There’s a serial killer murdering the blondes of London, but the movie is more concerned with showing us all the media technologies of the time (telegraph, newspaper, radio, electric billboards). Meanwhile after a performance of “Golden Curls,” the few performers who weren’t wearing wigs are worried about their walk home. Good music by Neil Brand, and I love the construction paper graphics on the intertitles.

Ivor Novello arrives, pale and scarved, at a boarding house, acting like a dramatic ghost while renting a room, and is assumed to be the killer so everything he picks up is implied to be a possible murder weapon. He likes local girl Daisy, which annoys her hanger-on Joe. First the landlady then the cops go snooping through Ivor’s stuff, then the real killer is caught off-camera but not before jealous Joe gets an angry mob to beat Ivor half to death.

Killer calling card:

British people must spend 15% of their day standing in shocked silence after something mildly disagreeable happened. Novello’s legacy: he would be portrayed ninety-some years later by the guy who also played young Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia 2.

POV: Ivor Novello wants to kiss you

The Unchanging Sea (1910)

Multi-generational romance and amnesiac drama. The actors are phony from the second they step onscreen, but there are long shots of people looking away from camera staring at the sea, trying to match the tone of the poem they’re adapting, which makes up for the rest. The not-actually-widow is the future Mrs. Griffith, their daughter grows up to be Mary Pickford.


A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909)

The reformation comes from taking his daughter to a play where he sees himself in the lead character – a drunk guy with enabler friends who’s violent with his family. The spectator returns home and vows to give up liquor immediately, instead smoking a giant pipe in the face of his young child. This couple is the same actors as the fishing couple, sans Pickford.

getting really into the play:


The Mountaineer’s Honor (1909)

Is he a mountaineer because he wears high boots with his suit and tie? That’s no kind of costume to go mountaineering in. Pickford is playing teenaged, sneaking away from family gatherings to hang out with this guy. Her brother chases the guy into town, shoots him and some passer-by. The law chases the brother to the house, catches him, says he’ll be hanged, so mum shoots her son dead (death before dishonor). Continuity between shots is maintained by having actors always point where they came from, then point where they’re going next.

autographed still of Pickford pointing to where she’s going next:


Enoch Arden (1911)

Enoch and Annie go home after their wedding, a title card says “later” and now they have three kids. Enoch goes to sea and might never return. Movie gets a lotta mileage out of people standing on the beach in front of crashing waves. Homely Philip pines after Annie and she finally agrees to marry him after Enoch has been lost at sea for a decade, but we’ve seen The Unchanging Sea and know that anything is possible. Sure enough, Enoch gets home after years on a desert island, sees his wife with Philip, then crawls away and dies. Remade a few years later with Lillian Gish (and Griffith in the cast), then twice in 1940, as Too Many Husbands and My Favorite Wife.

Island Enoch:


The Painted Lady (1912)

More like the Unpainted Lady, our heroine refuses to wear makeup to impress the boys, so she’s unpopular. When some mustache guy finally goes for her, he was apparently only trying to get to her whitebeard father’s money, and she shoots him when he breaks into the house. In the aftermath, she does put on makeup, goes mad, and dies, not necessarily in that order. She was Blanche Sweet, and her dad was later in a Bela Lugosi movie called Murder by Television.

ice cream festival of wicked temptation:


The Mothering Heart (1913)

Griffith’s concerns seem entirely domestic in these movies. Men go off to work – work where? Doing what? It doesn’t matter. Lillian Gish’s husband gets rich, somehow, and they start going to awful rich-person gathering places, where The Idle Woman starts pursuing the husband. Lillian catches on to the shenanigans and leaves him, goes to her mom’s and has a baby, which gets sick and dies. Meanwhile, The Idle Woman tires of the husband/dad and picks up a new guy. What’s the moral here?

I’ve got no handy documentary on Chomon like I did with Alice Guy, just watching some films. I’d only previously seen The Golden Beetle – these all turned out to be less colorful and more coherent.


Electric Current (1906)

Pretty good one-minute gag film. A couple steals from the grocer, has a picnic then goes back for more, but the grocer has rigged his wares to the electric lights. When they grab the food they’re paralyzed from electricity – and so are the cops who arrive to arrest the thieves, so they arrest the grocer instead.


Kiriki, Japanese Acrobats (1907)

Splendid gravity-defying stunts, using the same which-way-is-up technique as Massive Attack’s “Protection” video. The actors really sell it, trembling and straining in their positions.


