For the second time in three years, on a muggy August weekend I made a road trip to Rome, New York to attend the very unique classic film festival known as 'Capitolfest', after the Capitol Theater, the old movie palace downtown playing host to the event. The festival's tag line is "a vacation, not a marathon!" Well, with just two and a half days to watch over two dozen movies, and with assorted special presentations mixed in, if that doesn't meet the criteria for a marathon, I'm not sure I share the same working definition of the word. That said, here in Rome the experience was relaxed, and lacked major downsides of bigger festivals, such as rushing from one theater to another, standing in lines, fighting to secure a seat in smaller venues, and choosing between eating and seeing a film. Here, it was also a great pleasure to spend many hours exploring film history in the presence of other classic film enthusiasts and in such an historic place.
The Capitol Theatre on W. Dominick St.. in Rome, NY
This was the 14th annual edition of the film festival, and it is one of the most unique around, because it concentrates on hard-to-find films from the silent and early talking era. (This is NOT a greatest hits parade of classic film.) Yet, festival organizers, led by Art Pierce, theatre Executive Director, and Assistant Manager Jack Theakston, look at the critical reviews of the time and ensure they are generally positive before choosing a film to screen at Capitolfest. The films are often coming off restoration projects by the George Eastman House & Museum or the Library of Congress, and many haven't been seen since their original run in the 1920s or 30s. The festival also includes special presentations highlighting developments in film history. Tremendously affordable, a weekend pass (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) will put you out exactly $60.
Interior view of the Capitol Theatre, from www.romecapitol.com
About half the films screened are from the silent era, and accompanying them live on their original restored theater organ, were musicians Dr. Philip C. Carli, Avery Tunningley, and Bernie Anderson. And in the 'can it GET any better?' category, the 'featured star' this year was Gary Cooper, who was at his most smoldering and attractive early in his career.
Young Gary Cooper -- it may not get any better than this, folks.
The FilmsAs a relative newbie to film history appreciation, I really enjoyed the special presentations of the Dawn of Technicolor, by James Layton, and a sampling of Edison Kinetoscope shorts (with recorded soundtracks) from 1913, presented by George Willeman, .... these proving that color film didn't just emerge in the late thirties, or that sound films didn't just magically appear in 1927. Film history is much more complicated, with trials, errors, hard work, and more trials. I also wonder what the stars of those 1913 shorts would think if they knew, 103 years later, that live audiences would re-discover their work.
I'm proud to say I saw every film presented at the festival (!) While I can't claim I was completely awake for every last minute of them, I was there. The late film on Friday evening was the sci-fi-adventure-comedy mash-up JUST IMAGINE (1930), which could have garnered the award for oddest film possibly ever made in the 1930s. With it's look at what life might be like in the (gasp) 1980s (!) we all had fun with this one wondering what the heck was going on and I'm sure festival organizers did too.
The cast of JUST IMAGINE. Yeah, most of us didn't quite get this one, either.
My favorite films were, in no particular order:
Beautiful Florence Vidor
DOOMSDAY (Rowland Lee, 1928) opened the festival on Friday at 11:30 AM. A silent love triangle set in England with Cooper as the lower class rival for Florence Vidor's hand. While she loves him she balks at the hard farm work she'd be required to do. Complications ensue. Despite the somewhat anti-feminist themes in the film, I enjoyed it because it was my first exposure to Florence Vidor, and she was a fascinating, strong actress who was a good match for Cooper. Her career was launched thanks to her husband, director King Vidor, who cast her in many of the films he produced in the era. She eventually divorced him, and retired from films at the end of the silent era. She also later married violinist Jascha Heifetz.
