The most significant extant film to be made in Chicago after the Lumiere brothers’ 1896 Chicago Police Parade is probably the Edison Manufacturing Company’s Corner Madison and State Streets, Chicago. Made only one year after the Lumieres’ pioneering effort, the Edison film, copyrighted in July of 1897, is a fifty-foot, one shot actuality that depicts exactly what the title states. However, like most of “Edison’s movies,” Corner Madison and State Streets, Chicago was not made by Thomas Edison himself but rather by his favorite director/cinematographer team of James H. White and William Heise. Although both men had been prolific in the motion picture business since the pre-projection days of 1890, it does not appear as though their technique had much improved in the ensuing seven years. When viewed alongside of Chicago Police Parade, with its incredible use of depth of field and impeccably composed diagonal lines, Corner Madison and State Streets, Chicago offers an object lesson in the difference between Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers (i.e., the difference between approaching movies as a business vs. approaching them as an art).
Corner Madison and State Streets, Chicago shows a jumbled mass of people, horses and trolley cars in Chicago’s Loop as they hurriedly move in every conceivable direction at the same time. Some of the subjects are carrying large placards advertising “BOATING” and “ELECTRIC POOL.” Just as Chicago Police Parade is of interest because it proves that 99% of all Chicago cops had mustaches in the late 19th century, so too is Corner Madison and State Streets, Chicago of interest because it proves that 100% of all Chicago civilians, including women, wore hats during this same era (and in the middle of summer no less!). In terms of style, it appears that White and Heise have taken little care with the composition of the image, which looks particularly chaotic when compared to the clean lines and artful compositions associated with the Lumieres. Still, however slapdash its technique, it is of tremendous interest (like so many films of its era) for being an evocative portrait of a specific time and place.
The complete description of Corner Madison and State Streets, Chicago from the Edison Films Catalogue reads:
“The busiest corner in Chicago. Cable cars and street traffic of all descriptions. Hundreds of shoppers. Fine perspective view looking north toward the Masonic Temple. 50 feet. $7.50.”
The film can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube, courtesy of the Library of Congress, here (although at only 25 seconds, the speed of this particular transfer appears to be too fast):
It should be noted that Andrew Erish, in his excellent new biography Col. William N. Selig, the Man Who Invented Hollywood, claims thatCorner Madison and State Streets, Chicagowas a Selig Polyscope film that Edison pirated and copyrighted as his own. Most other sources, however, cite it as an authentic Edison film. Edison copyrighted Corner Madison and State Streets, Chicago along with several other Chicago-shot films on July 31, 1897 (Sheep Run, Chicago Stockyards, Armour’s Electric Trolley, Cattle Driven to Slaughter, etc.) Selig Polyscope copyrighted the similarly-titled State and Madison Sts., Chicago in 1903.
The earliest extant film by Chicago’s Essanay Studios following the company’s debut short An Awful Skate from 1907 (a print of which can still be viewed at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York) is probably their 1909 production of Mr. Flip. Directed by Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson, Mr. Flip is an important and influential slapstick comedy (it is the earliest such film included in Kino Video’s 2002 Slapstick Encyclopedia DVD box set) and also a good showcase for the comedic acting chops of Ben Turpin. Turpin, who had come a long way as a performer since his film debut in An Awful Skate (which merely saw him crashing into other people on roller skates), plays the title character as a lascivious cad who repeatedly pops up in various establishments to sexually harass the female employees. In each instance, the women turn the tables on “Mr. Flip” by inflicting physical pain on and/or humiliating him, causing him to flee.
The film is similar to An Awful Skate in that almost every scene features a gag that plays out in a single unedited shot before cutting to a new location and also a new shot. The difference is that in Mr. Flip each location features an elaborate, impressively designed set; Mr. Flip is shown attempting to caress or kiss the cheeks of various women (a female bartender, a seamstress, a telephone operator, a barber, etc.) in each of their places of work. In succession, he finds himself unceremoniously escorted out of the bar by a bouncer with a dolly cart, stabbed in the rear with a pair of scissors, smothered with shaving cream, sprayed with seltzer water, etc. Aside from the intriguing way the plot opens itself to a feminist reading, the film is probably most noteworthy today for its final scene, where a woman working behind the counter of a diner responds to Mr. Flip’s advances by smashing a pie in his face. This is believed to be the first time the famous “pie in the face” gag was depicted in a film comedy.
