Movies

Tuesday May 6

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Movie at Academy of Music

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Matt’s Notes

As we’ve discussed before, the Academy of Music was a storied venue that had fallen on hard times by the time Papa went there to see movies.

Once the home of New York Opera, and therefore the very seat of Knickerbocker society, it’s primacy came to an end at the hands of William H. Vanderbilt. Some time around 1880 Vanderbilt, who was considered nouveau riche by the standards of Knickerbocker society, was so incensed by the unavailability of boxes at the Academy that he simply decided to build his own opera house. Other like-minded millionaires jumped on board, and by May of 1883 their project, the old Metropolitan Opera House on 39th and Broadway, was in business.1

The Academy, having remained on top for forty years since its 1849 opening, took another forty to expire from Vanderbilt’s vengeful blow. Its popularity (and box seats) were gone by the late 1800’s, and bit by bit it conceded to host lower-brow attractions like wrestling, musical theater, and, finally, movies. The wrecking ball ended its misery in 1926, when the Consolidated Gas Company knocked it down and built new corporate headquarters in its place (the Con Ed building still stands in the same spot at 14th and Irving).

Did Papa know the Academy had but two years of life remaining when he wrote the above entry? We can’t be sure, but we do know he most certainly didn’t see any of that week’s first-run movies like Men, with Pola Negri, or Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, with Mary Pickford. The Academy wasn’t considered an important enough venue to make the New York Times listings, but it probably showed movies that had been hanging around town for a few weeks, like “The Thief of Bagdad,” “America,” “Three Weeks” or “Beau Brummel.” (While searching the Times archive I did come across a couple of enjoyable feature stories about the sorry state of subtitle writing and Hollywood’s lack of good scripts, complaints that persist today in movie journalism. Check them out if you’re a movie fan.)

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References

1 – As noted by Irving Kolodin in his History of the Metropolitan Opera 1883-1950:

Few of us today could imagine a society in which a mere whim could determine the existence of such a structure as the Metropolitan. Lilli Lehmann has recorded the circumstances in her memoirs, My Path through Life (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons; 1914): “As, on a particular evening, one of the millionairesses did not receive the box in which she intended to shine because another woman had anticipated her, the husband of the former [Vanderbilt] took prompt action and caused the Metropolitan Opera House to rise.”

Sunday July 6

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Enjoyed with friend
Blaustein the cooling waters
at the beach at C.I. concluding
the evening at an open air
movie at Brighton.

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Matt’s Notes

Papa and his friend Blaustein (who was also Papa’s brother in the Zionist fraternal organization Order Sons of Zion) were among half a million visitors to Coney Island on this day. The large crowd was apparently well-behaved, though one young man was arrested for violation of the Volstead Act and another broke his neck diving into shallow water. (My grandmother, who lived nearby and would have been 15 at the time, probably heard about this incident and vowed never to so much as say the word “dive” within half a mile of water for the rest of her life.)

I like to think that the “open air movie” Papa saw was something appropriate to the surfside setting like the recently-released The Sea Hawk, a rip-snorting tale of Spanish galley adventures deemed by the New York Times to be “far and away the best sea story that has ever been brought to the screen.” If first-run films weren’t available to Brighton Beach exhibitors, Papa might have seen something that had hung around for a while, like The Thief of Badgad, The Ten Commandments, or Girl Shy with Harold Lloyd.

My own memories of visits to my grandmother on Brighton Beach make it hard for me to picture the screening setup (I keep thinking that someone must have just pointed a projector at a makeshift screen near the end of the boardwalk where my grandmother and her friends would congregate at night) but I’m sure it must have been in a formal outdoor amphitheater with wooden bleachers and roving concessionaires and a regular weekend movie lineup. I wonder if the memory of this night stuck with Papa: images flickering on the screen, ferris wheel turning lazily in the distance, ocean breeze blowing cool. Did he close his eyes for a moment, think to himself that everything would be okay if he could just find some way to stay right there? Did he remember the feeling years later when he moved out to Brighton to raise his family?

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Update:

Here’s how the parking lot at Coney Island’s Dreamland looked on a crowded day (this photo was taken on July 22, 1923):

References:

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DARK HORSES READY FOR NEW CONTEST; Several Already Contending for Votes of Delegates Who May Be Freed

CONFEREES SPLIT ON PLANS; Two Reports to Be Made to Convention for Its Action. –>

Wednesday Sep 3

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Went to movies this
eve after a long absence,
as I could not stay home
all eve.

Today’s cool weather was
certainly relieving after yester-
days terrible heat, which tired
me so,

I see daily countless
beautiful girls, and I am
longing, getting older
and longing, and no
relief in sight.

