| Dan Does Road
Movies
Note: Move the mouse over each picture to see the title |
Ah, the road of life is paved with many stumbling blocks. On the week of February 26, he fooled all but two people (Jeff Downs and John Barker), who were the only ones to master the maze and come out unfazed.
|
|
 
|
A new old star has entered Dan's Movie Universe, and her name is Mary Pickford. A name everyone recognizes, but how many of you have even seen one of her films? From the top picture, would you even have guessed that the actress was Mary Pickford? As noted on the Silents Majority website and elsewhere, Mary's films have not been widely available in a digital format, until recently. Perhaps the film restorers and archivists have spent too much time on Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Lillian Gish. After reading Jeanine Basinger's book, Silent Stars, I'm developing a new appreciation for this engagingly funny silent film legend. I scanned two photos from Prof. Basinger's book. I hope she won't mind. I did a quick browse through Raymond Lee's The Films of Mary Pickford. This book has a photo of Mary with a matching hairdo, but not the matching outfit. It is conceivable that the photos in Kevin Brownlow's Mary Pickford Rediscovered more closely match the screen shot. Now here's where I got sidetracked in identifying this movie. In the screen shot, the actress looks Italian, and the actor looks Jewish. Thus, the movie was directed by either Woody Fellini or Federico Allen. But Radio Days is in widescreen format and Zelig is not a street name. La Strada just means road. Yuck, I ran out of possiblities. Next, we target the movie from the slum - ghetto - lower east side viewpoint. The candidates, Hester Street, The Shop on Main Street, and The Bowery, just do not fit. Screen World is handy in eliminating the first two choices. This left me with a brute force search for titles which include the words: road, street, avenue, boulevard, rue, route, highway, lane, broadway, square, piazza, etc. Unfortunately, I forgot alley. The best guess I could come up with was Big Deal on Madonna Street. In less than 5 minutes of viewing, this guess was also brutally eliminated. As the quiz deadline approached, I ran out of time to scan one of my favorite books on early movies, i.e., Robert K. Klepper's Silent Films, 1877-1996. Mr. Klepper is one the foremost authorities on the subject, and his book is the one to read if you want to learn about silent films which have yet to be reviewed on any of the web's leading movie sites (TV Guide, IMDB, and Silents Majority). I noticed that Amazon.com also has a good descriptive review of the movie. As a last resort, you can also consult Facets for a quick summary of a film no one else has bothered to review yet. |
|
Nobody looks like Tim Robbins, so to guess this movie, you need to find a 2.35:1 aspect ratio film that he stars in, and in which he plays someone with a secret past. Why else would the quizmaster show you a college yearbook photo? Just use Ken Cranes to do an actor search, and voila, there are only three movies (in current DVD/LD video production), with the proper aspect ratio. Ready to Wear is a loser from the get-go since Dan would never do such a movie. Robert Altman's Short Cuts does not fit the bill, plot-wise. The best reason to guess Arlington Road is that Dan has already telegraphed the name of the movie in Dan's Recent Film Impressions. |
|
Even if you didn't recognize Gloria Swanson in the foreground, you should know Erich von Stroheim, the man who plays her butler and former husband/director in the movie, Sunset Blvd. You eliminate other films like Friends and Lovers, Grand Illusion, etc., strictly by background. This leaves us with Sunset Blvd, which you verify by checking Lawrence J. Quirk's, The Films of Gloria Swanson, published by Citadel Press. |
|
Come and meet, those dancing feet ... On the avenue I'm taking you to, 42nd Street. Technically, the avenue they refer to is Broadway, the cross-street is 42nd St., and the intersection is Times Square. This is all irrelevant since the movie was basically shot on a Hollywood soundstage. (The above tune is not from the same number as the shot, but it's the one that sticks in your head like an ad jingle.) To guess this film, you recognize the face of Dick Powell, and identify the choreographer as Busby Berkeley. You have to know there is a street name in the title, and this limits the possibilities to just one film (42nd Street). Broadway Gondolier and On the Avenue do not involve Berkeley and are not available on LD. Luckily for me, the movie was not Broadway Melody or any of its variants, which were choreographed by Berkeley, but did not star Powell. Among the hard-to-find movies, don't forget Berkeley's spectacular color film, The Gang's All Here (1943). I'm sure the quizmaster owns this film on Laserdisc, and is waiting to spring it on everyone some day. Dan says the above shot is also featured on the Busby Berkeley laserdisc (chapter 2, Young and Healthy). Thus, if you're as cheap and poor as I am, you'll keep a copy of this disc as a handy reference to Mr. Berkeley's impressive directorial & choreographic efforts. Last summer, I employed the disc to figure out a scene from Gold Diggers of 1933, which was shown as a movie-in-a-movie in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. |