Author: David Pitts

  • The Birth of the Feature Part II: Hollywood in the Teens

    There's an eye-popping shot in the DVD release print of Cecil B. DeMille's Old Wives for New (1918). In the second reel, Elliott Dexter is fishing a mountain stream. He casts his line, and there is a brief shot of the line fluttering in the water. You see each detail clearly, from the play of light on the water's surface, to Dexter's line and lure, to individual pebbles on the bottom of the stream. It might have been shot yesterday. Because DeMille vaulted m...

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  • The Birth of the Feature Part I: Hollywood in the Teens

    The farther back one goes in film history, the more it resembles archaeology. The films themselves, the artifacts, are scant, they may exist in fragmentary form, and one is forced to generalize from a small sample. Occasionally, the artifacts come from actual excavations. The Oubliette (1914), an early Lon Chaney title, was recovered from the fill underneath a farmhouse porch in Georgia. An Even Break (1917), an Olive Thomas feature, was one of several films found in a fille...

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  • Hitchcock: The Nooks and Crannies

    As a twelve-year-old in the mid-60's, I watched whatever vintage films the networks aired (these were mostly from the mid-50's on up) and whatever aired on the matinee movie on Cleveland's local stations. Alfred Hitchcock was my favorite director. Back then, station libraries had very few films predating WWII, and for years Saboteur (1942) was the earliest Hitchcock I knew. I watched it whenever it ran, if I didn't have to be in school, and after repeated viewings I anticipated spec...

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  • Dying is Easy - Comedy is Hard

    Dying is easy – comedy is hard. This show biz byword has been around for ages, but no one knows who said it first. It has been attributed to Donald Crisp and to Edmund Gwenn on his deathbed, but it may go back to some unsung vaudeville comic. Its meaning is clear, and comic actors often insist that comedy is harder to play tha...

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  • Now That's Acting!

    Classic Films archive a century of acting styles. Pick and choose among the decades of cinema and you can see the last holdovers of declamatory stage acting; camera-oriented emoting in both flamboyant (John Gilbert) and restrained (Buster Keaton) modes; the talkie era’s celebration of the vernacular; the Group Theatre era of realistic acting and the common man (John Garfield);...

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  • The Casting Trampoline Part II: Might-Have-Beens (1940-1960)

    Here is a second selection of casting tales from Hollywood history. As before, the caveat holds that much of what passes as Hollywood history is gossip, and when it comes to casting deals, the story may be clouded by hearsay, whimsy, and star egos. Film buffs love these stories; we play the altered movies in our heads. Who has not loved Olivia De Havilland as Melanie, the decent, nurturing...

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  • The Casting Trampoline Part I: Might-Have-Beens (1927-1939)

    Fact or fiction: Groucho Marx was seriously considered for the part of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.  Try googling that.  You will receive an education in the collision of fact, distortion, half-truth, and mythologizing that makes Hollywood history.  You’ll find websites clamoring to give you the Groucho/Rhett connection.  Skim a little for the first limitation on the claim:  apparent...

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  • Character Actors: The Women

    A previous column saluted the great male character actors – this month, a look at the actresses who specialized in supporting roles in vintage films: the mothers, grandmothers, and matrons; landladies, secretaries, maids, and nurses; spinsters, gossips, harridans, and eccentrics; bad girls, earth mothers, and iron-willed women.  The films of the studio era are a museum of our images of women, both traditional and transitional. Lest this so...

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  • Weird Old Uncle Oscar: Academy Award Anomalies

    Second guessing the Oscars comes naturally to film buffs. It could hardly be otherwise. To expect that a short list of nominees could adequately represent the rich field of film production is impossible at the outset. This was more obvious at the peak of the studio era than it is today. 

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  • Hollywood Valentines: Romantic Films of the Studio Era

    In 1896 two stage actors, May Irwin and John C. Rice, sat for Thomas Edison's motion picture camera and enacted The Kiss. It was a 22-second film loop and it is said, perhaps apocryphally, to be the first film shown on a screen to a paying audience. It also offended some viewers, for, although it recreated an embrace from 'The Widow Jones', which Irwin and Rice had done onstage, the projected image made it uncomfortably intimate. To our eyes the only jarring aspect is that the actors, who wer...

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