Ummm. Vivien Leigh wins this one, hands (and body) down (under the train). But Frederic March definitely beats Kieron Moore as Count Vronsky.

But I’d like to see this version, too, only because Jacqueline Bisset used to be so hot.

Now I’m off to download the e-text of the book from Project Gutenberg…and hope when the time comes, I can get it on the iPod for my upcoming trip.

…or something very close to it is lurking in the manga section of a local chain bookstore where I spent a few hours last night. I was looking for the second part of Strawberry Panic and since I didn’t see any SP at all, I turned and wandered over to the other side of the shelf and found the Azumanga Daioh! omnibus. I nearly fell out because I was so stoked to find it, and even more so because I totally wasn’t expecting a large, almost 700-page book to stare me in the face and twist my arm to buy it. But buy it I did and then, most predictably, started reading it last night when I got home after a very, very late dinner with friends

I also found an absolutely mesmerizing book about movies in the 1930s, but because I couldn’t find a price on it, I returned it to its place on the shelf. I’ve got so many books about film and its history that it didn’t seem I needed another book. But now, looking at the book’s entry at Amazon, I’m sorry I didn’t plunk down the $40 for it. Well, at least I can get it through Amazon when I can justify spending that much on a book, not to mention another book in the same series, about movies in the 1920s and then one not from the series about the silents.

Even if I didn’t read a single word in the book (and by extension, I’m sure the same would hold true for the companion book about the 1920s, and probably the other one, too) and just pored over the pictures, it would be totally worth the price. But throw in actually reading the commentaries and such and I’d probably get more out of it than I paid.

If I’m not careful, I’ll have to buy another bookcase, even though I have absolutely nowhere to put one more…

1939

I keep finding Carole Lombard movies I’d forgotten about - like this one. I’ve had it for at least a couple of years, if not more and watched it last night because my copy of Plan 9 From Outer Space has gone missing. Or it’s hiding from me. I haven’t decided which it is. I’m not a terribly big fan of Jimmy Stewart, but he’s likable enough in this film. There’s nothing to say about Carole Lombard, naturally. The woman can do no wrong. This movie was interesting because I saw one scene where the scar she had on her left cheek was plainly visible; I’ve read she preferred not to have the left side of her face filmed because of it.

1994

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.

4 October 1924 - 5 April 2008

and each time in Warsaw!”

Vermont, that is. I watched one of my new Carole Lombard movies mentioned in my last post. Nothing Sacred is an entertaining little film, one I’m glad I’ve added to my growing collection of classics (thanks, Mike, for the tip!). The version I received isn’t the best and the color is a bit washed out, but it’s watchable.

I’m giving serious thought to getting rid of my television, since a) I don’t subscribe to cable (shades of Fahrenheit 451?) and probably never will, b) I get no television reception, anyway, and c) in order to get the screen caps I’m collecting and uploading to Flickr, I need to use the computer.

The thing holding me back from that is the immense VHS library I’ve got. Granted, I don’t pull out tapes very often these days, but I would hate to lose the ability to watch what I’ve got because I no longer have a television. I’m sure there’s a way to feed a VCR into a computer, but I’ve no more idea of how to do such a thing than I do change the oil in my car.

I think I’ll Google it now and see what I can find out.

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.

Here it is…the post I hope will cover the myriad observations, conversations, and situations over the past couple of weeks. Although it will be far from complete, here’s to remembering most of them, at least those not having to do with the factory proper. That may be tomorrow’s post.

By far the most noteworthy and exciting conversation took place just two days ago, at the factory, no less. A customer called to teasingly yank my chain about some pieces he’d picked up and then segued into an almost one-sided monologue about wanting to take me to lunch…to meet his sister. Yes, you read that correctly. He wants us to meet because, and since I expressed it so wonderfully in a recently sent email, I will shamelessly quote myself now and hope I don’t break any copyright laws:

…I nearly dropped the phone. “We’ll go to lunch one day!” he exclaimed. “She’s a really neat girl, Mickey Glitter and I think you’ll really like each other…you do know what I’m talking about, right?” I noised some sort of affirmative sound in the back of my throat and he continued, “I figure, if she’s going to go down the road she’s going down…well, never mind. I just want to make sure she knows some good people. And you don’t know how much I care for you and blah blah blah…” That’s about when my ears turned off and I just kept the phone to my ear. It might just be talk, but it might not be. Even if it is, it’s the most exciting thing to happen to me in a long time.

Maybe I should have left that bit for the end of the post, seeing that it really is the biggest event in my life over the past fourteen days. Isn’t it traditional to leave the best to last? Onto other happenings, Home Improvements for Amusement continues: I broke down and bought a real. grown-up. coffee maker. today. It has a clock and can be set to brew so a nice, fresh pot of coffee is ready when I wake up. This may be more difficult than I’d like it to be, since I’m waking up anywhere between half past one and three every morning. I’m glad to have the extra time back, since my over-all productivity is increased, but I really wish I knew how to sleep until at least eight or nine on the weekends…

The Library File Fiasco has been corrected (this is my oh, so clever name for the recent digital clusterfuck I got myself into) and I’ve got about 95% of my computer back to the way it was, albeit with a hell of a lot more disk space available at the end of the day. There’s still a backup program I need to download, plus a firewall utility, but as far as software, that’s all I’ve left to address. It’s another story completely with iTunes, though. Thankfully, my music is all on an external hard drive; my many playlists, though are not and right now are only available on my iPod. I spent some time this morning importing my more popular playlists to iTunes, but I haven’t gotten them all quite yet. I’ve decided to go this route to keep iTunes a little less cluttered than it has been. When one has over three thousand songs on file, it can be a bit painful even just to look at the list.

I’m continuing to work through quite a few movies I’ve downloaded over the last couple of years. So far, the sweetest find in my collection was Swing High, Swing Low - and only because of my recent discovery of and subsequent semi-obsession with Carole Lombard. I went through the same thing very recently with Merle Oberon and Myrna Loy, but my obsession with Merle Oberon lasted only long enough to get me through The Scarlet Pimpernel and Wuthering Heights. On the other hand, my DVD collection now contains almost as many Myrna Loy movies as it does Honor Blackman.

And while I’m on the subject of movies, I have absolutely fallen for Buster Keaton, hook, line, and sinker and no mistake. There are quite a few of his films in my collection, as well and I’ve watched all of them, or at least most of them. Is it fair to call Limelight a Buster Keaton movie, when his was such a small role, so small you’d miss it if you went to get more popcorn? After I read his name in the credits (do you think I would study the DVD packaging and figure it out long before I even put the DVD in the player?), I watched impatiently for the precious few scenes he shared with Charlie Chaplin. And although there were two, maybe three, seeing those two legends of Hollywood perform together for what I’ve read was the first time…ever…made even struggling to find something redeeming about Claire Bloom’s character worth the Herculean effort.

More to follow on the morrow, an hour later now that daylight savings time is kicking into gear. God, I detest this government regulated time change. Maybe I should move to Arizona so I can free myself of it.

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.