In 1909, the language of cinema had not yet evolved to the point where directors were routinely cutting to close-ups of actors’ faces during the emotional high points of a scene. D.W. Griffith’s innovative use of extensive close-ups in The Lonedale Operator was still two years away. The one close-up in Mr. Flip is an insert shot of a woman sticking a tiny pair of scissors through the bottom of a wicker chair, a detail that would have gone unnoticed in the wider shots that otherwise characterize the movie. Still, in spite of the dearth of close-ups, which make it impossible to clearly see Ben Turpin’s famously crossed eyes, the comedian’s performance nonetheless manages to be effective. Though the film is lighthearted, Mr. Flip’s nervous, jittery energy and his inability to keep his hands off of the female characters make him truly annoying and thus fully deserving of the comeuppance he receives at the end of every scene. It is also worth noting that Mr. Flip’s costume contains elements that would become part of the iconic looks of future screen comedians; his thick, obviously fake mustache predates Groucho Marx’s famous greasepaint mustache by many years (though both mustaches can be said to have a common root in vaudeville), and his flat-top straw hat is uncannily similar to the one that would become forever identified with Buster Keaton beginning in the 1920s.
Mr. Flip can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube:
Julian Grant is the Chicago-based writer/director of F*ckload of Scotch Tape, an impressive, no-budget neo-noir/musical that will receive its world premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival next week. As I noted in my capsule review from last Monday, the film that has already come to be known affectionately as FLOST is made with a fuckload of filmmaking heart. I recently interviewed Julian about this gonzo movie, a guaranteed cult item in the making.
Julian Grant directing Graham Jenkins in F*ckload of Scotch Tape
MGS: As I understand it, you began making cable TV movies as a director-for-hire in the 90s, then became a director of microbudget indies after you started teaching film production at Columbia College a few years ago. What lessons did you learn from your cable experience that you’ve been able to apply to your work as an indie director? Also, can you clarify for me what you see as the relationship between your roles as teacher and indpendent filmmaker?
JG: I’ve made a lot of movies over the years and always had to deliver maximum bang for the buck. From kickboxing dramas for Lionsgate to high-action mini-series for Syfy or romantic weepies for Lifetime, I was tied to the world of ‘movies’ – cinematic product that was market driven and defined by advertising, cast and proven formula. It’s not a bad world – but it’s a limiting one for an artist sometimes. As I became a full time professor, I was able to return to my love of ‘film’ and as such make anything that I could afford. It meant that I had to eschew the cheese trays and multi-camera world of moviemaking and dial into the more personal world of DIY LO-FI filmmaking. Worlds became character driven and I moved away from readily identifiable genre and market driven formula. of course, the irony is – the more you ignore the pretty girl, the more she wants you.
MGS:FLOST is a great neo-noir. A lot of big budget Hollywood movies try for a “noir feel” by using voice-over narration and nighttime exteriors but they miss capturing the true spirit of those original films from the 40s and 50s. FLOST reminds me of great b-movies like Detour in the way that it captures a sordid atmosphere of sleaziness and rank desperation. How much of that mood comes from the Jed Ayres’ stories on which the film is based and how much of it comes from your love of classic movies of this genre?
JG: Jed’s a great writer and the tone of his work inspired me to rework it into a cinematic world very reminiscent of Ed Ulmer and the poverty row pictures of yesterday. Dennis Potter (Pennies From Heaven, The Singing Detective) from the UK was an even greater influence and FLOST is very much a love letter to the palooka who can’t get a break and has to fight and sing his way out of trouble. Imagine a 30s version of Fight Club mashed up with Glee, and you’ve got a sample of what I was trying to do.
