#William M. Conselman | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

byneddiedingo · 9 months

Text

Lillian Gish at MGM

John Gilbert and Lillian Gish in La Bohème (King Vidor, 1926)

La Bohème (King Vidor, 1926)

Cast: Lillian Gish, John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, George Hassell, Roy D'Arcy, Edward Everett Horton, Karl Dane, Mathilde Comont, Gino Corrado, Eugene Pouyet. Screenplay: Frédérique De Grésac; titles: William M. Conselman, Ruth Cummings; based on a novel by Henri Murger and an opera libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Cinematography: Henrik Sartov. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, A. Arnold Gillespie. Costume design: Erté. Film editing: Hugh Wynn.

Bohème without Puccini, except for a few themes from the opera interpolated into the piano accompaniment for some contemporary prints. The screenplay by Frédérique (billed as Fred) De Grésac is said to be "suggested by Life in the Latin Quarter" by Henri Murger, which is also the source of the opera libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. But the librettists took liberties with Murger, combining several characters and incidents, that are copied in the movie, so it's pretty clear that De Grésac paid at least as much attention to the opera as he did to Murger. It's very much a vehicle for Lillian Gish, making her debut at MGM. She wanted John Gilbert to play Rodolphe to her Mimi, but sometimes seems to be playing an anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better game with her co-star. There is, for example, a scene in which Gilbert acts out the proposed ending to the play he is writing, with much swashbuckling. Then, a few scenes later, Gish acts it out again with similar verve for a potential backer for the play. Their courtship is a surprisingly hyperactive one, particularly in the scene in which they and their fellow bohemians go on a picnic that involves much running about. And Gish is not content to die calmly: On hearing that she won't live through the night, she makes a mad dash across Paris to be reunited with her lover, at one point allowing herself to be dragged along the streets while hanging onto the back of a horse-cart. Gilbert poses with feet apart and arms akimbo much too often, and the starving bohemians are given to much dashing and dancing. (Among them is the endearing and enduring Edward Everett Horton as Colline.) It's all a bit too much, and I have a feeling that the print I saw shown at the wrong speed, giving it that herky-jerky quality we used to attribute to silent films before experts corrected the speed at which they should be projected. The costumes are by the celebrated designer Erté, who is said to have had so much trouble working with Gish that he gave up designing for Hollywood.

Lars Hanson and Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström, 1926)

The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström, 1926)

Cast: Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson, Henry B. Walthall, Karl Dane, William H. Tooker, Marcelle Corday, Fred Herzog, Jules Cowles, Mary Hawes, Joyce Coad, James A. Marcus. Screenplay: Frances Marion, based on a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Cinematography: Henrik Sartov. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Sidney Ullman. Film editing: Hugh Wynn.

I'm pretty sure that any high school students who think they can get by watching Frances Marion's adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter instead of reading it are likely to be disappointed in English class. That said, no film version is going to reproduce the depth of characterization, the symbolic force, or the intellectual density of Hawthorne, so we should be grateful for what this one does give us: one of Lillian Gish's greatest performances. This was Gish's second film for MGM, after La Bohème, and it suggests that her talents were better suited to a contemplative director like Victor Sjöström -- or Seastrom, as MGM insisted on anglicizing his name -- than to King Vidor's more action-oriented style. If her Mimi in La Bohème was disturbingly hyperactive, her Hester Prynne is a marvel of understated acting. She uses her eyes and mouth and the tilt of her chin to convey a miraculous range of emotions, from stubbornness to fear, from strength to frailty. It's a pity that her Dimmesdale, Lars Hanson, doesn't match her in subtlety. He's more successful in this regard in their 1928 collaboration The Wind, which was also directed by Sjöström.

#The Scarlet Letter #Victor Sjöström #Lars Hanson #Lillian Gish #La Bohème #King Vidor #John Gilbert

5 notes · View notes

dweemeister · 4 years

Photo

The Little Colonel (1935)

Whenever I watch older films with black actors in subservient roles, I have a habit of pausing the film, and scrolling through their filmography. For the African-American actors and actresses that worked at Hollywood’s major studios before the emergence of Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Dorothy Dandridge in the 1950s, they toiled in stereotypical roles that read repetitively – servant, maid, busboy, slave, villager, savage, African chief. Like many black moviegoers in the early twentieth century, I am glad these mostly-unknown actors found work, but am sick to see the buffoonish, stereotype-adhering characters they play on screen (this raises questions about whether no representation or bad representation is better, but that is for another day).

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was the highest-paid black entertainer of the 1930s: a masterful tap dancer (tap dancing is an innovation from the minstrel show, where Robinson’s career began) idolized by Fred Astaire, the Nicholas Brothers, and Gene Kelly. His birthday, May 25, is National Tap Dance Day. Robinson’s vaudeville and Broadway career had long made him a national celebrity, and Hollywood studios looked to procure his services for bit and supporting roles. While in Hollywood, he quickly learned that he could not escape the restrictions Hollywood executives had set for non-white actors – casting directors, whether by a lack of imagination or naked racism or somewhere in between, could not envision black actors beyond certain roles.