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Matt’s Comments

Yishane, a regular reader, noted in a comment on August 10th that she had “been wondering these past few weeks whether Papa [will] ever finally be overjoyed in the diary…The year is more than half over!” And while I happen to know he won’t, I do find myself looking each day for signs of his emergence from the sadness he’s felt all year, some sign that he’s turning a corner. So, when he writes about how today’s “cool weather was certainly relieving,” the amateur psychologist in me wonders if he mentions it not just because temperatures dropped from the low 90’s to the low 70’s overnight but because he was feeling some sense of emotional relief.

Similarly, I’d like to believe his first movie outing in months signals a lightening mood, small step back into the world at large. Unfortunately, the rest of this entry points to an opposite conclusion: he still longs for romance, still longs for marriage, still longs for the next step in his own evolution. He goes to the movies not because he wants to be entertained, but because the emptiness of his apartment, the prospect of spending another night there by himself, is intolerable.

Papa wrote earlier this year of the escapism the movies afforded him, how they transported him to a “land of enchantment” where dreams ruled and reality had no place. Since then, though, the death of his father has triggered in him a struggle to leave his childhood and his childish daydreams behind and become more acquainted with reality. (He knows, for example, he must stop imagining the perfect life he might enjoy with each woman he meets only to be disappointed when he discovers their imperfections, yet he cannot keep himself from doing it.) Today’s return to the movies therefore has the bitter edge of a fall off the wagon, a reluctant return to the dreamworld that no longer serves him well.

Then again, sometimes a movie is just a movie, and here are a few that he might have seen that night.

  • Lily of the Dust with Pola Negri
  • The Roman spectacle Messalina
  • Little Robinson Crusoe with Jackie Coogan (I hope Papa didn’t see this at his first movie outing in months; it was panned by the New York Times)
  • The Iron Horse, John Ford’s depiction of the transcontinental railroad’s construction (Let’s hope Papa got to see this one — it’s described as “one of the finest of Western epics” in American Silent Film by William Everson, which I’m reading now.)
  • Youth For Sale
  • The Female, with Betty Compson as Dalla, an unconventional South African woman who marries into British society
  • The Man Who Came Back, geared, according to the Times, toward “ardent enthusiasts of lurid melodrama saturated with tears, sighs, drink and drugs.” Sounds good to me, even if the production did need “a lot of trimming.”
  • Flirting with Love
  • Empty Hands, a story of the Canadian wilderness directed by Victor Flemming
  • Fools in the Dark, a minstrel comedy centering on the misadventures of what the Times calls “a burnt cork negro.”
  • The Covered Wagon (this one’s been hanging around for months)
  • The Sea Hawk
  • Janice Meredith
  • The Thief of Bagdad (also enjoying a long run)
  • Monsieur Beaucaire
  • Secrets
  • Love and Glory
  • The Fire Patrol
  • Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall
  • Fools in the Dark
  • Love and Glory

Friday Sept 12

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Went to Miss S.S. a
fine type of a girl, I wish
I had some affection for
her, went with her to the
park (Prospect), and another
picture of flaming youth,
by just getting friendly
with her.

The Enchanting atmosphere
in the stillness of the night
tempted me to take her in
my arms and kissed her.

Flaming youth

Nettie made an appointment
for me without my knowledge, but
I could not keep it as I had the above, the
girl came, according to
Nettie, she is a very pretty girl,
she will come again.

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Matt’s Notes

The expression “flaming youth” sounds like one of Papa’s own romantic turns of phrase, but it’s actually a reference to the title of a racy novel and its 1923 film adaptation. The story deals with the romantic trials of Pat Fentriss who, among other things, gets involved with her deceased mother’s ex-lover. The movie “endeavors to establish that young men and maidens wild are going up in the smoke of their own cigarettes,” said Time Magazine‘s film reviewer, who nevertheless found it “rather ingenious.”

Flaming Youth became a sensation partly because its relatively unknown young lead, the proto-flapper Colleen Moore, launched an era-defining trend by appearing on screen with bobbed hair. Moore became an immediate superstar and went on to appear in dozens of films, remaining “at the vanguard of fashion’s first revolution of the 20th century as skirts rose above the knee, bosoms vanished and waistlines slid down to the hips,” according to her New York Times obituary. While her name isn’t as recognizable as those of other silent greats, it’s easy to see from the clip below why she was so appealing:

Anyway, Papa’s feelings about such modern women were subject to change. To call a woman “naive” was one of his higher compliments (though he could also use it disapprovingly) and he hated a party earlier in the year because it was full of “wild women” and “Jazz babies…none of that good type which appeals to me and [is]so rare among women.” Later on, though, he became infatuated with a woman he nicknamed “The 20th Century Girl” because he admired, among other things, her “passion for cigarette smoking,” and still later he battled turbulent, mixed feelings for his distant cousin Clara and her outspoken, seductive ways.

It would be easy to say his standards were inconsistent because, like most mortal men, he had no standards that a pretty face couldn’t derail, but he really might not have known where he stood regarding the emerging flapper phenomenon. He was certainly possessed of an old-world, formal approach to courtship, and he disliked men who took advantage of women and “did not act gentlemanlike.” Also, at age twenty-nine in an era when twenty-nine was not so young, Papa may have had trouble embracing emerging dating habits and meeting the expectations of younger women who wanted to act like Colleen Moore.