MGS: A couple of other films I thought of while watching FLOST were John Boorman’s Point Blank and Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy. As in the former, there is a plot involving a protagonist beating the hell out of one person after another in pursuit of a bag of money, and complex editing schemes including a montage that flashes back to all of the moments of violence throughout the film. As in the latter, there is the revenge theme as well as the use of a hammer as an important prop in one of the fight scenes. Were either of these movies a conscious influence on you?
JG:Point Blank is definitely a reference and the gritty ethos of all Asian action cinema runs through this as well. Park’s Oldboy is a friggin’ masterwork and his ‘hammer moment’ is just lovely – in a horrible way. Editing and violence go together like chocolate and peanut butter and my editor, Jason Robert Becker and I had long talks about what we wanted to do and just mix-mastered the hell out of everything to represent state of mind, time frame and emotional resonance. Who says editing is just to show who does what and where?
MGS: My favorite aspect of FLOST was your decision to turn it into a musical. There is something incongruous, funny and yet strangely poignant about baby-faced Benji lip-synching the songs of gravel-voiced Kevin Quain. What made you feel that this risky aesthetic choice would be right for this gritty story material?
JG: Musicals have always been a way for the poor and downtrodden to make light of the steaming pile that is their lives. The great work of Busby Berkeley during the 1930s, the British war musicals, the rock operas based on the music of The Who (Tommy and Quadrophenia) – all were seminal works for me as a child growing into this mania for cinema – and so with my dear friend Kevin Quain being gracious enough to let me raid his canon, it was a lovely way to show the fear, contempt, anger and love that is usually expressed through exposition. Fuck reality. This is cinema. We want a world that transports us away. To keep singing like a champ when we are hellbent and gutter bound.
MGS: I have a feeling that this film will go over well with the gay community. Benji is a character of ambiguous sexuality with self-confessed “daddy issues” and your camera seems to show more appreciation for the male body than the female body in the way that you shoot your actors. How did you and Graham Jenkins, who gives a fearless performance as Benji, approach the complex sexuality of this character?
JG: Benji is a twink. A flesh hammer of sorts for the gay crowd. He is eroticized as is every aspect of this film. I want to feel the fuck in this film – and you do. It’s sweaty and wet and smelly and heart-breaking at the same time. It’s the smell of bleach wiping down the sex club walls. Nostalgic and astringent at the same time. A razor blade in a dildo. The sort of work that demands you to participate and feel a little bit queasy afterwards. GJ is the next James Dean – and every gay man wants to fuck James Dean.
MGS: The stylized visuals are a real treat throughout the film even though you obviously had a limited budget and resources. One of my favorite scenes involves Benji putting on make-up before going to a club while what looks like found footage of old movies and TV shows is playing behind him. Where did that footage come from and how did you construct that scene?
JG: I’m a cinephile. Cut me and I bleed cinema. I draw from my extensive library of vintage materials (over 3000 hours) and sources dear to me. I use the old to inform the new and like to reference materials and show the audiences my homage honestly. Fuck thievery like some filmmakers who blatantly copy old pictures and call it their own. I stand up and show you the reel thing.
MGS: Following the world premiere at CIFF, what distribution plans do you have for FLOST? What is next up for you as a filmmaker?
JG:FLOST does the festival circuit for 18 months and plays wherever anyone has a sense of humor and an airline ticket for me and a place to stay. I’ll sell it directly, take a big check if offered or give it away on the web as a 16 part web series. The old model of distribution is dead – but that doesn’t mean I won’t roll over if someone is silly enough to offer me real money up front. Not stupid money – just enough to pay back costs and give cast and crew something for Xmas.
I’m shooting Sweet Leaf in Oct – Dec in the Chicagoland area and then moving onto another feature I’ve just been offered to direct for Summer 2013. I’ve got an animation series currently in negotiation in LA and lots and lots and lots of other ideas for anyone looking to get onboard the crazy train. Sweet Leaf is another Neo-Noir bad boy (and girl) fist in the face and I hope that fans of FLOST will dig it.
