A new venue! On Wednesday, February 11, I’ll be accompanying the 1924 silent film Peter Pan at the Newmarket, NH Library! It went over well when I did it in Plaistow, and the audience participated where they were supposed to.
If Newmarket is more convenient for you than Plaistow, or if you’d just like to see it again, drop in! There’s no charge and no requirement to sign up, and there will be refreshments.
In preparation for the upcoming showing of Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood at the Plaistow Library, I’ve watched the movie over and over. Inevitably, I’ve spotted inconsistencies and hard-to-explain bits. It’s still a wonderful movie, but for what it’s worth, here’s a nitpick list (SPOILER ALERT).
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That’s the exact title of the 1922 movie — Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood — that I’ll be accompanying at the Plaistow (NH) Library on January 13. They called it that because anyone could make a movie called “Robin Hood” to draw off confused moviegoers, but no one else could legally claim superstar Fairbanks was in it.
Many movies have been made about Robin Hood, and there’s no canonical story. Some emphasize his “stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.” Others show him as a partisan of King Richard, fighting against the encroachments of Richard’s brother John. This movie is in the latter category. Robin Hood is the Earl of Huntingdon, fighting the tyranny John exercises while Richard is away for a Crusade. The first part of the movie shows John plotting for power and achieving it, and Huntingdon becomes Robin Hood only after reluctantly deserting his king. His chief enemies are Prince John and Guy of Gisbourne. The Sheriff of Nottingham is basically a walk-on part.
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It’s that time of year, so I went looking for Christmas-themed silent movies. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was adapted multiple times. The earliest known version was directed by Walter R. Booth and released in 1901. It survives only in a five-minute fragment. A 1908 treatment is considered lost. That leaves Edison’s 1910 film as the earliest treatment that survives in a reasonably complete form. Marc McDermott is an enjoyable Scrooge, and Charles Ogle, better known as the first actor to portray Frankenstein’s monster on the screen, is Bob Cratchit. This is the film I’ve combined with my accompaniment on YouTube.
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The World War I years were the worst in the United States’ history for freedom of speech. Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years for opposing US participation in the war. Charles T. Schenck got the same for distributing petitions against the military draft, and censorship advocates today applaud Judge Holmes’ equation of his advocacy with “falsely shouting fire in a theatre.” There was also a movie that got its creator a federal prison sentence. What did this film do? It celebrated the American Revolution. That made it anti-British, at a time when Britain was our ally in the war.
If that sounds insane, it is. Under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the federal and local governments stomped on freedom of expression as never before or since, and the Supreme Court said it was fine. Still, The Spirit of ’76 is a weird case. The film was released on May 28, 1917, the month after the USA entered the war. Chicago censors made him cut some scenes depicting British atrocities. It opened in November in Los Angeles; I don’t know if it was seen anywhere during the intervening time. The Los Angeles showing included the censored scenes.
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