Movies

Friday Jan 11

by


The evening partially at home
& radio. Later went to a movie,
The Clinton, where I so often
go and I must mention once
in here, of that place where I
spend hours, going to a movie
is the best way to forget my troubles
for awhile,
It carries me away to a land
of enchantment where all
dreams are realized, where
every story has a happy ending.
I suffer with the heroes during
the plots and am happy with
them at the conclusions, Some
people go to this place of illusions
while their own beautiful dream is
still in process of development,
and others (soldiers of misfortune as
I would call them) who have played

continued from page 11

the game of love or some other (usually
the love game) which did not turn out
to their expectations, or utterly disappointed
and [are] ironically watching the picture
which in their pessimistic mind is nothing
but fiction (MY OPINION: SOME ARE AND SOME ARE NOT FICTION)
Yes the movies are a great relief

——-

Matt’s Notes

Movies!

I’ve been thinking about this entry ever since I transcribed it, and now I don’t even know where to start. Film fanaticism is a defining trait for my mother, my sister and me, so reading this entry is like watching my own DNA get decoded and seeing the movie gene first express itself in the presence of flickering light.

I always like to think about the origins of seemingly self-evident ideas, so what I like most here is how novel the idea of cinema as escapism is to Papa, how he needs to work it out on paper and make a case for it. It’s like reading an an optimistic position paper on the prospects of the Information Superhighway. His sincerity, too, is striking. Evocative phrases like “land of enchantment” and “house of illusions” remind me of the warmed-over sentiments we expect from Oscar presenters, but to Papa they’re vital, fresh and original, so enchanted is he by the very act of sitting in a movie house.

But even while waxing poetic on cinematic diversions he’s never quite diverted from his real concerns. On New Year’s Eve he searched the crowds for lonely souls; so too does he evaluate his fellow moviegoers. Are their lives ahead of them, or are they broken by disappointment? Do they believe in happy endings, or do they sneer at them? Papa carefully strikes a balance for the record (“MY OPINION: SOME ARE AND SOME ARE NOT FICTION”) but the very presence of this meditation shows how preoccupied he was with whether his own life was still beginning or starting to end. With all this churning in his head, I wonder if he’s being ironic when he says “Yes the movies are a great relief.”

Update

Looks like Papa got his movie fixes at the Clinton Theater at 80-82 Clinton Street, around the corner from his apartment on Attorney Street. According to cinematreasures.org, The Clinton featured Yiddish vaudeville as well as movies and operated from around 1914 to 1950. It’s now a store called Home Basics. A fan of old movie houses has a photostream over at Flickr that features The Clinton, so head over there if you want to see what the spot looks like now.

Papa doesn’t mention the movies he saw that day, but my new best friend the New York Times Archive helped me cobble together a list of what was playing in town in January of 1924, including a few biggies. Here’s what he had to choose from:

– The Temporary Husband
– The Great White Way
– West of the Water Tower
– Through the Dark
– The Hunchback of Notre Dame
– The White Sister
– Scaramouche
– Black Oxen
– Pleasure Mad
– The Ten Commandments (Papa must not have seen this — I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t mention it in his diary if he had)
– The Courtship of Miles Standish
– Anna Chrystie
– Reno
– Under the Red Robe
– Let no man put asunder
– Lucretia Lombard
– The Humming Bird
– Unseeing Eyes
– The Man from Brodneys
– The Shepherd King
– The Covered Wagon
– The Acquittal
– The Steadfast Heart
– A Lady of Quality
– Don’t Call It Love

Another Update:

Here’s a 1938 article from the New York Times (subscription required; PDF) in which William Hays publicly acknowledges that, yes, American movies are officially escapist.

Friday Feb 1

by


Evening at Loew’s Delancy
Saw Chaplin’s serious
movie production
A Woman of Paris

– Fine work. –

———–

Matt’s Notes

My special friend Netflix recently afforded me the opportunity to see A Woman of Paris, and while I was excited just to watch something that Papa saw, I think it’s a fine movie on its own merits. It’s also an unusual work for Chaplin because, as Papa points out, it’s a “serious movie production” and, as its opening title card cautions, Chaplin doesn’t appear in it.

I don’t see a lot of silent films, so when I do I’m often surprised by their technical sophistication. Early talkies could be stagy and static because primitive microphones forced actors and cameras to stay in place, but it’s easy to mistake those limitations as endemic to 20’s films in general. In fact, silent directors were not so restricted, and Chaplin displays a masterly command of pacing, editing, composition and camera movement. Chaplin directed the films he starred in, too, but as Vincent Canby noted when A Woman of Paris was revived in 1978, Chaplin’s directorial talent is “so closely bound to the performer’s personality we can’t easily tell where one starts and the other leaves off.” If you’re a movie fan, A Woman of Paris is worth checking out just to evaluate Chaplin’s behind-the-camera talent without distraction.

