A quote from Samuel Goldwyn, that renowned movie mogul of years gone by, and very apropos of many of the pictures I’ve uploaded to Flickr recently. Yes, I finally cleaned off the Compaq hard drive of all those screen caps I’ve been collecting and probably had the better part of five hundred. It’s a little excessive, perhaps a little obsessive as well. What more is there to say?

There’ll be more to come…someday. I love movies (I love television, too, but that’s another story). Getting these screen caps seems a natural collection to have, and even more so now that I’ve become so intrigued with the opening sequences of these films that I’ve created a separate Flickr set for them.

It seems to me these opening sequences, as well as the credits can be as telling as the movie itself as to the time period when the movie was made; I’m thinking specifically about movies from the 1930s, when these credits would use a very art deco font and designs - now that I’ve gone off on this very unexpected tangent, I regret not having any to include with this post. I’m not even sure opening sequence is the correct term for what I’m talking about; it’s not so much the credits, where the performers and such are listed (although they, too have their own level of interest), but what the above picture illustrates.

Now that the screen caps are off the Compaq, I gave some thought to starting it all over again, but between you and me, it’s nice to simply sit back and watch a movie, not worrying about anything but the story. Of course, I used the screen cap exercise as a way of remembering what I’d watched so I could update my movie page. It was also a good way for me to keep track of what movies I owned, but it would only be as helpful as my memory allows: I can only remember so much and unfortunately, I can’t remember every Honor Blackman movie in my collection, nor can I recall the filming order of The Thin Man series; to this end, I’ve gone over to dvdspot.com (thanks to Wes for giving me the heads up on this some time ago!) in order to keep track of these myriad DVDs (I plan to totally buck the system there and include my VHS tapes, too - HA!)

The movie page will disappear eventually, I think…but I do reserve the right to change my mind.

I’m already changing my mind about the screen caps - there are a couple I’d to grab tonight, if they show up again in the second episode of Bishôjo Senshi Sailor Moon, the live action version of the anime. Ooh, what a hoot this show is, but I’m hooked already and can’t wait to get back to it tonight.These are from the commercials, but oh my God, I nearly fell off the couch last night when they came on. I’m not sure if the subtitles are correct, but if they are, it’s pretty damn sick, but so sick as to be almost painfully funny in a way.

God help me…how do I end up in the twilight of my thirties (also known as the dark side of my thirties) and suddenly find Sailor fucking Moon so intriguing? Seriously. There’s something wrong with that. It would be understandable if I’d had a previous infatuation with it, but for crying out loud, not this. Of course, this way, I can introduce Star and Bar to it when they’re of an age.

Yes, that must be it.

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.

This is a topic I’ve discussed in earlier incarnations of SCS, but it’s still nagging at my mind, so I think it’s worthy of another post, not to mention I’ve found another example of it recently. I’ve always assumed silent movies are black and white by default and although one copy of Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens in my collection most definitely is not, I still make that assumption. Silent = black and white, and all but two in my collection follow that assumption to the letter…so far. I watched Douglas Fairbanks’ 1924 version of The Thief of Bagdad a couple of weeks ago and was surprised to find another silent movie with color.

Why? I’ve discussed this with a couple of people and can’t find an explanation I can accept. Colorized, thanks to Ted Turner’s evil plot to eradicate the world of anything as dull as a black and white film? I really don’t think that’s it at all; the color found here simply doesn’t look like a clumsy and poor job of it, as is so evident in movies coming from Turner’s mad laboratory. It’s too natural to be Turner’s Frankenstein, too even, and frankly, too professional.

There’s definitely something about these color silent films (perhaps they were lovingly and painstakingly hand-tinted? But why and by who?) I find enchanting, as evidenced by the sheer number of screen captures I’ve posted to flickr (here and here). I suppose one day I’ll find a little time to do some research on the internets, but for now, I almost prefer not to know anything more definite about it.

Up next in what I’ll call Film Obscuria will be title shots and opening credit sequences.