Our Silent Film Weekend will take place over the 5-6 April. After a considerable pooling of minds, we have produced a schedule encompassing some of the best and rarest of silent cinema from the US, mainland Europe and our native UK. There is the customary blend of archive treasures and mainstream entertainment, presented by an enthusiastic team of experts with, of course, the usual live music from our skilled accompanists.
The following programme running order may be subject to change.
Saturday 5th
10.00 Boy Woodburn (UK 1922) (35mm) Introduced by Lawrence Napper.
Directed by Guy Newall, who also stars alongside his wife Ivy Duke, Boy Woodburn was adapted from Alfred Olivant’s 1917 novel of the same title (it was released in the USA as Wings of the Turf). The story is set amid the world of English horse racing, where a trainer’s daughter agrees to marry a penniless banker if her foals win the Grand National. Also in the leading cast are A. Bromley Davenport, Mary Rorke, Cameron Carr and John Alexander. Guy Newall was already an established actor by the time he met photographer George Clark when both were serving in the First World War. On leaving the Army, they set up a production company that led in time to the construction of Beaconsfield studios. While awaiting completion of the new facility, Newall went on location to the New Forest and Salisbury Plain to film Boy Woodburn and an adaptation of Warwick Deeping’s 1911 novel Fox Farm.
11.45 Five Actresses from the Teens Presented by Dave Peabody.
Profiling a quintet of the most influential women in early cinema: these include writer, director, and actress Gene Gauntier of the Kalem company, with whom she worked variously in the USA, Ireland and the Far East before leaving to establish her own `Gene Gauntier Feature Players’; Ethel Grandin, an early star of Carl Laemmle’s IMP company who, with cinematographer (and her future husband) Ray Smallwood, was taken to California by director Thomas H. Ince before returning to New York to star in George Loane Tucker’s sensational 1913 drama Traffic in Souls; another Kalem star, the Swedish-born actress Anna Q. Nilsson, a former model named in 1907 as `the most beautiful woman in America’, whose later freelance career sustained throughout the silent era to the point where, in 1928, she set a record for receiving fan mail (in the region of 30,000 letters per month); Laura Sawyer, a former Shakespearian actress who joined Edison in 1908 under the direction of J. Searle Dawley (the subject of a previous talk by Dave Peabody) before moving on, five years later, to Famous Players; and Jane Wolfe, again of Kalem, whose films for the studio include The Mexican Joan of Arc (1911), directed by George Melford.
1.15 Lunch
2.00 Revolutionshochzeit/The Last Night (Germany 1928) (digital) Presenter TBC
Rarely seen and, for many, a neglected masterpiece, the costume drama Revolutionshochzeit was adapted from the 1909 novel by Danish writer Sophus Michaëlis and directed by fellow-Dane A. W. Sandberg. Produced and distributed by the German company Terra Film, it was shot at their Marienfelde Studios in Berlin with sets designed by the noted art director Hans Jacoby. A clue to the story lies in the German-language title, which translates to `revolution wedding’; in 1792, a French aristocrat finds herself confronted with the choice of either standing with her peers or becoming a revolutionary. Starring in this truly international production are Italian actress Diomira Jacobini, legendary Swedish stage actor Gösta Ekman and one of director Sandberg’s regular players, Karina Bell, who was again from Denmark. Also in the cast are Austrian-born Fritz Kortner and the German actors Walter Rilla, Paul Henckels and Ernst Behmer. The copy being screened is by kind courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.
4.00 World Premiere of the new Nasty Women full programme, Breaking Plates and Smashing The Patriarchy Presented by Michelle Facey.
The World Premiere of a raucous new programme from the Physical TV Company, who gave us Cinema’s First Nasty Women (as seen in an online KB presentation during 2022). Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy is the second in the Nasty Women series, a programme of rollicking shorts that takes inspiration from the freedom of the first years of cinema to bring a boundary-smashing brawl and a creative revolution for women to the screen. This programme will include a 25-minute documentary with film sequences.
