Tag: Harold Lloyd

Posted on

We Now Resume Our Regularly Scheduled Life

It has been a week of local excursions here in Wales, days spent sunbathing and splashing in the radioactive sea, bookhunting in Hay-on-Wye (the world-renowned “Town of Books”), dining al fresco, stargazing outdoors and on screen, playing with Montague, our unruly terrier, and being among friends (even after having been critiqued with the candor I reserve for those who matter to me). The occasion of it all was a weeklong visit by my closest if mostly long distance friend, the fatherland I haven’t set foot on for seventeen years. It is to him that I owe the wonderful book pictured above, a splendid addition to my collection of Claudette Colbert memorabilia.

Whenever I venture out to Hay, I return home with a few treasures. This time, I added a book on Harold Lloyd (my favorite silent screen comedian, whose films The Kid Brother, The Cat’s Paw and Girl Shy we screened during the past few days), as well as a coffee-table topper on screwball comedies (a book which I had previously gifted to abovementioned best pal, but with which I was pleased to get reacquainted). However convenient and economic it might be to browse and shop online, the thrill of the hunt (as previously described here), is something a carnivore of a booklover like me does not like to go without.

Now, the people of Film Pictorial, a British publication, are full of it. Legend, I mean, which is a term I much prefer to trivia when it comes to describing pieces of nothing from which to weave whatever your mind is up to at the moment. Trivia is for the mercenary; legend for the mercurial. I shall raid said volume from time to time here on these virtual pages. Where else might you learn whether or not you have a “Film Hand” from a writer who examines the “long little finger on the hand of Katharine Hepburn” or the “thickish fingers” of John Boles and Warren William to tell their temperament and acting skills?

The book also contains longer articles on “The Gallant Life of Norma Shearer” and takes readers to the homes of stars like Harold Lloyd, Bette Davis, and . . . Gordon Harker? Robert Montgomery, meanwhile, debates, along with Jeanette MacDonald, “At What Age Are Women Most Charming” and Myrna Loy reveals her “Own Ideas.” It’s all glossy but telling gossip, which I am looking forward to sharing, along with old news from , over the next few days.

Of course, my week was not without pain and what there is of sorrow in my life, among which my tumble down the slippery steps to my room and the breaking down of our car are the most dramatic examples. My lower back and my left toe still ache; the car might not be salvageable at all. In a matter of weeks, I reckon, such woes—which led to dipped feet in cooling springs and a ride through Wales in an Auto Club truck—will be nothing but cheerful anecdotes to be shared among chums. For now, they are inconveniences, at most.

As I have mentioned before, the weeks to come will be somewhat less than regular. On 7 August, I shall return, however briefly, to my old home in New York City. In the meantime, I resume my journal, hoping it will be appreciated by those who make it a habit to keep up with someone as gleefully out-of-date as yours truly, broadcastellan.

Posted on

Silents, Please!; or, How to Prepare for the World Cup Doldrums

Well, it is supposed to be busting out all over tomorrow. June, that is—the month during which television entertainment goes bust. In the US, at least, a generally enforced leave-taking from your favorites is a programming pattern that predates television. Looking through my radio files, I came across an article in the June 1932 issue of The Forum, discussing what Americans could expect to find “On the Summer Air.” It is an interesting piece, especially since it serves as a reminder that, during the early years of broadcasting, the summer hiatus was a response to technical difficulties. The shutting down of broadcast studios, like the closing of Broadway theaters, was directly related to the rising mercury, to the heat that made the asphalt buckle and urbanites escape to their vernal retreats.

“Formerly,” the reviewer remarks,

June marked the beginning of the radio doldrums, an enjoyable period lasting through three splendidly quiet months. Hot weather static raised so much hell with radio transmission that many sponsors permitted their public to amuse itself until September. But no longer! This year modern superheterodyne radio sets, the new pentode tubes, and more powerful, efficient transmitting equipment will help to put the Indian sign on summer static.

Did such technological advances improve matters for the home audience? Did static give way to ecstasy?

The gentleman from the Forum suggested that programmers made ample use of the re-conditioned air, but did not quite live up to the medium’s potential. There was Broadway legend Florenz Ziegfeld, for instance, who promised to widen the Great White Way with his Ziegfeld Follies on the Air. He also promised to present listeners with the lovely Lupe Velez. “We need television for a program like this,” the frustrated reviewer commented, and Ms. Velez was “the victim” of such a visual approach to sound-only broadcasting. “The microphone has yet to be built which will bring gestures and wriggles, no matter how seductive and amusing, to your front room.” The home audience was not likely to join in the applause with which the performers were greeted in the studio.