Another American cultural fixture in the 1930s was an adorable, curly-haired girl named Shirley Temple. Months before its merger with Twentieth Century Pictures, Fox Film Corporation cast Robinson in a Shirley Temple picture, The Little Colonel. Shirley Temple movies often relegated A-list actors to supporting roles – disgruntling those actors to some extent, but mollifying their frustration with the dependable profits made at the box office. Seen today, The Little Colonel is problematic in its depiction of race relations and portrayal of its black characters. And yet, it is also groundbreaking. The film features the first interracial dance couple in American film history, and spawned a close intergenerational friendship between Temple and Robinson that lasted until the latter’s death.

It is the early 1870s in Kentucky, and life has changed little since the American Civil War ended. White landowners retain their plantations and black subordinates. Those subordinates are no longer slaves, but racially-coded relations remain. Though Kentucky remained in the Union, there are numerous veterans and supporters of the defeated Confederacy within its borders, including Colonel Lloyd (Lionel Barrymore). The colonel has learned that his daughter, Elizabeth Lloyd (Evelyn Venable), has married a Yankee, Jack Sherman (John Lodge). Furious, the Colonel disowns Elizabeth – forcing her and Jack, an American soldier, to accept a posting in the West. There, they raise a girl, Lloyd Sherman (Temple), before moving back to Kentucky six years later. Before leaving the fort with her parents, Lloyd, the outfit’s darling, is made an honorary colonel of the United States Army. Elizabeth, Jack, little Lloyd, and housekeeper Becky “Mom Beck” Porter (Hattie McDaniel) settle in a household near Colonel Lloyd’s plantation without his knowledge. Colonel Lloyd eventually learns that the happy-go-lucky rapscallion bothering him and his head servant Walker (Robinson) is his granddaughter, and continues to exile Elizabeth and Jack from his life.

The Little Colonel, shown in black-and-white, ends with a brief two-strip Technicolor scene (Walt Disney’s monopoly on three-strip Technicolor would end later that year) – a “pink party” that marked the only time Shirley Temple wore makeup in a Fox film.

Adapted from Annie Fellows Johnston’s novel of the same name by screenwriter William M. Conselman (several Shirley Temple films, including 1934’s Bright Eyes and 1936’s Stowaway) and journeyman director David Butler (another Shirley Temple regular, 1942’s Road to Morocco), The Little Colonel sees Temple play a hallmark of her characters: a precocious troublemaker whose very charm melts hearts and inspires others to do what is just, despite their personal prejudices and historical biases. Only if the real world could be like that, audiences must have thought – packing movie theaters to see escapist fare like this, to forget momentarily the Great Depression. Like any Shirley Temple picture, the film is at its best when it concentrates on its young star. Most of the G-rated humor on display is gentle, ribbing others’ sense of self-importance and their absurd, absolutist behavior (especially Barrymore’s Colonel Lloyd, who looks as if he is about to sell me fast food served in a red-and-white tub). Not even little Lloyd is spared:

LLOYD SHERMAN: Aren’t papas supposed to love their little girls? MOM BECK: Yes, honey, they should. LLOYD SHERMAN: It seems might funny to me. MOM BECK: It’s ‘cause all the Lloyds are stubborn. The old colonel is, your mama is, and you is. LLOYD SHERMAN: I’m not stubborn! Don’t you call me that! MOM BECK: Don’t you stomp your foot at me. That don’t change it, that just proves it!

Elsewhere, too much of The Little Colonel’s humor is premised in racial stereotyping. That Lloyd Sherman befriends two black children in May Lily (Avonne Jackson) and Henry Clay (Nyanza Potts) might be enough to spark outrage among millions of American moviegoers in the 1930s. As much as this decision should be commended, that commendation is tempered by their appearance – inspired by minstrel shows – and by the fact they are eating watermelon in several scenes. Barrymore’s Colonel Lloyd is not only a misanthrope, but a racist misanthrope. Where little Lloyd sees an old man who needs to be taken down many notches, few others who see this film would probably be as disarming towards him. Colonel Lloyd refers to May Lily and Henry Clay as “pickaninnies”, threatens physical punishment towards Walker and Mom Beck at the slightest mistake, and indulges in Lost Cause rhetoric that glorifies the Confederacy as righteous. He is the sort of person that many Americans on tumblr would rather not speak to over Thanksgiving dinner. For Mom Beck and Walker, the two black servants in this film are understandably undereducated. But though the film paints them as self-aware and quick-witted, it mocks their lack of education during a scene where their poor spelling and grammar is apparent.

youtube

The Little Colonel is less of a musical than other Shirley Temple films, but it is obviously not devoid of musical moments. Its one notable musical scene is without lyrics and is best known for its fancy footwork. The staircase dance between Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple is transcendent cinema. This sequence is set to an original rhyme before transitioning into “My Old Kentucky Home” (Robinson mimics a trumpet to provide the melody) and follows a late-night confrontation between little Lloyd and Colonel Lloyd. Lloyd Sherman, who has been sent away from home because her father must be quarantined due to illness, wants to see her parents – ironically, this is for the good of the film, as Lodge and Venable’s performances are indifferent. She has never been away from her parents this long, and finds herself unsettled by living with her cantankerous grandfather. But there is Bill Robinson, as Walker, to provide comfort and solace.

