The Sunday Intertitle: Less than an ant

First encountered the generally charming ELLA CINDERS (1926) when prepping last year’s POW!!! retrospective on comic book movie adaptations with Niall Greig Fulton for Edinburgh International Film Festival. Looked at it again last night with Fiona as prep for a project she’s undertaking.

I would have missed the political significance of this intertitle because I lazily assumed “Armenian” was just a comic intensifier, like certain swear words. The old Woody Allen joke about someone trying to commit suicide “by standing next to an Armenian” is certainly racist and would hopefully not be something W.A. would stand by today. It’s mitigated slightly by our certainty that Woody does not have anything against Armenians, but that certainty is in itself racist, born of the belief that Armenia isn’t significant enough to have any strong opinions about.

(There’s a would-be funny line in THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST about the prez losing sleep over Libya — Libya, of all places! — that kinda falls flat now.)

Fiona pointed out that the Armenian famine was a real thing, the result of genocide by the Ottoman Empire during WWI, less than ten years before ELLA CINDERS. Not so funny now. And curious that a mainstream, lighthearted Hollywood comedy would think this a suitable subject for amusement.

Oh, I see. It’s funny because they’re Armenian.

A Miss

Unable to see everything showing at the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival — adding up the price of tickets and the price of transport, I decided to skip last night’s show of TOGETHER, Lorenza Mazzetti’s 1956 film, described by Lindsay Anderson as an early example of Free Cinema, and tonight’s showing of King Vidor’s THE PATSY, starring Marion Davies. This decision was something of a wrench! Maud Nelissen is doing the music for the latter, along with Filmorchestra The Sprockets, and she was behind the greatest musical/cinematic spectacle of my life, Von Stroheim’s THE MERRY WIDOW in Bologna.

But I have to save money somewhere, and schlepping to Bo’ness for one movie would not be economical. Plus I have seen THE PATSY on the big screen before (though I’ve totally forgotten WHERE — I think it must have been Edinburgh Film Fest and it must have been over a decade ago. I know I saw THE SCARLET LETTER).

THE PATSY is a charmer. Maybe less ambitious than SHOW PEOPLE but funnier. Marion gets to freak out wicked stepmother Marie Dressler by pretending to be crazy, and she also performs (on the slenderest excuse) drop-dead accurate parodies of rival movie stars ~

Gloria Swanson. Mae Murray.

Lillian Gish.

Pola Negri.

This was almost a standard bit at the time — doesn’t Colleen Moore do more of less the same thing in ELLA CINDERS? Or maybe Beatrice Lillie in EXIT SMILING? I wonder how those parodied took it?

The Sunday Intertitle: We Firemen

Preparing for Origin Story, an illustrated lecture I will be giving at Edinburgh International Film Festival as part of POW!!! — our retrospective of live-action feature film adaptations from the sixties, seventies and early eighties. This talk will trace the pre-history of the field, right back to the origins of cinema itself (no lie!).

Despite very early short movie versions of The Happy Hooligan and the Katzenjammer Kids among many others, the first FEATURE-LENGTH comic book movie appears to be ELLA CINDERS, starring the delightful Colleen Moore, from 1926. If anyone can nominate an earlier example, I am all ears.

ELLA C. was a natural for the movies since it deals with a movie-crazy teen who wants to be a star. Better, it began as a movie pitch for a Bebe Daniels vehicle, which turned into a newspaper strip when Hollywood turned it down. This kind of cross-fertilisation was more common than you’d think.