Here’s “The Tailor,” an adorable short from the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, written, directed and edited by Gordon Grinberg.

1. The film is based on an old and well known Jewish joke. So old is the joke that I actually heard this back in high school when I was a student at the Brooklyn Talmudic Academy.

2. A certain segment of orthodox Jewish men wear black suits and black hats only. Think of it as a regulation uniform. Why? The most common explanation is that black signifies mourning and the Jewish people are still mourning the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Also—and this is just my personal opinion—black is, y’know, slimming. (more…)

When King Vidor first stepped onto the set of The Champ, he was filled with a rare sense of freedom. Frances Marion’s script was unusually simple, focused squarely on a pair of immensely sympathetic protagonists and their relationship. All the key moments, plot twists and emotional climaxes were spelled out on the page, with no false conflicts or manufactured drama to complicate the works. Vidor realized that having such a tight screenplay “would relieve me as a director — now I didn’t have to worry about the story, worry about how I will wrap this up and keep it all together. I could concentrate on little details, touches and things.”

Touches and things. As we learned last week, Vidor equated silent films to ballet: operatic makeup, overwrought facial expressions, stylized movements, and the action punctuated by an enormous symphonic orchestra that — because the players and their instruments were live in the theater — sounded as amazing as today’s very best surround-sound systems. With the advent of synchronous dialogue, all of this vanished — people now wanted to hear actors talk, of all things! Now, rather than mounting a sort of grand operatic ballet, Vidor found himself helming something more akin to a stage play, and the change was jarring and disheartening. How could a director recapture the emotional magic of old, using mere dialogue?

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Lupe Velez, The Mexican Spitfire.

The lives of Hollywood stars are frequently tragic and messy tales of absent fathers, cruelly ambitious mothers, and madly dysfunctional families.

Mexican-American actress, Lupe Velez (July 18, 1908 – December 13, 1944) “The Mexican Spitfire” was a beautiful, passionate, emotionally unstable woman best known for a series of 1930’s B movies in which she plays a delightfully scatter-brained character who speaks broken English mixed with streams of rapid fire Spanish.

Her first feature-length film was in the Douglas Fairbanks blockbuster, The Gaucho (1927), where she plays a high spirited Spanish dancing girl. Velez performed in a further eighteen films before settling into comedy—she had a Carol Lombard vibe, a  flair for screwball situations, but her accent limited her appeal—most notably in the seven “Mexican Spitfire” series of films (1939-1943). (more…)

Lillian Gish

The great twin tragedies of the fate of silent films in the modern era is indifference and ignorance. And for those who have seen clips from silent films, they invariably view muddy, degraded prints projected at the wrong speed, hence the jerky motions that give the impression that all silent films are bad slapstick.

Of course, we all owe a great debt to Robert Osborne and TCM for programming so many fine silent films. At last, film lovers have the opportunity to screen a varied selection of silent films and appreciate the great craft that was abruptly short-circuited with the advent of talkies. The best silent films were a universal language in which image, motion and emotion were paramount. (more…)

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.”

In 1923, Colleen Moore’s starring vehicle, Flaming Youth was an international box office hit that ushered in the era of the Flapper. The Jazz crazy kids wore their galoshes unbuckled causing the rubber tongue to flap. Thus: Flappers.

 
Colleen Moore, studio portrait in the Stars and Stripes.

I’m waiting for that particular fashion statement to reappear.

Colleen Moore, born Kathleen Morrison, (1900-1988) and her husband John McCormick embarked on a grand tour of Europe to promote Flaming Youth, Colleen’s career, and enjoy a belated honeymoon.

Colleen’s look, specifically her Bobbed haircut, was a global fashion rage. Contrary to popular opinion it was Moore who pioneered the severe cut—not Louise Brooks. It is sad and certainly a skewed vision of film history that the current Louise Brooks cult has spread like a virus, whereas Moore, a far more important figure in motion pictures, is virtually forgotten.  George Cukor, a director who knew something about Hollywood stardom, was utterly baffled by the post-modern Brooks fever. When queried about the star of Pandora’s Box, Cukor forcefully exclaimed: “Louise Brooks? She was nothing!” (more…)

Alma Rubens, Early Studio Portrait

Many persons who have followed my career on the screen and stage mistake me for a Jewess. This belief perhaps was strengthened when I married Ricardo Cortez, my third husband, the only one I ever really loved, and whom I am now trying to divorce.

Although I didn’t find it out until almost a year after our marriage, Ric, instead of being a gallant Spanish caballero which I believed him, was the son of a kosher butcher, with a shop on First Avenue, New York City. His real name is Jacob Kranz. — Alma Rubens (more…)

A few years ago, I was up in Toronto, on location for Within These Walls, a film the Academy Award winning actress Ellen Burstyn, acting as producer and star, asked me to write. Ellen, one of the great Hollywood actresses—past and present—discovered the true story and immediately realized its potential as a powerful and entertaining film. The challenge of playing a hardened murderess—redeemed by training dogs for the disabled—greatly appealed to Ms. Burstyn.

Silent Star Madge Bellamy

During the first week of production, one of the featured actresses—not Ellen—knocked on my hotel door and asked if she could discuss her role with me.

Of course I sat down with the actress—a recognized and respected talent—and we discussed her role, the character’s history, motivation, and dramatic arc. The actress relentlessly probed every single line of dialog. She challenged me to defend all the hard decisions I’d made in writing the character.

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