Silent Films

Tuesday Senior’s Movie Night at Peter’s is always interesting and many times eye-opening, as it was tonight.  This was the first time in over a year that the Guerneville Senior Center book club showed a silent picture, Cecille B. DeMille’s and Gloria Swanson’s hit, titled, “Male and Female”.

We often think, these days, a hundred years on, about “silents” as two reelers, with a quick point or laugh and that’s it.  This was a two-hour film.  One in which I repetitively asked, isn’t that it?  And the others repetitively answered, “No, there’s more”.

At the time, 1916-18, the point at the beginning of the film was to depict normal life, sans war.  Then, Cecille B. DeMille depicted a fantasy version, after civilization had fallen apart, where there was little way to tell good from bad, rich from poor.

After watching the movie, which was great fun, I spoke to many who equated the movie to “Roma”, a candidate in this year’s Academy Awards.  Some thought it was great, an equal number thought it was unwatchable.  Many thought it was sexist.

We watch old movies every Tuesday Night [6pm] at Peter’s House in Monte Rio.

Some of my friends and neighbors must think it odd, strange, even a bit weird that I am so enamoured with 50-100-year-old movies; also with using the British spellings of words like enamoured; possibly also with using colons.  I think that I have been that way all my life.  It has been a dormant part of my life, but as that wears down, and I’m cutting connections to groups that require physical participation; I’m refocusing on activities that are more sedentary, like hosting a movie night.

Old movies satisfy my joy in researching topics, as I have found that for about fifteen years now, Hollywood is “remastering” some of the old movies, adding in bonus interviews and commentaries by directors, actors, and producers.  On the flip-side, if they aren’t worth tarting up a bit, then they simply sell the DVD for under $5 as a four-pack of the “greatest”.

The tie to the past is much more than a researching penchant though.  I have a strong bond with my parents, possibly because I was a slightly pre-war baby; more likely because they were both college-educated adults, who shared their lives, within cultural limits, completely with me.  A case in point, I was looking up the movie “Duel in the Sun”, 1946, as a candidate Academy Award winner, and saw Lillian Gish as a nominee for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.  I thought, why do I love that name Lillian Gish so much?  Looking further, I saw her linked to Richard Barthelmess, who was a famous actor, thirty years before.  Gish lived to be 100, but Barthelmess features in my mother’s memoirs, which were the stories she told me as a child.  There are three entries in her memoir: early memory of a famous movie star [co-starred with Lillian Gish in many D.W. Griffith’s block-busters]; second teen-age memory was of a barn-storming pilot who stopped by her Waterloo, Nebraska home, who looked a lot like Richard Barthelmess; third adult reflection was of her encounter with Richard Barthelmess, patching his parachute and getting a free ride in a biplane.  I can still visualize my teen-aged mother playing the piano/organ at the small playhouse where the town showed silent movies, bonding herself with the plots and characters, during the nineteen-twenties.

My father was more visceral. And is somewhat blank during the silent era.  His favorite early picture was, “It Happened one Night”.  In fact, he loved all the Frank Capra movies, which he passed down to both me and my sister.  Maybe that was because he was the more day-to-day wage earner during the depression, rather than focused on the future as my mother was.  Then again, he loved the escapist movies like “Gold Diggers of 1934”, but my mother loved the Hepburn movie, “Stage Door”.  My sister and I are lock-step on movies like: “Miracle on 34^th Street”, “It’s A Wonderful Life”, and any Laurel and Hardy movie.

As anyone over 65 will vehemently concur, movies have been degrading for years., they don’t make them like they used to.  And this is why I have started a movie night for seniors.  We show some new movies, but the average targeted age group is people who were teen-agers in the sixties.