Even in its heyday, some two decades before television finally took off as a mass medium, radio was being compared to the supposedly superior medium that offered images and noise. Television, of course, is no less superior to radio than talkies are to silent films. The creators of art are called upon to explore the limitations and strength of the medium in which they work; but commercial radio rarely received such respect for the arts. In fact, the producers of broadcast entertainment often counted on its alleged defects.

Radio could be tantalizing by virtue of its inability to show, by hinting at rather than revealing. It could be tame or racy, largely depending on the imagination of the listener. Such teasing could be exploited, employed to draw listeners out of their homes and into the theaters, the lack of visuals reminding them that what they heard was a mere substitute, rather than the real thing. It was a concept ideal for advertisers, but at times frustrating to those who were hoping for free home entertainment.

Flicking through the Radio Times, anno June 2006, I was pleased to discover that television, though no longer free, occasionally offers programming that fits the medium as well as the moment: silent movies, the storytelling that is most purely vision. There will be quite a few silent nights in the next few weeks, UK television going eloquently speechless with moving pictures such as Chaplin’s The Immigrant, British classics like A Cottage on Dartmoor, Hindle Wakes, and Piccadilly, as well as Lubitsch’s Eternal Love, starring John Barrymore and Camilla Horn (which is shown on the digital channel artsworld). These small-screenings coincide with a series paying tribute to cinema’s Silent Clowns (Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin, and Lloyd), as well as the biographical drama Stan (as in Stan Laurel), by the aforementioned writer/composer and silent film aficionado Neil Brand.

It is the calm before the storm, the madness that is World Cup soccer. If only the BBC offered an hour of silence for every shout of “Gooooooal.”

Posted on

Loving (and Judging) Harold Lloyd

Well, thanks to a much needed and greatly appreciated contribution to our DVD library (courtesy of my nostalgic pal Danny), I had the good fortune of screening Harold Lloyd’s Movie Crazy (1932) last night. I know, Lloyd did not direct this film, but calling it Clyde Bruckman’s Movie Crazy hardly clarifies matters. In most cases, the ultimate and highest credit is given to the director; but just as often it rightly belongs to the actors, writers, or cinematographers who hold a film together and make it worth watching.

I have always preferred the middle-class milquetoast portrayed by Lloyd over the melancholy tramp created by Chaplin. Perhaps it is Chaplin’s ego that has shattered my belief in his sincerity. Perhaps, being partial to old-time radio, it irked me that Chaplin, unlike Lloyd, kept his eyes closed to broadcast drama. Perhaps, and more likely, it is easier for me to identify with Lloyd’s bespectacled fool coping with modern times than to ingest foolish spectacles steeped in pseudo-Dickensian treacle.

It is tiresome to explain one’s predilections. “What is there to say about what one loves except: I love it, and to keep on saying it?” This is how Roland Barthes expressed the difficulty of writing intelligently—and intelligibly—about our passions. I might flaunt my tastes yet by sharing some of my top-ten lists on this blog, whenever my fount of ideas dries out. Anyway, I decided to cast my vote for Movie Crazy over at the Internet Movie Database. My voting history is on public display for anyone registered at the IMDb.

So, how do I rate motion pictures? It sure is easier to review them than to determine how many stars (or thumbs up or rotten tomatoes) a film warrants (ten stars being the highest rating on IMDb, which I have given only once thus far, in recognition of this previously discussed masterpiece). Supposedly, we are to judge the entire picture, not some aspect of it. Am I to boost or lower a film’s overall ratings if I find it unfairly appraised? Am I to root for my favorite actress? And how do I rate a comedy on a melodrama day?

I have always had difficulties with such seemingly simple tasks as voting by numbers or grading by letters; for the same reason, I have done poorly when being put to the multiple choice test. I would rather share my thoughts about a work of art than declare my approval by adding numbers to a graph. Still, I am going to cast my vote, remembering Harold’s awkward courting of Mary and her alter ego (Constance Cummings, whom I had just seen in Blithe Spirit and, like Lloyd’s character, did not recognize in another role); bearing in mind a few slapstick routines that did not quite come off; recalling the superbly executed finale of the film; and unwilling to dismiss that I watched it with someone I love.