 1970s from an acetate 35mm positive, and then revisited in 2001 with a re-recorded score.  Airs at 3 p.m.

These are just some of the films that will be broadcast during the tribute, and, hopefully, some you’ll be looking out for. I’ll tackle the changeover period between silent and sound films in my next piece. But as a special behind-the-scenes bonus, I’ll leave you with this: all the films mentioned in this article are held by George Eastman House!

As we prepare to welcome Carole Tanenbaum, one of North America’s premier vintage and costume jewelry dealers, for her lecture “Celebrity Watch: 100 Years of Style Makers” and the Vintage Collection Jewelry Benefit Trunk Show and Sale this weekend, we thought we would have some fun by producing a video for a different kind of collector than we’re used to here at the Museum. In the video, Eastman House volunteer and makeover consultant Kay Noske shows the many ways you can think outside the ‘jewelry’ box.

George Eastman House is grateful for Carole Tanenbaum for generously donating a portion of the trunk show proceeds to help support the museum.

As Carole would say, “Stay fabulous!”

Although he has only directed four films, James Gray has already established himself as one of the most accomplished voices in modern American cinema. At a time when Hollywood moviemaking is defined by youth and spectacle, and “independent” cinema by disingenuous quirk, Gray’s films have embraced a restrained and classical visual style, a focus on the working class, an emphasis on character over action, and sincere performances of great depth and feeling.

Director James Gray on the set of ‘Two Lovers’.

It’s a style that’s a unique blend of American and European influences, and appropriately, Gray has long been received as a modern day auteur abroad. In France, Gray has been consistently praised by the critics of the prestigious Cahiers du cinema, and is the subject of a new book, Conversations with James Gray.

Born and raised in New York City — the setting for all of his films — Gray made his directorial debut in 1994 with Little Odessa, a striking mob picture set in Brooklyn’s Russian-Jewish community. Directed when Gray was only 25 years old, the film won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and immediately established Gray’s finely tuned sense of place and facility with actors.  Little Odessa was followed by a pair of noir-tinged, classically tragic crime dramas about families on either side of the law: The Yards and We Own the Night, both starring Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix again starred in the romantic mood piece Two Lovers, giving a bravura performance as an emotionally scarred man who finds himself torn between two women (Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw).

Gray with Joaquin Phoenix.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix in scenes from ‘Two Lovers’.

 

James has generously taken time out of preparation for his newest film (with an all-star cast including Phoenix, Marion Cotillard, and Jeremy Renner) to be with us for the Dryden Theatre screening of Two Lovers, this Friday, December 2nd.