Hunting and Gathering: UCLA’s Preservation Fest Salvages Forgotten Gems, Endangered Indies

Lowbrow entertainment is also on display in the backstage comedy Pointed Heels (1929), albeit in the sophisticated mode. But all the class brought by slick William Powell and Fay Wray is obliterated each time vaudeville duo Helen Kane and Skeets Gallagher appears. Max Fleischer is supposed to have based his Betty Boop on Helen “Sugar” Kane, but either Kane was over the hill by 1929, or Fleischer was a real gentleman.

The Film Parade is a real curio, a picture about the history of cinema made in 1933 by British émigré J. Stuart Blackton, who had co-founded the Vitagraph company in 1897, sold the company to Warner Bros. in 1925, and lost his fortune in the 1929 crash. For him, the flicks started in Egypt, and he shows us drawn figures seen behind columns from a moving chariot, claiming it was proto-zoetrope! He also uses a lot of Vitagraph footage but not just: When Warner refused him scenes from The Jazz Singer, Blackton sang “Mammy” himself, in blackface. Besides this resourceful man and his wife, The Film Parade also features ex-silent actress Margerie Bonner, not yet Mrs. Malcolm Lowry.

UCLA Film & Television Archive

The Salvation Hunters

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More About

• Josef von Sternberg
• University of California-Los Angeles
• Frank Borzage
• William Fox
• Helen Kane

Blackton’s faded glory is on display on the same UCLA bill, in William Humphrey’s commendable 1911 version of A Tale of Two Cities. It had been filmed before (in 1907) and would be again many times, but this one is an eye-opener on the ambitions of Vitagraph, which was then testing the public’s appetite for longer films and more complicated narratives. And at three reels, this makes a good attempt at telling Dickens’ tale of the French Revolution. It is more tableaux vivants than real cinema, but the acting is exceptionally good (Maurice Costello especially), the makeup incredibly modern and the sets excellent, with one striking snow sequence actually shot on location. You can try to spot Norma Talmadge on her way to the guillotine, and even Mabel Normand as an extra.

The Naked Eye (1957) might sound like a dull doc on photography, but director Louis Stoumen was a shutterbug himself and has a good eye. Watch Alfred Eisenstaedt chat up the secretaries in the Life office, Edward Weston at Point Lobos, and Weegee in his bed-cum-darkroom screwing a dead cigar in his face before he even pulls on his suspenders in the morning.

14TH FESTIVAL OF PRESERVATION | UCLA Film & Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater | Through Sunday, April 26 | www.cinema.ucla.edu