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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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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Charles Chaplin was a complicated person, formerly accused for being a Communist. (I use “Charles” rather than “Charlie” because this article focuses on the man rather than his movie persona.) These accusations had no merit, but the Wikipedia article on Chaplin echoes some of the charges against him. It claims that “he feared that capitalism and machinery in the workplace would increase unemployment levels” and that this view influenced his film Modern Times. It asserts that his late film Monsieur Verdoux presented views “criticising capitalism and arguing that the world encourages mass killing through wars and weapons of mass destruction.” (Wikipedia articles regularly change, so you might see something different at a future date.)
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