Tag Archives: Sound film

Kathleen Loock’s Seminar on Sound remakes of Silent Film, 1st of April, 2-4pm, KSR 4

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We are very pleased to welcome Kathleen Loock to Kent. Kathleen has very kindly provided the following contextual information about her work which she will speak to us about in more detail on the 1st of April, 2-4 pm, in Keynes Seminar Room 4:

Sound Memories: “Talker Remakes,” Paratexts, and Cinematic (Self-)Historicization

 MPN_19301907_Greta Garbo Cartoon (2)

(The above is from Motion Picture News, 19th of July, 1930, p. 41).

During the transition to sound and throughout the 1930s, Hollywood remade a great number of former silent hits as talkies. Remaking was an established practice by that time, but since the coming of sound, cinema attendance had decisively increased with between 80 and 90 million Americans going to see double features every week in theaters that remained open all year long. Until the early 1940s, studios produced from 400 to 800 films each year, and recycling old properties was both a way to meet the public demand for talkies when it was difficult to find fresh stories, and to encourage return visits to the cinemas with tried and proven material. Hollywood movies had a “short shelf-life” at the time. They were essentially ephemeral commodities—quickly outdated and forgotten unless they were remade. In this sense, “talker remakes” replaced predecessors from the days of silent cinema with updated sound versions, yet in doing so they also preserved popular narratives for future media generations. In fact, they constructed these media generations and prompted them to recognize themselves as such in the ways their versions differed from earlier renditions of the same story. “Talker remakes” and the various paratexts that surrounded them evoked the memory of silent films as something of the past and framed the transition to sound as a narrative of technological progress. Thus, they made the historic development of cinema as a technological medium visible, and ultimately helped to construct and communicate a cinematic past and archive.

For more information on Kathleen’s work visit her staff page at Freie Universitat Berlin: http://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/en/faculty/culture/persons/team/Loock/

Melodrama Screening and Discussion, 16th October, Keynes Seminar Room 6, 4-7pm

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All are welcome to attend the second of this term’s screening and discussion sessions which will take place on the 16th of October in Keynes Seminar Room 6, from 4pm to 7pm.

We will be screening Lies’ choice: Rain (1932, Lewis Milestone, 94 mins)

Lies has very kindly provided the following introduction:

Joan Crawford and Rain

Rain, based on W. Somerset Maugham’s short story Miss Sadie Thompson, deals with the adventures of a group of travelers who are temporarily stranded on the South Pacific island of Pago Pago. As young prostitute Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford), wanted in America for a crime that is never named, spends her time socializing with the US marines posted on the island, she becomes a thorn in the eye of fanatical preacher Alfred Davidson (Walter Huston), who decides she needs salvation.

               Rain Crawford Although Joan Crawford was one of the key box office stars for the year 1932, the film was not a major hit at the time; Variety wrote that “It turns out to be a mistake to have assigned the Sadie Thompson role to Miss Crawford. It shows her off unfavorably. The dramatic significance of it all is beyond her range.” Motion Picture was kinder and pointed out that “a picture with such a long stage and screen history behind it starts with a handicap of inevitable comparisons”, calling Crawford “neither the greatest ‘Sadie Thompson’ of theatrical history, nor the worst by any means”. This review touches upon an important consideration in terms of Rain as a film, which is the fact that the story had previously been made into a play (1923) and into a silent film (1928, as Sadie Thompson). It would also be remade in 1953 with Rita Hayworth in the title role as Miss Sadie Thompson.

Crawford herself appears to have been on Variety’s side, and said in later years that she hoped “they burn every print of this turkey that is in existence”. She blamed the film’s issues on its writer and director, as well as on her younger self, who “took the bull by the horns and did my own Sadie Thompson. I was wrong every scene of the way”[1]. Despite this judgment even by its star, however, the film is one of Joan Crawford’s better-remembered early performances today.

Since both Of Human Bondage and Rain were written by the same author and made, as films, around the same time, they lend themselves quite well to a comparison of the performances and stardom of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. These two stars have frequently been grouped together as similar types – both often playing, as Basinger puts it, “exaggerated”, extraordinary women, particularly in their later careers[2] – yet have also often been contrasted with each other as “the actress” (Davis) and “the star” (Crawford).

To watch (or re-watch) Crawford in Rain: http://archive.org/details/rain1932

Link to the original short story:

http://maugham.classicauthors.net/Rain/

Link to the Swanson film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWtW_RqSwAk&list=PL272B5585907AB161

Connected to last week’s question on radio versus film melodrama, how might melodramatic performance differ from silent to sound film? Is silent film, with its reliance on gesture and facial expression, particularly suited to the genre?

[1] Roy Newquist, Conversations with Joan Crawford, p. 76

[2] Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960, p. 167

Do join us if you can, for what promises to be a very interesting and enjoyable film.