I am often reminded of something that D W Griffith said about his innovative film making. It was more or less that he didn’t see himself as innovating. He was just trying to tell stories. I think that’s generally true of artists. Very few people see themselves as pushing an art form in new directions. They are just trying to communicate in their own way. Of course, Griffith gets rather more credit than he deserves for his work. Today, we talk about someone who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for her work. (Yes: of course it’s a “her.” It had to be, right?)

On this day in 1873, the great film pioneer Alice Guy (later Guy-Blache and often just Blache after marrying Herbert Blache) was born. She started very early in the business—in 1894. She is generally considered the first female filmmaker, which is probably true given that she was one of the first filmmakers full stop. She was pretty much the first person to make narrative films. Like most things in the early history of film, it is hard to say anything for certain. For one thing, what exactly qualifies as a narrative film? And there were so many people making so many films in so many different places that it is impossible to say anything for certain. But Guy was hugely important in moving films in that direction.

Early films were, by and large, just slices of life: a train pulling into a station or girls having a pillow fight. The closest you got to having an actual story was Lumiere’s 1895 film, L’Arroseur Arrose, a film in which a kid restricts a water hose causing the gardener to spray himself in the face. But it is hardly a narrative. It is more or less the same as the pillow fight.

She made at least 700 films during her 26 year career. This includes 22 feature length films. Most of them are lost. The Internet Movie Database lists only 430 films and according to Wikipedia, only 350 are still known to exist. And it is still hard to find much of her work outside of film archives.

In 1907, she married English director Herbert Blache. At that point, she had to resign from the Gaumont Film Company. This was very common in the “advanced” countries: married women couldn’t work outside the home. So Guy and Blache emigrated to the United States where they started their own film business, The Solax Company. It was very successful for a decade or so. But the company eventually died off because of the break up of Guy and Blache’s marriage and also the move of film production to Hollywood.

Guy made her last film in 1920, Vampire—which, like most of her films, I know nothing about. And there is a reason for that. There was a systematic, if not conspiratorial effort to write her out of film history. Human beings are amazing at justifying their own self-satisfying narratives. Leon Gaumont’s success owed an enormous debt to Guy for her work from its beginning in 1894 through 1906. But when he published the history of his company, he started it in 1907.

After 1920, Guy made a living lecturing and writing what would come to be known as novelizations. Mostly, she was forgotten for a very long time. However, in 1953, the French government awarded her the Legion d’Honneur. Otherwise, she was pretty much ignored during her long life. (She died in 1968, just short of her 95th birthday.)

It is really hard to find films made by her. In addition to there just being few, most of the ones that are available are not confirmed to have been made by her. It is a shame. You might want to check out The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ, a half hour long blockbuster that by the standards of the time is amazing. But here, from 1905, is an actual sound film, Five O’Clock Tea. Think of it as one of the first music videos. It features Armand Dranem, the French music hall singer and comedian.

Happy birthday Alice Guy!

I am still away from home, but I will be back later today and we’ll get back to normal around here! I have been working in and around the Bay Area this weekend, and it was Gay Pride weekend. That’s all fine, but the whole thing has turned from what was once an important political event to a great big party that draws people from all over the Bay Area. That’s great. I’m happy that gay rights are largely a non-political issue. But dealing with the crowds and all has been a total pain!

On this day in 1927, the great playwright James Goldman was born. Yes, I did him last year. But what can I do: I really love one of his scripts. Of course, he is best known for the film (and play) The Lion in Winter. And here’s the thing: that is a great film. That would have been enough. But no, not for James Goldman!

He wrote one of favorite films, They Might Be Giants. It is the only truly successful modernization of Don Quixote. As I wrote last year:

And that’s all I have to say about it right now. I should probably write more about the film, because it truly is brilliant. Or at least the script is.

Happy birthday James Goldman!

On this day in 1920, the great, great, great special effects artist Ray Harryhausen was born. He is best remembered for his films Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. His work holds up surprisingly well in this world of computer animation where literally anything can be done. Something to note about his films is that the look of them is not dictated by his special effects. That is a common complaint of mine about many more modern special effects.