WOLF SONG (Victor Fleming 1929): This was the concluding film of the festival, a silent Western melodrama directed by Victor Fleming with a script written by John Farrow. Cooper plays a rugged 'mountain man' who in his travels meets and falls in love with beautiful Mexican ingénue Lupe Velez. The struggle to maintain their relationship in face of Cooper's character's reluctance to be tied down creates the primary drama. This one had terrific acting by the leads, and solid support comes from Louis Wolheim as his sidekick. What distinguished this film for me was the emotional resonance and the final payoff, when Cooper had to literally crawl on his knees back to his love to gain her forgiveness. It was working on this film that Cooper and Velez started a romantic relationship that lasted a few years. Their chemistry in the film oozes from the screen. DUDE RANCH (Frank Tuttle, 1931)-- This was a farce in which enterprising business owners run a fake 'Dude Ranch' as a tourist attraction. The trouble? Not enough going on threatens business. So they hire a family of traveling circus performers to impersonate cowboys to liven things up with horses, gunfights and the like. This showcases the comic skill of Jack Oakie who was in his element here with his double takes and 'aw shucks' charm-oozing persona. Eugene Pallette is also tremendously entertaining with and also despite his totally un-PC act as a Native American. Great example of verbal and physical comedy at a breakneck pace. I'd love to see this movie discussed in TCM's Slapstick course!
Cast of THE POOR RICH (IMDb)
THE POOR RICH (Edward Sedgwick, 1934): Another rousing comedy with some of the best character actors to grace the screen in the 1930s, or any era. The cast is composed of Edna May Oliver, Edward Everett Horton, Andy Devine, Thelma Todd, Una O'Connor, Leila Hyams and Grant Mitchell. All contribute in what is a master class of comic timing, both verbal and physical. The plot concerns a brother and sister (Oliver and Horton), late of the landed upper class but now completely destitute, who return to their family home in ruins, and attempt to try to rebuild while keeping up the ruse of their class for important and class-conscious visitors. My only complaint with this one was Thelma Todd has too little to do and didn't get to showcase her natural ebullience as a comedienne.
The Extras
A huge 'dealers room' in a neighboring space provided much browsing pleasure. Original film stills and magazines in great shape, hundreds of books on film at low prices, and DVDs galore, added to the vintage feel of the festival, and I must say I enhanced my collection just a bit :
Making the festival for me was the opportunity to get to know some new film friends, some of whom I met at the Turner Classic Film Festival, and others only online. They inspire me with their passion, knowledge, and ability to express their love for film across multiple online platforms.
A few blogged about their experience, and @classicmoviehub and @citizenscreen created a video log:
Check out these other first-person accounts from film friends:
This installment of #WesternMovieSummer finds me in the early 1940s for two contrasting films, one considered a classic and the other not so much. The two pictures are filmed in black and white and that's about where the similarities end. I've already had a moment or two this past week of feeling overwhelmed as the vastness of this genre has been driven home to me -- apparently 30% of movies made in the Hollywood studio era were westerns -- but, undeterred, I'm soldiering on, watching and enjoying a fascinating sampling of the genre.
This is the "classic" of the two, directed by William Wellman, and starring Henry Fonda, by then a major star of 20th Century Fox, and with Dana Andrews in a small but critical role. It's entirely fiction, based on the 1940 novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, of the same name, and packs a depressing and spare story into 81 minutes. It twists our guts as an entirely unromanticized tale of brutality, making the viewing experience more educational than entertaining. Fonda is nothing like his noble 'YOUNG MR. LINCOLN' character or even his Frank James in JESSE JAMES. For those who like their Westerns tackling head-on the ugly reality of much of society who pushed forward into lawless unsettled territories, this one won't disappoint. As discussed by Prof. Slotkin in his Western Movie course, the film's key subject, lynching of a small band of settlers accused of cattle rustling and murder, would have been understood by contemporary audiences as a parable for the rampant practice of lynching of African Americans, still prevalent at the time.
Anthony Quinn, Dana Andrews, and Francis Ford as the victims, Frank Conroy at right as Major Tetley
Further driving this point home, the most heroic character of the film, the one most willing to stand up in opposition to the lynching, is an African American character, Sparks. Ironically, and sadly, the actor Leigh Whipper, went uncredited in the film. His career was quite long and eventful, and he is cited as having been the first African-American actor to join the Actor's Equity Association.
Leigh Whipper as "Sparks." Image from diva-harrington.com
Despite the bleak tone, the story and characters are well drawn, the direction is tense, and the message is timeless. I especially appreciated Andrews here, as a desperate man caught in the web of hate. Secondary character Harry Davenport is excellent, as is young Harry Morgan and Anthony Quinn, who's oily but attractive. The film does not waste time setting the atmosphere -- in the very first scene, as Fonda and friend Morgan ride into town, the view of the town shows very little life:
Also early on, we understand the nature of Fonda's character as a man who, while not necessarily criminal, is not someone we'd admire. Within the first few minutes Fonda downs several whiskeys, gets into a fistfight as a result of a minor insult, gets knocked out cold, and when coming to has to rush out of the bar to throw up. The close-ups and medium shots do not flatter him. Because he's Henry Fonda we expect him to act the hero, but he lets us down a few times during the film. He does emerge at the end, however, as a somewhat changed man.