En Avant La Musique (1907)

If we’re meant to believe that elite Japanese acrobats have developed incredible skills of strength and balance, this one tosses believability out the window. Just a Mr. B Natural-type conductor transforming the musicians into musical notation and miniaturized song-slaves.


The Diabolical Pickpocket (1908)

A liquid-metal T-1000 criminal escapes two clueless cops by making a mockery of spacetime physics.
Looks like this was part of a series about uncatchable thieves in checkered suits, along with The Invisible Thief and Slippery Jim.


The Electric Hotel (1908)

Before people knew what electricity could do, this imagines a fully automated hotel. Guests get a small electric switchboard and accompanying instruction manual. Each switch causes a whirl of stop-motion – shoe-shining, hair-cutting, suitcase-unpacking. One writes letters home using AI. I was waiting for something to go comically, catastrophically wrong, but all the tech works properly, until a drunken basement employee starts throwing switches haphazardly and all the hotel’s objects violently revolt against their masters.


Legend of a Ghost (1908)

At 14 minutes this is over twice the length of the others, a de Chomon epic. Old fashioned set building and fireworks create a hellscape of dancing demons, or maybe tortured souls, or reveling partiers – in the cavernous set I can’t make out faces. Yeah, it’s either a Halloween parade float or the beginning of the apocalypse, maybe the point is not to know. Then we got hula-girl vikings in a Meliesian underwater scene? An anarchist blows up the parade float and we’re sent to heaven for a minute. It’s almost halfway through the movie before the grim reaper provides some transformative camera tricks, then back to cavorting with fireworks and costumes. The death parade reaches its cavernous destination and the participants celebrate with a scythe dance (The Seventh Seal was a remake of this). But the movie’s not over – the viking frog queen’s servants do an involved dance with the lizard people, layers upon layers. Morning comes and everyone lays dead, except for Death Himself, who transforms into a fancyman. Certainly more expensive than the shorter films, not necessarily more fun to watch.

A pure info-dump doc – I took no pleasure in watching, though I instantly flagged the narrator as Jodie Foster. Very busy visuals, the audio chopped half to death. I noted one interview with especially yucky sound editing: Pamela Green… the movie’s own director! Just re-record! Motion graphics, desktop cinema stuff and zoom calls. I learned what I needed to know about Alice, anyway – she hired both Lois Weber and Louis Feuillade. She had her own studio until Edison’s patent racket drove the filmmaking world from NJ to CA. Studio fire, divorce, and investment problems all hit at once in 1918, ending her cinema career. Gotta give it up for the outstanding location scout sequence where they superimpose her films onto their present day locations, and good work weaving her post-career 1920s-40s correspondences with the filmmaker digging up a 1957 interview.

Then I attempted to enjoy some Alice Guy films…


Falling Leaves (1912)

String music by Tamar Muskal was far more engaging than the movie, a standard-looking drama with its one famous plot point, young girl tying leaves onto the trees after hearing her sister will be dead of consumption before the leaves have fallen. A passerby sees this behavior and announces the following.


Cupid and the Comet (1911)

A silly crossdressing comedy, everyone gesticulating wildly. The doc got its title from Alice Guy’s studio motto: “Be Natural” – but there’s none of that here.


The Consequences of Feminism (1906)

Comedy portraying a woke society where women hang out and drink and are sexual predators while the men iron and watch the children and make themselves pretty. Big modern music by Max Knoth, I liked it.


A Story Well Spun (1906)

Dude crawls into a barrel and a prankster pushes it downhill, causing much chaos. Later remade as 2000 Maniacs. Hope the editor got in trouble for leaving in those couple frames of the stagehand crouching behind the barrel.


On the Barricade (1907)

The barricade doesn’t hold for two seconds before the military run right over it and execute its constructors. Some kid who excitedly joined the battle claims he’s not a combatant, the soldiers let him go home, then he guiltily returns ands demands to be executed, but his mom protests and he’s spared a second time, how embarrassing. Somewhat shorter than the other movie I’ve seen about the Paris Commune.

After reading Beatrice Loayza’s essay for the new box set, I had to watch an Akerman movie. But I cannot tolerate silence in a home screening, so, per the artist’s original intent, I made a playlist with Colleen then Titan to Tachyons then Tomeka Reid Quartet.

Static camera, hanging around in the hotel lobby and hallways and especially elevators, even getting into a couple rooms. Then back to the hallways… long static takes of hallways. Then movement! Dolly up a hallway, looking out the window at NYC, impressive jump cut from night to day, back up and down the hallway. Movie ends on the roof, slow rotation looking out at the city, the movement reminding of La Chambre. Akerman had moved to NYC and made these films with DP Babette Mangolte, both artists influenced by Michael Snow, then Mangolte shot Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew the following year.