The story concerns a young provincial woman named Marie St. Claire (Edna Purviance, a Chaplin regular) who heads off to Paris when her plans to elope with Jean, her earnest young beau (Carl Miller) go awry. Within a year she’s living in high style, kept by the unapologetically lascivious playboy Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou, who really stands out). Jean resurfaces in Paris, and a moral crisis ensues for Marie.

I have to remind myself, when I see better silent films, that their broad performances and dramatic scores do not mean the films inherently lack nuance, and A Woman of Paris is a great example. Though he’s a cad, Pierre is not unsympathetic, and he’s far more honest with Marie than Jean, who claims to want her back but is unable to really pursue her for fear of offending his mother. Marie may be a kept woman, but Chaplin does not judge her too harshly, and resists the urge to force her into a climactic rejection of her comfortable life (as I’ve been conditioned to expect from major Hollywood releases). Jean is just too wishy-washy to merit such a change. While everything ends in a rush with Jean’s sudden death and Marie leaving Paris to work in a provincial orphanage, the resolution is not as corny as it sounds. As Canby notes, the film is “a highly moral tale that teaches that the wages of naivete is death, while the wages of sin may well be a better understanding of the true values of living.”

The film was apparently critical darling (the New York Times called Chaplin a “director par excellence…a bold, resourceful, imaginative, ingenious, careful, studious and daring artist”) but disappointed the public, who didn’t want to see a Chaplin movie without Chaplin. My wife, Stephanie, finds it consistent that Papa liked an ambiguous, commercially unpopular movie because I generally prefer difficult, ambiguous, or depressing movies over popular ones, as do my mother and my sister. It’s not quite clear what Papa, who prided himself on being a gentleman, would have liked about a story in which gentle behavior is a dubious virtue, but maybe he just liked interesting art for its own sake. Or, perhaps, the film’s final title card cemented his approval:

It was right in line with what he believed (and after the previous day’s romantic roller-coaster, something he probably needed to tell himself). Perhaps he nodded quietly to himself as he read it.

—————

Additional Notes:

According to Cinematreasures.org, The Loews Delancey Theatre was located at 140-146 Delancey street, next to Ratner’s (the legendary dairy restaurant that tragically closed a few years ago). It’s amazing to think that there were once at least two independent movie houses on the Lower East Side within a few blocks of each other (the Clinton and the Delancey) when so few independent theaters survive in New York today. Anyway, there’s a great thread about the Delancey at Cinematreasures, so head over there if you want to learn more.

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References:

Friday Feb 15

by

Movies & home.

I’ve a nice little home
but it is awfully lonesome.

————-

Papa doesn’t say what movie he went to, but here are a few that were in town that week:

  • The Yankee Consul
  • Bachelors and Children
  • My Man
  • An Innocent Sinner
  • Name The Man
  • When a Man’s a Man
  • The Ten Commandments
  • The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln
  • The White Sister
  • The Great White Way
  • The Eternal City
  • The Covered Wagon

When he wanted to take a break from his “awfully lonesome” apartment on Attorney Street, there were at least two theaters right around the corner:

Monday Mar 10

by

Sister night & Movies
& home & radio

—————–

Matt’s Notes

Movies Papa might have seen that night include:

And here’s Papa listening to the radio at home:

Monday Mar 17

by


Movies & home

My only companion radio
is again entertaining me
this evening.

My heart is full of dreams,
I am longing for a girl to
love me sincerely.

I can’t bear the emptiness
of my life.

H. whom I met Saturday
is a girl that appeals to me
most. I’m planning inviting
her to the opera —

But have I the right as a
wage earner to propose to
a girl like her?

I’m happy in the thought
that she is my friend now
being having been introduced to me by
my friend Rothblum.

———————

Matt’s Notes

“Perhaps in the pursuit of action yesterday’s dream will be forgotten before the day is over…”

Papa wrote those words a few weeks earlier after staying out all night with friends and acquaintances from the old country. How well he knew himself, or at least enough to dread his own swings from dreaminess to disappointment.

And here it is again: Just day ago, lost in fantasies, Papa dared to think he’d met the woman who would change his world. Now he corrects himself abruptly, angrily, declares himself unworthy of her, prepares himself to settle for mere friendship. A day in the factory, an evening alone, a night with his humble possessions — radio, chair, photo of his faraway parents — have shamed him, dissolved his illusions.

To see this reminds me of why Papa’s diary feels so important to me. His beautiful, spare prose speaks richly of his struggle to reconcile what he wants with what he has and is worth reading in its own right. But taken in view of his whole life, it testifies to a deeper, more difficult struggle — the struggle for perspective familiar to those of us who swing between extremes of expectation and judgment.