5.45 The Yellow Lily (US 1928) (35mm) Introduction by Liz Cleary.
Although known primarily as a maker of British films, Hungarian-born Alexander Korda spent four years working at First National in Hollywood (following a stint in Berlin) before relocating to London. His first American film, The Stolen Bride (1927) was the first of four Korda films starring Billie Dove. In this and other respects it was something of a template for The Yellow Lily, in which she is co-starred with British actor Clive Brook, who plays an amorous Archduke. Dove plays the sister of a village doctor (Nicholas Soussanin), to whom the Archduke’s spurned lover (Jane Winton) is taken after a feigned suicide attempt; the Archduke’s attention is drawn instead to the attractive newcomer. Also in the cast are German actor Gustav von Seyffertitz, as the Archduke’s head of household; Edison veteran Marc McDermott as the Archduke’s father; French-American actress Eugenie Besserer as his mother; and Korda’s fellow-Hungarian Charles Puffy (real name Huszár Pufi), who aside from feature roles of this type also starred in a long run of `Bluebird Comedies’ for Universal.
7.00 Dinner
8.00 The Ring (UK 1927) (digital restoration) Presented by Neil Alcock, author of Hitchology.
One of Alfred Hitchcock’s most highly regarded silents, The Ring, made at Elstree, was the first film made by British International Pictures (BIP), which the director joined after previously having worked at Gainsborough. Although frequently described as Hitchcock’s only original screenplay, there was some degree of input from Eliot Stannard, who wrote all of Hitchcock’s other silent films; the idea, though, was Hitchcock’s own, inspired by boxing matches he had attended where he noticed how well-to-do many of the spectators had seemed and that the fighters themselves were sprinkled with champagne after each round. Carl Brisson, Lillian Hall-Davis and Ian Hunter star in a love-triangle tale about Jack, a former fairground boxer, Bob, the heavyweight champion whose sparring partner he becomes and Jack’s wife Mabel, for whose affections Bob becomes a rival. British character actor Gordon Harker, years before his tenure as `Inspector Hornleigh’, plays Jack’s trainer. Real-life boxer Bombardier Billy Wells – at one time the man who struck the gong at Rank! – makes an uncredited appearance.
Sunday 6th
10.00 The Sea Urchin (UK 1926) (35mm) Introduced by Lawrence Napper.
Also known as The Cabaret Kid, The Sea Urchin was produced at Gainsborough Studios by Michael Balcon and directed by Graham Cutts. The star is Betty Balfour, one of Britain’s top screen attractions of the 1920s (seen at a previous KB weekend in the 1929 film Bright Eyes). This is a romantic comedy with echoes of Romeo and Juliet, about two aristocratic English families whose mutual enmity finally comes to an end when the daughter from one side (Balfour) meets the other family’s son, a pilot (George Hackathorne) in a Paris nightclub. Each is unaware of the other’s lineage and the daughter must be rescued from the nightclub’s owner. Also in the cast are W. Cronin Wilson, Haidee Wright, Connie Brand, Marie Wright, Cecil Morton York and Clifford Heatherley.
11.45 Restorations and Discoveries
Little Mickey Grogan (US 1927) (digital restoration) Eric Grayson, on video, will present the UK premiere of his restoration of the 1927 comedy-drama Little Mickey Grogan, based on the stories written by Arthur Guy Emprey. It was directed by James Leo Meehan and stars Frankie Darro, Lassie Lou Ahern and Jobyna Ralston (remembered today chiefly as leading lady to Harold Lloyd). The film was long unavailable until an appeal was made in 2015 by former child actress Lassie Lou Ahern (by then 95 years old) for the recovery of this, her final silent film. A French-language 35mm nitrate print was located in the archives of Lobster Films in Paris. The English text was reconstructed with the aid of a script Ahern had kept ever since the film’s production. Little Mickey Grogan will be followed by the latest 35mm nitrate finds by Joshua Cattermole and new restorations from the Tony Saffrey collection, including: Circumnavigation of Graf Zeppelin (Germany 1930); Wait and See (UK 1910), a Gaumont comedy directed by Alf Collins; and a previously missing film by early pioneer R. W. Paul, His Mother’s Portrait, Or, The Soldier’s Vision (UK 1900).