Harryhausen was originally inspired by the work of Willis O’Brien on the movie King Kong. And he even managed to meet O’Brien when he was fairly young. After working at the bottom rungs of the film industry—notably under Frank Capra during World War II—he eventually worked as assistant animator under O’Brien for the film, Mighty Joe Young, where Harryhausen ended up doing most of the actual animation while O’Brien worked on the more fundamental technical problems. I suspect this was how things usually worked.

Within four years, Harryhausen got to be in charge of his own film, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms—basically a Godzilla film, although the connection goes the other way since Godzilla didn’t appear for another year, and the original screenplay title was “The Giant Monster from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” By 1958, Harryhausen brought the process to color films with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. He continued this on with other notable films like Jason and the Argonauts in 1963 through to his last film in 1981, Clash of the Titans. In 2010, Clash of the Titans was remade just to prove that more advanced technology doesn’t lead to better films.

Here is a short Turner Classic Movies tribute to Harryhausen:

Happy birthday Ray Harryhausen!

On this day in 1904, Peter Lorre was born. I once had this boss who had worked in television. I had mentioned Lorre for some reason and she dismissed him out of hand, “Oh, he was married eight times!” I believed her, in part because I’m gullible. But also, it just seemed like Lorre would be the kind of guy who married a lot of women. And there is something to that. He was married three times—staying married most of his adult life.

He started acting on the stage in his late teens and didn’t make his first film until he was 25. But fairly quickly he became a star for his performance as the pedophile serial killer in Fritz Lang’s M. This led to his first English language film, The Man Who Knew Too Much. And since he was on the run from the Nazis (Lorre was nominally Jewish), he ended up settling in the United States in 1935.

Lorre is best known for his acting in films like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. These days, I most associate him with all of his Mr Moto films, because a couple of years ago I went through a period where I watched them all. They are rather bad films, but it is fun to watch the Austrian Lorre playing a Japanese character. I had intended to write an article about the racism in the films, but I never got around to it. Other than the casting, I’m not sure the films are that racist. Although they certainly push stereotypes of the cunning oriental. To do it justice, I’d have to go back and watch the films again—I’m not keen on that prospect, even with Lorre.

Sadly, Lorre had health problems for most of his life. These were mostly with his gallbladder, which kept him on morphine for many years. Then later in life, he put on quite a lot of weight. That’s all fine, but in the final films, he really does look sickly. You can see this in two of my favorite of his films at the end of his life: The Raven and The Comedy of Terrors. (Both films were written by Richard Matheson and available as a single DVD!) He was only 59 when he died of a stroke. I can’t help but think that modern medicine would have done a better job of treating his health problems.

Nonetheless, he managed to make an enormous number of films. He was a great actor, but his career was based primarily on the fact that there is just something very charming about him. Even when playing villains, his humanity comes through. That was clear enough when he was 27 in M. Here he is in Casablanca. I love the look he gives at the very end when Rick says, “I am a little more impressed with you.” It seems like the first time that Ugarte fully realizes what he’s done. It’s just a shame the character is used as nothing more than a plot device to get Rick the letters of transit. But we’ll always have this scene:

Happy birthday Peter Lorre!

Another day, another birthday post. Last year I did George Orwell, although I actually talked more about the composer Francesco Araja. I feel my life adrift except that I have a birthday post to write each morning. I used to hate doing them, now they seem like the easiest part of my day. It’s actually a good bit of advice for new bloggers: pick something concrete to write about every day. Finding something you want to write about is often the hardest part. Anyway, here we go again.

The actor June Lockhart is 89 today. She came from an acting background. Both her parents we professional actors—especially her father Gene Lockhart, who played the idiot sheriff in His Girl Friday. Similarly, June’s eldest daughter Anne is also a successful actor. I’m very interested in these kind of thing. It isn’t primarily that parents can get their children breaks in the industry, just like people with union jobs can get their children union jobs. It is that if your parents are in a particular business, it just seems like the thing you do. And in June Lockhart’s case, she was in a film along with her parents at the age of 13.