Katy’s out of town and there’s a new Criterion blu-ray, so we’re having a Tod Browning Halloween.


The Exquisite Thief (1919)

Fragment of a lost film, found in Dawson City. A carnival barker turned blackface comedian turned melodrama film director, Browning had made six features before teaming up with the exquisite Priscilla Dean for a successful run. Here she is robbing everyone at a fancy dinner party before making her getaway. Her chauffeur steals Lord Chesterton’s car, accidentally also stealing the Lord (Thurston Hall, later a Karloff victim in The Black Room). It’s implied that the cops are about to find dirt on our Lord just as he’s turning the tables on his captor, but here the fragment ends.

How will Lord Chesterton get outta this mess:


Outside The Law (1920)

Now Priscilla Dean is a reformed criminal, hanging out with her dad Madden at Chang Low’s bazaar in SF Chinatown. Gangster Lon Chaney shoots a cop while Chinese Lon Chaney(!) suspects a plot and tries to help, getting Madden arrested. The dad was in some major Griffith films, “Chang Low” is a white guy from Richmond VA who also played “Lu Chung” in an Anna May Wong movie.

Priscilla, her dad, Chinese Chaney, Chang Low:

There’s to be a heist, and the cops, the Chaney gang and the girl are all playing different angles. Priscilla gets away with Safecracker Bill, and their plan is to hang out in his apartment… for how long? Months? They invite over an annoying neighbor kid (Stanley Goethals died in 2000, and might well have seen The Matrix or the Matthew Broderick Godzilla) and let him play with a hatchet.

Sweet Priscilla goes outside the law:

Safecracker Bill is Wheeler Oakman of some very silly looking early-’40s Bela Lugosi films. Chaney surprises them and they try to keep him from finding the jewels. But they’ve both fallen for the annoying kid, and his shredded kite out the window provides a christly vision convincing the girl to go straight. The last couple reels of the film are as damaged as the kite – there’s a half hour of good movie in here within the sappy script. Browning would make a different crime film a decade later using the same title.

Non-Chinese Chaney, Priscilla, Safecracker Bill:


The Mystic (1925)

In the time since Outside the Law, Browning made a bunch more Priscilla Dean pictures and Unholy Three. Zazarek, his assistant knife thrower Anton, and daughter Zara are traveling and being tailed by a Regular Looking Normally Dressed Man, who stands out among the loonies and drunks that are their usual clientele. When they finally corner him, he’s an investor offering to bring them to the States to do their act for wealthy people.

In their U.S. debut, police pre-inspect the room as if this is a crime and not a performance, which seems silly until it turns out he money man’s plan isn’t to get performance money from rich patrons but ghostly blackmail/trickery with Mystic Zara. The money man begins to fall for cute, round-nosed rich lady Doris (she was in Princess Nicotine in 1909 and lived long enough that she might’ve watched Edward Scissorhands). The team goes after her “guardian” Bradshaw, who’s working with the cops. Schemers turn on each other and it ends in a situation I’d imagined during Outside the Law – if the people who say they were gonna give back the stolen goods get nabbed before they can, there’s no way to prove good intent. The money man didn’t have good intent after all when it comes to the crimes, but he does follow the deported family to Hungary to find Zara, so that’s something.

Glad I stuck with the new Dean Hurley score instead of playing my own thing, enjoyed the foley effects. They seem like pretty minor actors. The money man appeared in Stella Maris with Mary Pickford, the knife thrower had been in The Big Parade, the father figure showed up in small parts everywhere, and Aileen “Zara” Pringle was a short-lived star. I thought there should be more knife throwing.


London After Midnight (1927)

Browning’s lost follow-up to The Unknown, which I watched out of order in its TCM reconstruction from titles and stills. Halloweeny visuals, with a mad spookyfaced Lon Chaney renting a house, or something. The music was bad so I put on Secret Chiefs – but The Book Beriah, not Horrorthon. Unfortunately I swung too far in the other direction, now the music is 100 times better than the “movie,” and all the panning across still photos is tiresome so I’m dropping this 48-min program halfway through.