1.15 Lunch
2.00 Die Straße/The Street (Germany 1923) (digital) Presenter TBC
Among his surviving works – of which, concerning the earlier examples, there are sadly too few – The Street is considered the most notable film of Vienna-born director Karl Grume, who later worked extensively in Britain. The Street has been called an expressionistic nightmare, a complex blend of two story strands within the dangerous context of an intimidating cityscape prone to sometimes bizarre metamorphosis, created by Grume with art director Karl Görge. The leading cast are Eugen Klöpfer, Lucie Höflich, Anton Edthofer, Aud Egede-Nissen and Max Schreck (of Nosferatu fame).
3.50 Focus on Biograph (film and digital)
Back despite public demand (!), Glenn Mitchell and Dave Glass present another of their `Focus on …’ programmes examining the comedy output of specific studios. This time it’s the turn of Biograph, associated more usually with the dramas of D.W. Griffith than with Griffith’s own lighter output and the early comedy efforts of the pre-Keystone Mack Sennett. This will also be the premiere of a number of Biograph comedies recently restored by the Film Preservation Society, by kind courtesy of Tracey Goessel. Featuring stars like Mabel Normand, Fred Mace, Mary Pickford and Sennett himself, it’s sure to please lovers of both vintage film comedy and early cinema rarities.
5.45 If I Were Single (US 1927) (35mm) Introduced by Michelle Facey.
If I Were Single is a romantic comedy directed by Roy Del Ruth, who was initially a writer then director for Mack Sennett (as was his elder brother, Hampton Del Ruth). By the 1930s he was the second highest paid director in Hollywood, his credits including the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon, comedies and dramas with James Cagney and musicals such as Broadway Melody of 1936. Based on the story Two-Time Marriage by Jack Townley, If I Were Single was originally released with synchronised music and sound effects, but the discs are not known to have survived. It was remade as a talkie in 1930 under the title Divorce Among Friends. This earlier version of the tale, about a rich girl trying to break up a couple’s marriage while the wife enjoys a flirtation of her own, stars May McAvoy (remembered now for the 1925 version of Ben-Hur and pioneering part-talkie The Jazz Singer), Conrad Nagel and Myrna Loy, some years before her association with William Powell in the Thin Man series.
7.00 Dinner
8.00 The Trail of ’98 (US 1928) (digital) Presenter TBC
Starring Dolores del Río, Ralph Forbes, Karl Dane and Harry Carey, The Trail of ’98 was based on the 1910 novel by Robert W. Service, an adopted Canadian born in Lancashire. He had travelled extensively in the western parts of Canada and the US and his poems earned him the reputation variously of `the Poet of the Yukon’ and `the Canadian Kipling’. Adapted for the screen by Joseph Farnham, Benjamin Glazer and Waldemar Young, The Trail of ’98 became, in the hands of director Clarence Brown, one of the truly epic western films, about fortune hunters from all over the country rushing to the Klondike after the discovery of gold there in 1897. Shooting brought hardships in many ways comparable to those genuinely experienced in the gold rush it depicts; it cost the lives of four stuntmen. Location filming took place in Denver and the Great Divide in Colorado, Truckee in California, Dawson City in the Yukon (from where, ironically, a great many missing silent films were later recovered), and various Alaskan regions including Skagway and the Copper River. Recalling the experience for Kevin Brownlow’s book The Parade’s Gone By, Brown considered it to have been his toughest assignment, taking a year to make and causing his weight to drop twenty pounds in the process. `We worked at eleven thousand six hundred feet for five weeks’, he remembered. `I had to send a number of people down; they just couldn’t take it. We couldn’t walk fast, we couldn’t run – we could hardly do anything at that altitude.’
TICKETS & PRICING
Weekend Ticket £35 / One Day £21 / Afternoon and evening pass £16 / Evening pass £8. You can also book dinner (£12) on both days at the Cafe Jamyang, next door to the Museum. Tickets and dinner bookable here.
