A PROGRAM OF ROMANTIC DRAMA, MYSTERY & COMEDY FROM 1925/6

The Roach-McCarey-Jones-Chase combination could always be relied on in the twenties for good slick comedies that combined slapstick with more subtle humors. We have shown several in the past, and hope to obtain more in the future. BROMO AND JULIET is a typical, above-average specimen, racing breathlessly from one gag situation to another with little regard for plot content. Even the vulgarity is presented with such flamboyance and enthusiasm that it remains quite inoffensive!

Hornung's famous mystery of the amateur cracksman has been filmed many times, usually as a vehicle for a polished, debonair top-ranking male star. John Barrynore, Ronald Colman and David Niven are typical examples. It has always seemed rather odd that that fine actor (but rather stolid and far from dashing personality) House Peters should have been selected for the lead in this version. The initial miscasting, plus Peters' own interpretation of the role (quite at odds with the original) tended to work against the film, and though any Peters vehicle in those days was assured of a good market, it soon fell into oblivion and was never revived. In the belief that the interesting obscurities that nobody has seen are often as enjoyable (and, to the film student, almost as valuable) as the established classics that everybody has seen, we are happy to re-present this quite rare item today. Its plot - the rivalry between Raffles and a detective to capture a notorious burglar, and Raffles' own eventual reformation by love - needs no detailed repetition here. Each successive version of the book has been reasonably faithful to its original. Depending more on suspense and elements of mystery than on dramatic thrills or action, the film is a quiet and methodical mystery-drama, very typical of its period.

King Baggott who directed (and who also directed Bill Hart's Tumbleweeds, shown a few weeks back) was formerly an actor, and held the distinction of being the first American player ever to appear in a French film. (Title: Absinthe). He began directing in 1922. The film's heroine, Miss Dupont, is undoubtedly best-known for having attracted the lecherous attentions of Erich Von Stroheim in Foolish Wives. Hedda Hopper and old friend Walter Long need no introduction! House Peters incidentally, still makes an occasional appearance in films - one of his most recent being as a somewhat hammy frontier evangelist in a Gene Autry western! His son, House Peters jr., is also very active in films and has been for five or five years now.

Curiously, SON OF THE SHEIK is not included in the current United Artists Festival at the Museum of Modern Art, in spite of the fact that it was one of the company's really big successes, and one of the best - and most typical - of all the Rudolph Valentino films. We are glad to lend UA a hand by making up for their omission!

SON OF THE SHEIK has been revived constantly - internationally and theatrically - and the reasons are quite obvious. Even apart from the fact that it presents Valentino in such a colorful and famous role, the film still packs in all the essential ingredients of mass popular entertainment, and they are ingredients that haven't dated in any noticeable degree, either in their content or their presentation.

The film offers a full-blown, exotic romantic story in terms that the allegedly more sophisticated contemporary cinema has "outgrown." It is a wonderful melodrama too - replete with threatened fates-worse-than-death, desert chases, last-minute rescues, stunts and furious fights. No one has ever pretended that this file was "art" -- but it does represent a peak in polished hokum backed by all the arts and techniques acquired by the motion picture in the mid-twenties.

In the twenties, Hollywood was still a wonderland, and the movies spelled glamor. The artistic masterpieces of that period have never been surpassed - and nor have the masterpieces of hoke and make-believe, of which this Valentino film is a prime example. William Cameron Menzies' sets gleam and glisten; the photography of George Barnes is rich and luxurious; beauty opposed in true fairy-tale fashion by repugnant ugliness, good by unmitigated evil.

Valentino's characterisation is of a type that has completely disappeared from cinema today - the gentlemanly hero with dishonorable (if unrealized) intentions just doesn't stand a chance with today's production code. Thus he has been replaced by the hero whose intentions are always honorable, but who is, alas, never a gentleman; Valentino! Barrymore, Lewis Stone, Clive Brook, Adolphe Menjou have given over the leading ladies to the louts - the Widmarks the MItchums, and the Palances. However, since Dolores Costello, Norma Shearer and Vilma Banky have been replaced by Marilyn Monroe, Terry Moore and Ava Gardner, perhaps matters aren't as tragic as they might be. Hero and heroine are pretty evenly matched, and only the audiences suffer. SON OF THE SHEIK in any event, presents a hero-heroine team in the grand old tradition. The beautiful Vilma Banky (married to Rod la Rocque) has never been seen to better advantage, and Agnes Ayres, co-star of the original The Sheik, returns for a short "guest" appearance.

French-born George Fitzmaurice achieved a considerable reputation as a big, stylish director of comparatively unimportant pictures. SON OF THE SHEIK was probably his biggest property of the silent period, and proved to be a fabulous success, despite being released after Valentino's death. There was a curious belief - often substantiated at the boxoffice - that audiences would avoid a film starring a player who had died since its completion. This film, at any rate, overcame the tabu. At the end of the silent and the beginning of the sound eras, Fitzmaurice teamed with Sam Goldwyn on many films as a writer-director - the Colman version of Raffles being among them. He died in the early forties. The talkie Suzy with Jean Harlow, Franchot Tone and Cary Grant is another of his best remembered films, as is the Wallace Reid film Forever – this from the silent period of course - an earlier version of Peter Ibbetson. In the latter period he was in fact making some of his best pictures, among them the Garbo films As You Desire Me and Mata Hari. His last film was an interesting melodrama from Paramount, Adventure in Diamonds (1940) with George Brent and Isa Miranda.

It is certainly worth recording that Son of the Sheik was one of the first big productions made entirely on panchromatic film. George Barnes (who died last year, and whose later credits included Rebecca, Mourning Becomes Electra & Samson and Delilah) photographed all the desert scenes near Yuma, in Arizona - location of Brenon's Beau Geste, and many other Arabian stories. Included in the film by the way, is one quick clip from the original The Sheik. Son... was a much more polished, less "corny" production on the whole, than was the first film (which was made for Paramount, not for UA).

COMING PRESENTATIONS: We haven't forgotten our promise to screen Cheney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and this will be forthcoming very shortly. The print is currently at the Eastman House Archives, being copied for the edification for future generations in Rochester, so the delay is in a noble cause. The print is absolutely complete in every way, and is a tinted original, so will be well worth waiting for.

We are also currently arranging another "orgy" of silent classics for early presentation. Those of our members who remember the evening of five German classics of a little less than a year ago will realise that something really special is in store. Among the films to be screened are Manon Lescaut with Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Light, The Sacred Mountain, Marcel L'Herbier's L'Argent, The Tournament by Jean Renoir, and others. It may well have to spill over into two sessions. Prints are available to us only at certain tines, and, for single days, which is why the "marathon" form of presentation is necessary. We know that our old reliables will have no complaints about this!