The Unknown (1927)

Opens at Circus Zanzi (this guy and Z names), where all the gypsy circus gals lust after Malabar the Mighty. This is a terrific tragedy which I’ve watched before on TCM, but does it count as tragedy if the guy who loses the girl is actually evil? Lon Chaney is sweet on Zanzi’s daughter, who fears being touched, so the armless wonder Lon is a perfect confidante. But of course Lon has arms, he’s just hiding them for his act, and he strangles her dad after being discovered.

Lon foot-toasting Cojo:

Lon’s buddy Cojo says you can’t marry the girl or she’ll find out you have arms, so Lon blackmails a doctor with a dark past into arm-removal surgery. After all, he can light and smoke a cigarette with his feet, and the girl doesn’t know he murdered her dad, what could go wrong? But while he’s away in recovery she decides she’s not afraid to be touched after all, falling into the strong arms of Malabar. Even Cojo is a shitty friend, taunting Lon about his lack of arms. Crazed Lon tries to sabotage a strongman stunt and gets horse-stomped to death in the commotion.

Typical piano score, after 10 minutes I swapped out for Tortoise’s Remixed, which I’ve never appreciated on its own but as a movie score it’s fantastic. Zanzi was in Chaney’s Hunchback and Malabar was Christine’s beau in Chaney’s Phantom. The girl Joan Crawford went on to some fame in the sound era. Between The Mystic and Unknown/London, Browning and Chaney made The Blackbird and the half-surviving Road to Mandalay, and Browning went back to “Hungary” for The Show.

Our second Dupont movie after Variety. Rather than Anvil/Alloy we went with the music on the blu-ray, which was fine. After a talkie introduction scene, simply terrible, awkwardly tacked on (starring John Longden who I just saw in Quatermass 2) we get a proper silent film with glamorous costumes and camera moves. The setup is that Valentine (Claudette’s fiancé in It Happened One Night) runs a successful club with star dancers Victor (Hitchcock’s Blackmail) and Mabel (star of The Devil Dancer two years earlier), then after a falling out, the dancers are replaced with kitchen worker Anna May Wong, a vast improvement. Tensions build in the second half – Mabel is jealous that Valentine is sweet on Anna, and maybe murders her, but in the ensuing court drama we learn that Anna’s boy Jim (not her brother, as she’s told people) did the crime. Smooth little drama, mostly noteworthy for its Anna May content.

AKA Kimmy Schmidt’s War of the Worlds. Aliens invade Earth in search of the prettiest, perkiest girl with the most terrible trauma, and they find Kaitlyn Dever (the one who isn’t Beanie in Booksmart). A typical grey (but with fingers for toes, like Sophie Okonedo in Aeon Flux) poltergeists her house, attacking her with doors and freaking out the electricity, until she manages to stab it in the head with one of her Beetlejuice-town model buildings.

The gimmick, a good one, is that Kaitlyn never speaks – she has no friends, and doesn’t constantly talk to herself or her birds like I do – but the aliens chatter in their own language (so saying the movie has no dialogue is inaccurate). She tries to escape the town but is chased off the bus by bodysnatched humans, so returns to deal with a variety pack of aliens (the short mean one, the one with absurdly long limbs, etc) on her own turf, happily ending up the sole unbrainwashed person in town.

Duffield made the exploding-teens movie Spontaneous, and his DP did a bunch of Black Mirror and one of the Evil Dead remakes. Critics raved: “would have absolutely slayed in theaters if not for Disney’s choice to dump it straight to Hulu.”

Salome (1973)

Girl finds a mostly-nude boy in the catacombs, they start making out but he strangles her. The vibe is a murkier, cultier Jean Rollin, with light and fog effects so heavy they turn the actors into abstract imagery. It’s content to roll along in its slow dreamy way without getting caught up in story – I suppose if you’re familiar with the Oscar Wilde play you can follow along but I’m going by a few year-old memory of the Ken Russell version. Music sounds newer than 1973, like Coil Concrete – aha, this must’ve been recorded for the late 1990s home video release, which means I am free to listen to Secret Chiefs 3’s Horrorthon during the next film.


The Forbidden (1978)

Horrorthon mentions Faust in the dialogue clips, and if you skip the “preview” first track and start the album with the movie, the circus music that plays when the nude man (Barker?!) starts dancing around is very funny. Barker made these films and his theatrical works before writing the Books of Blood – I always thought of him as a novelist who came to filmmaking late, but I was off. This has the most nudity in any Faust film outside the pornography realm. The image processed in negative, surfaces seem to glow. The opening mathematica and later full-body tattooing recall Book of Blood, and rotating light over pins/nails predict Pinhead and Leviathan at once.