In this complicated, potentially dangerous dancing scene, they showcase their agility and technical ability together. Robinson was Temple’s sole tap dancing teacher; she was a quick study, soon learning how to feel the beat rather vocalize or visualize it. Without hyperbole, Robinson would later claim Temple to be one of the best dancing partners he ever had. Depression-era audiences of all races witnessed their mastery on-screen. The scene celebrates and implies that blacks and whites can address and overcome hardship together. Robinson holding Temple’s hand proved incendiary to many Southern theater owners, as many requested prints that edited out the hand-holding.

During the years after The Little Colonel’s release, Robinson – fifty years Temple’s senior – became her most frequent co-star and a dear friend (best described as a close uncle-niece relationship). Nevertheless, unlike his white co-stars, he could never embrace or kiss Temple on-screen. Robinson also stayed in and used different facilities – giving the young Shirley Temple an early, though, understanding of the racism blacks faced in America. She recalled how, on the set of The Little Colonel, Robinson was the only person in the cast or crew to treat her as an equal, never patronizing her. The two sent telegrams when apart, encouraging and motivating the other to do and be their best. This meeting of two cultural giants, their careers constrained in their respective ways, continues to provide the inspiration and joy that audiences in the Depression sorely needed – even if the films themselves reflect the most unsavory aspects of American attitudes towards race.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

#The Little Colonel #David Butler #Shirley Temple #Bill Robinson #Lionel Barrymore #Evelyn Venable #John Lodge #Hattie McDaniel #William M. Conselman #Cyril J. Mockridge #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

4 notes · View notes

gamesfromfolktales · 2 years

Text

The Vendor of Tears by William M. Conselman

This is our monster for the month. He’s clearly a faerie who sells Arcane Connections. Stats eventually. This recording was released through Librivox by Dale Grothmann. Thanks to Dale and his production team. *** The Vendor of TearsBy William M . ConselmanThe little old man closed my library door and stepped nimbly forward. He bowed until his longbeard touched the rug, and said: “ I have…

View On WordPress

0 notes

manualstogo · 4 years

Link

For just $3.99 365 Nights in Hollywood Released on December 10, 1934: A washed-up movie director working for a bogus acting school discovers a new hot blonde actress and tries to make a come-back movie starring the girl he wants to marry. Directed by: George Marshall Written by: James A. Starr with screenplay by William M. Conselman and Henry Johnson The Actors: James Dunn Jimmy Dale, Alice Faye Alice Perkins, Frank Mitchell Percy, Jack Durant Clarence, John Bradford Adrian Almont, Grant Mitchell J. Walter Delmar, Frank Melton Frank Young, John Qualen Professor Herman Ellenbogen, Lynn Bari showgirl, Dorothy Bay student actress Miss Jessup, Brooks Benedict dancing boy, Nina Borget French girl, Margaret Brayton young wife, Tyler Brooke casting director, Donald Brown dancing boy, Betty Bryson showgirl, Duke Burgess dancing boy, Fran Carlon young wife, Bud Carpenter dancing boy, Russ Clark electrician, Jimmy Conlin student actor Heeber, Frank Conroy studio executive, Ray Cooke assistant director Eddie, Warren Crosby dancing boy, Jay Eaton effeminate man, Larry Fisher electrician, Pat Flaherty dancing boy, Harry Fox dance director Joe, Jean Fursa showgirl, Helen Gibson student actress, James Gonzalez dancing boy, Enid Gray elderly lady, Harrison Greene boarder, Ben Hall student actor, Arthur Housman drunk motorist, Perry Ivins lyricist, Al Klein prop man, Helen Lindeloff Dutch girl, Lois Lindsay dancer, Bo Ling Chinese girl, J.A. Massett young husband, Nelson McDowell thinking man, Paul McVey cameraman, Gene Morgan fresh guy, Pat Moriarity gateman, Thomas Murray dancing boy, Dennis O'Keefe dancing boy, Ted O'Shea dancing boy, Paul Parry young husband, Ruth Peterson waitress, Jessie Pringle Mrs. Carey, landlady, Addison Richards Assistant District Attorney, Gloria Roy waitress, Lorraine Rugg Lorraine, Paul Schwegler student actor, Gay Seabrook student actress, Ed Stanbridge dancing boy, Carl Stockdale bookkeeper, Betty Stockton showgirl, Frank Sully Mr...

#film #vintage #theater #classic #theatre #movie

0 notes