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.

Despite the great excitement I feel about this latest incarnation of SCS, I’m really, really trying not to let it suck all my free time in the few precious hours I have between factory and sleep. And although I’ve gotten lost more than a couple times in the sheer number of WordPress themes, I’m determined to stick with the Horsehead Nebula for as long as I can. It’s a fitting theme because of my reawakened interest in astronomy, as long as it’s not too difficult. I’d rather work on getting SCS back to rights, complete with those monster lists of links and the badges and…and…and…I hope I can address that this weekend in between getting my blood taken, working on my friends’ website, answering email, and all the normal weekend events. Next weekend is shot because I’ve set that aside for taxes, although I suspect it won’t take me too long to accomplish.

So, back to keeping my time in front of the computer from taking over any free time I might have. In order to accomplish this, I’ve reached deep into the movie vault and have come back with silent movies filling my hands. The Phantom of the Opera and The Thief of Bagdad are the two most recent viewings, with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde up next. I was all set to watch a silent version of The Scarlet Letter a few evenings ago, so imagine my surprise and disappointment when I figured out I’d mislabeled it as silent and it was in actuality one of those new-fangled talkies! Oh! I was so disappointed, but the telling of the tale at the factory provided many laughs, especially when I said I said I really prefer the silents over the talkies because I don’t sit on my couch and think people are really talking about me in a secret language only they can understand.

I’ll have plenty of new screencaps being uploaded when I’ve got enough to fill an entire CD; they’re all on the Compaq, which has really become my telly of choice and I’ve wasted enough CDs with only a few images on them at a time. At the rate I’m going, it won’t take long to fill it up. I’m finding more things about film that fascinate me, but that’s a post for another evening.