Papa has as little reason to call his life “empty” as he does to think “H” can transform it, yet he is convinced each is true, and the contrast is unbearable to him. Still, we know he rode out the stormy swings of his inner life to become a man who conveyed and imparted a sense of modulation, realism, and calm. I have idealized Papa, but the more I read about him, the more I realize he must have always retained a trace of his internal changeability; perhaps it was, in part, his mastery of it that made him so remarkable. I’m certainly no stranger to the private, stormy swings he writes about. (Is anyone?) It’s good to think they might be worth it.

—————–

Additional Notes:

Movies Papa might have seen that night include:

  • The Thief of Bagdad
  • The Covered Wagon
  • Thy Name is Woman
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame (I wonder if he saw this — it would have matched his mood)
  • The Great White Way
  • America
  • The Ten Commandments
  • A Society Scandal
  • Yolanda
  • The Hoosier Schoolmaster
  • The Fighting Coward

The New York Times also published an article that day on the potential of the “phonofilm,” or sound movie. Author Lee De Forest takes on those who doubt its prospects and makes a strong case for the use of sound movies in news reporting and political coverage. While he’s not sure how it might help dramatic films, he seems most excited about the potential use of music. It’s worth reading here.

Wendesday Apr 2

by

Movie & home
Sent home to parents $10.00

It is funny how I am trying
to pass my idle hours,
nothing seems to cheer me.

Its a period of one great
longing for me.

—————-

Matt’s Notes

Movies Papa might have seen in this day included:

  • Sporting Youth, a car-racing comedy starring Reginald Denny (“a good-looking, virile young man who does not overact,” according to the New York Times)
  • Try And Get It, a farce about competing salesmen, accompanied by a short film of boxing match recreations called Great Moments in Great Battles (the latter sounds more interesting to me)
  • Woman to Woman, a Moulin Rouge drama with Betty Compson condemmed by the Times for its overuse of rain effects, a bad habit perpetuated, unfortunately, by modern movies
  • Three Weeks, an adaptation of an Elinor Glyn novel by the same name (Papa probably saw this if he was in the mood for a first-run movie at a big movie palace, since it was playing at The Capitol Theater, one of his preferred venues)
  • Beau Brummel, starring John Barrymore in the title role and Mary Astor as Lady Margery
  • Virtuous Liars, a light comedy dismissed by the Times as “a modern entertainment, the story of which does not bear close scrutiny.”

Papa’s local theaters like the Loews Delancey or the Clinton Theatre probably showed movies a few weeks after they had opened rather than first-run movies, so if he was in the mood to pass his “idle hours” in the neighborhood he might have seen:

  • The Covered Wagon
  • America
  • Secrets
  • The Thief of Bagdad
  • The Ten Commandments

And for those of you just joining us, note that Papa’s $10 disbursement to his family back in the old country was larger than usual. He was no doubt worried about his father’s ongoing convalescence from an injury sustained in a fall a few weeks earlier. This, along with a bevy of romantic woes including his infatuation with an aloof woman named Henriette, would have contributed to his ongoing malaise.

—————–

Additional notes

We’ve talked about the Loews Delancey Theatre and Clinton Theatre before. Both were within walking distance of Papa’s apartment on Attorney Street.

Thursday Apr 24

by


Enjoyed movie
The Song of Love, at Clinton

I am alarmed I have
not heard from parents
for a long time. —

——————-

Matt’s Notes

As Papa mentioned in an earlier entry, he loved to escape from his daily worries to the “land of enchantment” he found at the movies, an easy enough vice to indulge since both the Clinton Theatre and the Loewe’s Delancey were around the corner from his apartment.


The Song of Love would have met Papa’s need for escapism; it was a big-budget Arabian extravaganza starring Norma Talmadge (“the highest-salaried screen actress,” according to the New York Times review) playing a French spy masquerading as an Algerian belly dancer. Time Magazine described this as Talmadge’s “first semi-vamp role,” certainly a big deal at the time, though I imagine it was equally unusual for films to have a female co-director as this one did in the person of Frances Marion.

I haven’t seen The Song of Love and it doesn’t appear to be available on video (has anyone out there seen it?) but I did find this picture of Normal Talmadge at the Library of Congress Web site:

Norma Talmadge

Papa had little relief from his anxiety over his ailing father in the old country — his “alarmed” words at the end of this entry even look anxious on the page — so I hope the lovely Ms. Talmadge’s excursion into cinematic sensuality was enough to distract him, for at least a little while, from his worries.

————

Additional References

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Image source:

Norma Talmadge. Library of Congress #LC-B2- 5472-10