A quote from the slapshoe slapping, flat hat wearing man himself. I downloaded quite a few more silent movies this weekend; I’ve pretty much exhausted the silent offerings at the Public Domain Movie Torrents website - there weren’t that many to begin with, but boy, are there some classic bad talkies. Holy cripe! It’s a hoot and some of them are definitely up for a post some day.

I’ve been poking round the Internet Archive more and more; the site has quite a collection of silent movies. Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, the quality of these downloads isn’t always the best, but typically, I’m not really too much concerned with that type of thing enough to eschew the site’s seemingly endless offerings.

The officially oldest movie in my collection now is the Irwin-Rice Kiss, made in 1896. Granted, it’s not a movie per se - complete with a storyline, but the players, Irwin and Rice move, so it’s a movie, right? I may pop this bit of cinema history into the computer tonight and watch it, since I haven’t yet, mainly because I managed to misplace the disc about the time I ejected if from the computer on Sunday night and just found it this morning.

I started watching the 1927 version of The Cat and The Canary last night; I’ve tried watching it a few times in the past, but it always managed to put me to sleep. This time around, though, I’m not going to let that happen because I really do want to see it through, not to mention it’s one of those oddly colored silent movies I find so absolutely mesmerizing. This movie has been remade a handful of times - the earliest version is what I’m currently watching. Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard rolled with it twelve years later with some slight changes to character names. Unfortunately, the last time I looked for this version on Amazon, it was not available on DVD; I see now it is, for Region Two and for a bit more money than I’d like to spend on it.

Forty years later, Radley Metzger got his hands on the story - this was the first version I’d ever seen and I’ve watched it more than a few times since. In fact, I have this on tape and DVD (not my original plan), believe it or not, thanks to my goal of owning every single Honor Blackman movie I can get my hands on. Naturally, this is my preferred version because of Honor Blackman - my favorite actress - ever! That she portrays a lesbian (Strange Cousin Susan) involved with Olivia Hussey doesn’t detract from the movie at all…except the ewww factor gets notched up about million levels when you realize they’re cousins. But after you recover from that, you may realize those two are really good together.

I’ve veered so terribly from my intended topic that I don’t see how I can get back on track with it now; I hope to return to it soon - perhaps between now and then, I can corral my thoughts a bit more and appear more focused than I typically do.