Garner: Louise Brooks' DVD release
The great silent screen legend, Louise Brooks, who spend the last third of her life in Rochester, is being celebrated Oct. 20 with the Blu-ray release of one of her greatest films, Diary of a Lost Girl. The film was made in Berlin in 1929, as the second of her two gems for German master G.W. Pabst.
Though not quite on a par with the Brooks-Pabst masterpiece, Pandora's Box, it is still a superb and essential film.
Diary of a Lost Girl is based on a controversial, best-selling German novel by Margarette Bohme, about a teenage girl who is raped by a family employee, has a child out of wedlock, is thrown out of her disgraced family and ends up in a brothel. Needless to say, the film stirred considerable uproar and was severely cut, just to earn a cinema release. This DVD is the best possible restored version, and is beautiful in its imagery, and in Brooks' performance.
This new release also benefits from a well-researched and often-fascinating commentary track by Thomas Gladysz, director of the Louise Brooks Society. (As an aside, I notice it is much easier and enjoyable to listen to a commentary on a silent film, where there is only piano music on the film soundtrack.)
The Blu-ray Diary of a Lost Girl is formally released on Oct. 20. I knew Brooks extensively in the last years of her life, and have written frequently about her. She died in Rochester in 1985. How would I rank Diary among her films?
My favorite, of course, is the justifiably legendary Pandora's Box, Diary is second, the French melodramatic tragedy Prix de Beaute (Beauty Prize) is my third favorite — with a fabulous death scene — and her fourth greatest film is the William Wellman American film, Beggars of Life, co-starring Wallace Beery and Richard Arlen. Brooks plays a young vagabond who is forced to go on the lam. Brooks told me she loved it, in part because the role called for her to dress in drag, as a young boy!
Brooks was justifiably famous for bringing an engrossing, minimalist and natural approach to screen acting, along with stunning beauty. Though many of Brooks' films are lost, these four are all available online and are frequently shown at the Eastman Museum's Dryden Theatre.
A HUSTON RARITY: Fans of the great filmmaker John Huston (of The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Man Who Would Be King), should know that one of his rarities — his half-hour film on America's independence — is available on youtube.com.
Titled Independence, the film explores the people involved in creating the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on the hot July of 1776. It was created for America's Bicentennial and was solely on display at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, until its appearance on the internet.
The prestigious cast includes Ken Howard as Thomas Jefferson (a role he had recently played in the film musical 1776), Pat Hingle as John Adams, Eli Wallach as Benjamin Franklin, Patrick O'Neal as George Washington, Anne Jackson as Abigail Adams and E.G. Marshall as the narrator.
BLACK PANTHERS: A prestigious documentary exploring one of the most volatile and important of 1960s organizations is being showcased as this month's One-Take Documentary entry at the Little Theatre. Stanley Nelson's The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution will be shown at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 20.
The film has earned acclaim at film festivals and is building momentum toward a possible best-documentary Oscar nomination.
A Skype conversation will follow the screening with founding Black Panther member Victor Houston.
HORROR AND WOODY. The Eastman Museum's Dryden Theatre this week presents two especially noteworthy films, though they have absolutely nothing in common.
The first is Videodrome, one of the most bizarre of the several bizarre films of the innovative Toronto horror master, David Cronenberg. It's at 8 p.m. Oct. 22 and stars James Woods as a crazed and obsessed TV producer who believes he can revolutionize broadcasting. He unleashes gore that can only be called (Marshall) McLuhanistic. Indeed, the film takes the famous "The medium is the message" statement of the late Toronto media professor to its most horrific extreme.
Then comes a film many consider Woody Allen's most beautiful and lyrical, Manhattan. The romantic comedy is Allen's paean to the glories of his hometown, and is embellished with the shimmering music of George Gershwin. The film follows the complications of the love life of a comedy writer played by Allen (including the admittedly troublesome affair with a 17-year-old played by Mariel Hemingway).
The black-and-white cinematography by the great Gordon Willis (who also shot The Godfather) remains at the pinnacle of the art form. Manhattan is at 8 p.m. Oct. 24 and 1:30 p.m. Oct. 26.