Talk About Cinema

Well, it's been a while since I've seen Tramp, Tramp, Tramp , and I have been wanting to get a better understanding of the popularity of Harry Langdon, so I decided for this review, I'd check out another one of his most famous films, The Strong Man . Langdon plays Paul Bergot, a Belgian soldier who has been exchanging letters with a blind American woman, Mary Brown (Priscilla Bonner). During the war, Bergot is kidnapped by a German soldier who later turns out to be Zandow the Great, a strong man traveling throughout the United States to perform his act with Bergot as his assistant. Along the way, Bergot attempts to find the woman he has fallen in love with. So let's start by discussing the obvious comparison. The idea of a comedian falling in love with a blind woman was also done by Charlie Chaplin in City Lights . The Strong Man was made first, but their approaches to the subject are both different, reflecting the two comedians' different styles. Chaplin puts ...

The Phantom of the Opera may possibly be the most well-known Lon Chaney film. The fact that it’s in the public domain is probably a huge contributing factor, though I imagine the main reason is that this is one of the few horror films Chaney did. Despite how much the public associates him with the horror film genre, in reality, Chaney, Sr. didn’t actually make as many horror films as people might believe. The Phantom of the Opera is interesting for the fact that it does work as an entertaining horror film, despite how much it feels like it shouldn’t. Based off of the Gaston Leroux novel of the same name, The Phantom of the Opera  follows Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin), a singer at the Paris Opera House who is the understudy of lead singer Carlotta (Virginia Pearson in the original, Mary Fabian in the sound version). Christine has been training under the tutoring of a mysterious voice that lives in the Opera House. After being convinced to cut contact with her sweet...

Although A Sailor-Made Man was Harold Lloyd’s first feature film, it was Grandma’s Boy that really cemented him as a feature film star. Today, the film is praised for helping to decide how a feature film comedy should be approached, along with Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid , and resulted in Lloyd permanently moving into features. Lloyd plays a 19-year-old living with his grandmother (Anna Townsend). Unable to stand up for himself against a rival (Charles Stevenson), all seems lost to him, until his grandmother gives him a magic charm that will keep him from being harmed, and he gets a chance to prove himself by capturing a wanted criminal (Dick Sutherland). Grandma’s Boy is a much different experience than the earlier A Sailor-Made Man . That’s not to say A Sailor-Made Man is bad; it moves at a good pace and is full of funny gags. However, Grandma’s Boy stands out by doing more than could really be accomplished in a short comedy; it’s emotional in more ways than one. Starting wi...

Today’s post is dedicated to Walt Disney’s first cartoon star: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Although Disney had created some cartoons for his Laugh-O-Grams studio as well as the Alice Comedies , Oswald was Disney’s first big cartoon star, headlining his own cartoon series as well as generating lots of merchandise for Universal Pictures. Oh, and also, the cartoons were silent, giving us an opportunity to see how Disney and his staff were able to work without sound, the very thing that made Disney a household name in the first place (the first two Mickey Mouse cartoons, made as silent cartoons, failed to find a distributor until sound was added later). For anyone who wants more information on Oswald and his cartoons that were made under Disney’s supervision, I highly recommend David A. Bossert’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons , a very well-researched book which tells the history of Oswald at Disney, as well as presenting plenty of information about the carto...

I’m not too familiar with the work of Harry Langdon, which is strange because I’m a huge fan of silent comedy and have seen lots of Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton’s work. With Langdon, my viewing experience has been limited to the 1939 movie Zenobia and briefly seeing the end of one of his shorts a long time ago. Considering that Langdon is often considered to be the fourth of the major silent comedians, I decided it was time I finally checked out one of his movies and see what the big deal was with him. The movie I chose was Tramp, Tramp, Tramp , which is considered one of his most popular movies. Harry Logan (Langdon) lives with his father at his shop, but when it’s in danger of being shut down, Harry has three months to collect the money that they need to pay to the owner (Tom Murray). At the encouragement of Betty Burton (Joan Crawford), who he’s smitten with, he decides to enter a walking race to California that promises the winner $25,000. Langdon’s character seems to be that ...

Today’s subject is Mary Pickford, one of the most popular actresses of the silent era. Pickford got her start in films working for D.W. Griffith at the Biograph Company, eventually working her way up through the industry to the point that she became her own producer, making her films through United Artists, the company that she founded with Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and her then-husband Douglas Fairbanks. It is probably her United Artists films that represent her best work, notably Sparrows , a film that I hope to talk about sometime in the future. For now, though, let’s go back in time and talk about a film whose story should be instantly recognizable to many audiences today: Cinderella . For the few of you who don’t know the story of Cinderella , here’s a quick run-down: Cinderella (Pickford) is a kindhearted woman who lives with her evil stepmother (Isabel Vernon) and two stepsisters (Georgia Wilson and Lucille Carney). Having been denied permission to attend a ball held for the ...