For people of my generation, Lockhart is known primarily for the part of Maureen Robinson on Lost in Space. I haven’t seen the show since I was a kid, but it was not one of my favorites. I was more a Gilligan’s Island kind of kid. But I would probably get into it more now, because of the Dr Smith character, who I hated as a kid. Lockhart, of course, played the mother character. This was typical of her. Before Lost in Space, at the age of 34, she played Timmy’s adopted mother in Lassie. And after Lost in Space, she played the mother figure Dr Janet Craig (replacing the deceased actual mother Bea Benaderet) on Petticoat Junction. (I can’t find any DVDs with the later seasons that had Lockhart in them.)

Lockhart also did a lot of work in the theater and in film. Actually, I shouldn’t use the past tense, because she is still working. IMDb has her listed as acting in 167 films and television shows. That’s counting the 207 episodes of Lassie as one show. The same goes for the 84 (including the un-aired pilot) episodes of Lost in Space and 45 episodes to Petticoat Junction and 9 episodes on Robert Montgomery Presents and on and on. And here she is in a Crest commercial:

Happy birthday June Lockhart!

Last year, I wrote, Apologies to Alan Turing for the birthday post. It’s interesting that his birthday comes just a day after another computer pioneer, Konrad Zuse. But when talking about Turing, I can never seem to get into the work that he did. He was so badly abused by our culture. It is sad. I never forget him. But today, let’s think happier thoughts.

On this day in 1927, the great choreographer and director Bob Fosse was born. In terms of his theater work, it was so great that to this day, people produce musicals the way he did. The only other theater director I’ve seen that done for is Samuel Beckett, and that is most certainly not because he was a great director. Fosse’s approach to choreography was highly stylized. You absolutely can’t miss it. At the same time, from talking to dancers, it was a form of dance that was very hard on the body and often led to injuries and otherwise shortened dancing careers.

I’m mostly interested in him as a film director, because that’s mostly where I know him from. I can’t think of a more consistent filmmaker. And this is despite the fact that his films are shockingly different from one another. He started with Sweet Charity, a musical with fairly standard direction. But the dance numbers were fantastic—both for the dance and for the way they are directed. Here is “Big Spender”:

Then he did Cabaret, which is astounding in the advancement on Sweet Charity. Most notable about it is that he changed the play from a standard musical into a film that had musical numbers only in the scenes in the cabaret. This makes it far more real. He also made the sexual aspects of the film far more explicit—quite a change from when film versions usually toned down or completely changed the sexual content as in The Children’s Hour. Here is one of the great numbers, “Mein Herr.” The song works especially well in the film given that Sally Bowles is actually the opposite of how she is presented in the song. She is fundamentally a romantic:

Next, Fosse made his first non-musical film, Lenny about the rise and fall of Lenny Bruce. I remember the first time I saw the film. I had never seen anything like it. It is presented almost as a documentary. It has since become absolutely standard cinematic technique in films like, Leaving Las Vegas. It is a technique he would refine to a much greater extent in his last film, Star 80. That film is generally thought to be his weakest. I long thought that myself. But now I think the film is perhaps his more profound as he demonstrates that the exploitation and murder of Dorothy Stratten was not the result only of her estranged husband but of pretty much everyone in her life.

Between those two films, Fosse made his masterpiece: All That Jazz. It is a film like no other and I still watch it every couple of years. It pulls together everything in his life. As I talk about a lot around here, I like idiosyncratic art. Well, this film is idiosyncratic art by a master artist. It tells the story of a miserable artist who hates himself and pretty much everything else. Yet the filmmaker isn’t wearing a mask. He assaults every part of the entertainment business and himself with great relish. The best moment in the film is where Joe Gideon is hanging out with a janitor at the hospital. The janitor sings, “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag” at Gideon’s request a few times. It is a rare unpretentious moment in Gideon’s life where he reconnects with what he originally liked about show business: the pleasure of music for its own sake and not as a commodity fine tuned to the point where, at least for the artist, it loses all its charm. Sadly, that scene is not online. (Typical: the scenes I find most important are usually not interesting to other people.) So I’ll show this scene that ought to be shown to all aspiring actors:

Happy birthday Bob Fosse!