Papa mixes tenses in this paragraph so I can’t tell whether he actually kissed “Miss S.S.” in Prospect Park or if he was just tempted to, but to even think about kissing a woman he didn’t feel strongly about clearly threw him for a loop and sent him searching the popular vernacular for the right words to describe it. The expression “flaming youth” was obviously in circulation by the time Papa wrote this entry1, and the way he repeats it makes me think he was either taking it for a test run (as he did with the phrase “date her up” a few days earlier) or was genuinely amazed by the bold, permissive world in which he now found himself.

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Additional references for this post:

  • 1 – “Flaming Youth” would also become the title of a Duke Ellington song, a Kiss song, and the name of Phil Collins’ first band.
  • Colleenmoore.org – As you would imagine, this site has everything you want to know about Colleen Moore
  • Flaming Youth’s synopsis at allmovie.org. Alas, it looks like only a short piece of the film survives.

Friday Nov 14

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Home & Movies

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Matt’s Notes

Papa doesn’t say what movies he saw on this night, but some choices included:

  • The Fast Worker, a light comedy starring Reginald Denny
  • East of Broadway, the story of a young man who fails his entrance exam for the New York City police force because he thinks the Tropic of Capricorn is in the Bronx
  • The Lover of Camille, and adaptation of the play “Deburau” deemed by the New York Times to be a mere shadow of its stage production
  • The Greatest Love of All, an interesting-sounding experiment in which, it seems, the film stops in the middle and its actors appear live on stage to finish out the story. The Times liked the conceit but not the story: “This novelty is worth seeing because of the combination of actors in shadow form and in the flsh, but cuts should be made in both chapters.”
  • The Garden of Weeds, a disappointing effort, according to the Times, from James Cruz, director of the huge hit The Covered Wagon. (The Covered Wagon played for over a year in New York and was Photoplay Magazine‘s choice for best picture of 1923. I’ve never seen it, but the VHS version will soon be on its way.)
  • The Battling Orioles, a slapstick comedy written and directed by Hal Roach.
  • He Who Gets Slapped, a serious drama starring Lon Chaney and called “faultless” by the Times.
  • The Beloved Brute, a Western starring the ex-boxer Victor McLagien, who would go on to receive a best actor Academy Award for his role in 1935’s The Informer and a nomination for his supporting role in 1952’s The Quiet Man.

Other films in town included Hot Water with Harold Lloyd, Dante’s Inferno, The Ten Commandments and The Iron Horse.

Monday Nov 17

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Movies & home

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Matt’s Notes

Papa went to the movies the other day, so the list of what he might have seen hasn’t grown that much. Still, here are a couple of newcomers listed in the New York Times:

  • Forbidden Paradise, a light drama about an imaginary Eastern European royal court starring the great Pola Negri and directed by the similarly great Ernst Lubitch. I hope Papa got to see this since the accompanying musical program at the Rivoli included “On Volga’s Shores” by Pawlowsky’s Ukranian Ensemble (Papa was from the area now known as Ukraine) and the overture from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (Tchaikovsky was Papa’s favorite).
  • The Siren of Seville, described by the Times as “the latest bullfighting film” to hit the screen; was there a whole bullfighting genre in the silent era?
  • The Fast Set, directed by William C. De Mille, a well-known director and older brother of the more well-known director Cecil B. DeMille, whose hit The Ten Commandments was still enjoying a long theatrical run
  • K – The Unknown, starring Virginia Vallie, directed by Harry Pollard, and summarily dismissed by Mordaunt Hall, the Times’ movie reviewer.

Other films in town included The Midnight Express, Married Flirts, The Iron Horse, and Madonna of the Streets.

Friday Nov 28

by


Movies

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Papa doesn’t say what movie he saw, but a few new choices have come to town since the last time he went:

  • Wages of Virtue, a Foreign Legion story starring Gloria Swanson and directed by Alain Dwan. (Dwan, who made movies from the early 1900’s through 1961, provides one of the more fascinating interviews in Peter Bogdanovich’s Who The Devil Made It.) If Papa saw this film at the Rivoli, he would have particularly enjoyed the accompanying Flying Fist two-reeler because it starred the great Jewish boxer, Benny Leonard.
  • A Sainted Devil, a tale of passion and revenge starring Rudolph Valentino
  • The Price of a Party, a melodrama starring Hope Hampton and the first actor to go by the name Harrison Ford.
  • The Breath of Scandal, panned for its dullness by The New York Times
  • The Silent Accuser, starring the police dog Peter The Great, who, though “not as good looking as Strongheart or Rin-Tin-Tin,” according to the Times, still made a graceful screen star.
  • The Black Swan, a depiction of high-society intrigued dismissed as “very weird” and amateurish by the Times.