1921-1930

Stanley and Oliver protest that they were only bystanders to the raid, but are hauled off to a prison labor camp anyway. They procede with their usual mayhem, Stanley getting his pick stuck in Oliver’s coat, Oliver chopping down a tree which just happens to contain the guard lookout post. When the Governor’s party happens by, Oliver accidentally pokes a hole in his car’s radiator, then attempts to stop the leak by filling the radiator with rice. The result is melee with all involved throwing clumps of soggy rice at each other.Read More »

Plans for a nice Sunday picnic seemed doomed even before Stanley and Oliver and their families get into the car. First the boys get into a fight and destroy all the sandwiches. Then the car itself keeps acting up, requiring repeated exits and reboardings by the boys, their wives and grouchy, gout-ridden Uncle Edgar. A brick-throwing tiff with a neighbor threatens to escalate into general mayhem until the local parson strolls by. They finally manage to get underway, steering toward an innocent-looking mud puddle in the street.Read More »

Synopsis
Stanley’s attempts to treat Oliver’s cold include dropping a swab down his friend’s throat, applying a mustard plaster to his rump, and inflating the air mattress from the gas jet until it has Oliver pressed against the ceiling.Read More »

IMDB Review wrote:
Seven years before his first feature-length film “Jenny” ,Carné already displayed the populisme,the command of the picture and the brilliance which would mark his golden era (1936-1946) .With hindsight,it is pity that ,for lack of money,he could not make his final film ,”Mouche” from Guy de Maupassant , which would have taken place down by the Marne ,and which might perhaps have returned him to former glories.Read More »

Plot: MGM’s big showcase of musical talent is the main appeal of this film. It’s clunky, but it was filmed literally at the dawn of the sound age. So where else could you see Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Marie Dressler, Laurel, & Hardy, Buster Keaton, John Gilbert, Norma Shearer, Cliff Edwards, Rose Tyler, Conrad Nagel, Charles King, Polly Moran, Bessie Love, William Haines, Anita Page, Gus Edwards and your master of ceremonies, Jack Benny.Read More »

A Havana prostitute (Helen Twelvetrees) with a sadistic “protector” (Ricardo Cortez) falls for a young sailor (Phillips Holmes).Read More »

Young Autant-Lara’s (1901-2000) avant-garde debut, made a decade before his first feature and two decades before his breakthrough. It features his mother, who was a famous actress, as well as Antonin Artaud, who was a friend of the family.
The films circulates around a triangular love drama with a lot of faux avant-garde effects: filming only hands and feet, rotating camera, dream sequences expressing the tensions between the protagonists etc. etc. Given that this was made many years before Un chien andalou and most of the titles that can be found in Kino’s box sets, this was pretty cutting edge in 1923.Read More »

Quote:
“The film Life in Hands (David Maryan, 1930, USSR) is an instructive historical case of the transition from the bright experiments of Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko to agitprop as the focus of all the most odious in Soviet cinema. Prior to this work, Marian was a screenwriter for several films, which, as far as we know, have not survived, and this is his directorial debut, which borrows a lot from both the Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930, USSR) and the General Line (Sergei Eisenstein, 1928, USSR) – both thematically and in dramatic and visual solutions. “
google translateRead More »

Plot: Talkie Era musicals were usually all-star revues or tales of backstage heartache and triumph. Golden Dawn – based on a 184-performance, 1927 operetta co-created by Oscar Hammerstein II – ambitiously breaks free of those musical confines to expand the genre’s cinematic reach. Set in World War I-era Africa, it tells the tale of Dawn, a tribal woman in love with a British soldier but chosen to be the sacrificial bride of a god. Stage sensation Vivienne Segal (perhaps best known for starring opposite Gene Kelly in 1940 Broadway’s Pal Joey) portrays Dawn. The film was originally shot and released entirely in color (another example of the production team’s ambitiousness), but color prints have unfortunately long been lost.Read More »