Henry Fonda not looking his best.
Those familiar with the novel or the film will surely point to the many societal lessons and psychological depths embedded in it. For me, it was a potent reminder that even in the relatively early years of Hollywood, Westerns were not all romanticized visions or rousing action melodramas, and that the studio system could buck the expected societal values and critique them.
WHEN THE DALTONS RODE (1940)
In sharp contrast is this minor but entertaining western, made in 1940 for Universal Studios. At the helm was George Marshall, a talented director who scored brilliantly with DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (1939) and is also known for the Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake noir THE BLUE DAHLIA. The film chronicles the heyday of the real-life 'Dalton gang' of brothers, who, in the James & Younger gang mode, terrorized stagecoaches, trains and banks in the early 1890s in and around Kansas until they met their end, not unlike many other outlaws of the era, in a grand shoot-out. The film, of course, greatly fictionalizes the story, and in the tradition of the JESSE JAMES movie, tries hard to keep our sympathies on the side of this gang of murderers by giving them a sympathetic, loving matriarch, a law-abiding hero/friend in protagonist Randolph Scott, and a justification for their turning outlaw in the greedy, unscrupulous land-grubbing capitalists who make life tough for them.
I found a sharp contrast between the subject matter and the tone of the film, set up from the beginning in the onscreen narration which does not mince words about the lawless and brutal nature of the Daltons, but is accompanied by the most upbeat and jaunty music imaginable. Introduced early on the brothers, portrayed by Broderick Crawford, Brian Donlevy, Frank Albertson & Stuart Erwin, are shown to be a rowdy bunch of good-hearted pranksters who are out to have a good time and celebrate their Ma's birthday. Crawford as 'Bob' Dalton, is even the local sheriff and is engaged to the lovely telegraph operator Kay Francis. Even when it's made clear that the gang has succumbed to the life of crime, and the body count rises, the film seems to want to make it clear that they are just a short redemptive act away from returning to the right side of the law. The men of the town are shown to be largely a group of buffoons, in which the Daltons are clearly part. Andy Devine plays his usual dupe for comic effect on many occasions. The only smart characters are Scott's Tod Jackson, Francis, and George Bancroft as the businessman/villain. And very unlike THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, this town is filled with folk:
The last fifteen minutes of the film, though, are somewhat grim, as the brothers find themselves ambushed, and there is a prolonged shoot-out in which there is little music, only shots fired repeatedly in an intense sequence, until every last gang member is dead (this would not be a spoiler considering the real-life end for this gang, captured in some morbid photos that can be found online). Ironically the youngest of the brothers, Emmett Dalton, is shown as being killed, but in real life he lived to write an autobiography on which the film is supposedly based.
The brothers being photographed with their Ma (played by Mary Gordon) .
While there are no social critiques of note here, and the film exists primarily to entertain those looking for a pseudo-historical romp, it is a fun watch, with daring stunts and colorful characters. The cast seems to be having a grand time. Kay Francis, on the way down from her career high as elegant pre-code 'woman of the world' roles, is still stunning and compelling as the love interest. As a film capitalizing on the success of JESSE JAMES and the depression-era audiences who would expect to root for the common man against evil capitalists, it's an example of studio-era Hollywood fare very much of its time.
Kay Francis and Randolph Scott "meet cute" at the cow pen
DUDE RANCH (Frank Tuttle, 1931)-- This was a farce in which enterprising business owners run a fake 'Dude Ranch' as a tourist attraction. The trouble? Not enough going on threatens business. So they hire a family of traveling circus performers to impersonate cowboys to liven things up with horses, gunfights and the like. This showcases the comic skill of Jack Oakie who was in his element here with his double takes and 'aw shucks' charm-oozing persona. Eugene Pallette is also tremendously entertaining with and also despite his totally un-PC act as a Native American. Great example of verbal and physical comedy at a breakneck pace. I'd love to see this movie discussed in TCM's Slapstick course! 