You can view the trailer for FLOST here:
You can purchase tickets for the world premiere of FLOST at CIFF here.
As someone who has been attending the Chicago International Film Festival regularly since 1993, I can honestly say that the forthcoming 48th edition offers a shockingly good array of films, maybe the best I’ve ever seen. Not only will CIFF soon play host to regional premieres by major international auteurs like Leos Carax (Holy Motors), Abbas Kiarostami (Like Someone in Love), Raul Ruiz (The Night in Front), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Mekong Hotel) and Jan Troell (The Last Sentence), it also snagged an impressive number of buzzed about prize-winners coming out of this year’s biggest European film fests, from Berlin (the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die) to Cannes (Matteo Garrone’s Reality, Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux, Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills) to Venice (Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air). And this is to say nothing of the exciting titles on offer that are more off the beaten path, including documentaries (Room 237, The Final Member), experimental animation (Consuming Spirits), cult items (John Dies at the End, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files) and strong local work (F*ckload of Scotch Tape). At the 48th CIFF there is truly something for everyone. Below is the first of several previews I’ll be offering of the festival, which begins on October 11th and runs through the 25th. Any of my students who attend any of the screenings (and staple their ticket stubs to a one to two page screening report) will receive extra credit. Refer to the extra credit page of your course website for more information.
For the complete line-up, as well as ticket info, showtimes and directions to festival venues, visit: www.chicagofilmfestival.com
The Last Sentence (Jan Troell, Sweden/Norway) – U.S. Premiere
Rating: 7.8
Torgny Segerstedt was a “failed theologian” who became one of Sweden’s most respected – and controversial – journalists after he began crusading against Hitler in a left-wing newspaper run by friends in 1933. Segerstedt continued this mission undaunted for over a decade even though both the Prime Minister and the King of Sweden tried to convince him to tone down his rhetoric for fear of a German reprisal. While a powerful reminder that silence is acquiescence, this is not just another WWII-related history lesson but also a powerful character study that focuses on Segerstedt’s intimate relationships with three women (his mother, his wife and his mistress), all of whom appear as literal ghosts at one point or another in the movie. Beautifully shot in crisp black and white digital, the latest from 81-year old Swedish master Jan Troell (The Emigrants, Everlasting Moments) has some of the stateliness, grace and intense interiority of late period Carl Dreyer. Troell is scheduled to attend the screenings on 10/19 and 10/20.
F*ckload of Scotch Tape (Julian Grant, USA) – World Premiere
Rating: 7.3
In this impressive Chicago-shot crime tale, Benji, a petty criminal who resembles Macaulay Culkin on steroids, earns $50,000 for his part in a kidnapping plot only to find that he’s been double-crossed by the man who put him up to it. Writer/director Julian Grant shows an appreciation for the sordid atmosphere of rank desperation that characterized the best PRC programmers of the 1940s but updates it for the 21st century by adding a healthy dose of homoeroticism as well as an unexpected string of musical numbers; the film develops a darkly funny, singularly nutty quality as the fresh-faced Benji incongruously lip-synchs the songs of gravel-voiced Tom Waits sound-alike Kevin Quain while embarking upon his bloody rampage of revenge. With minimal production values and money but a few well-chosen visual motifs (a lollipop, a mask, the eponymous adhesive) and a fuckload of filmmaking heart, Grant has deftly crafted 84 minutes of brutal, sleazy neo-noir fun. Grant is scheduled to attend all three screenings of the film.
Consuming Spirits (Chris Sullivan, USA) – Chicago Premiere
Rating: 7.2
This experimental animated epic concerns the intertwined destinies of characters named after colors (Blue, Gray, Violet) in a small Midwestern town over a period of several decades but only gradually does something like a narrative emerge from the carefully honed rural/Gothic atmosphere. Imagine Tim Burton at his early imaginative best making a film adaptation of A Prairie Home Companion and you will have an inkling of what writer/director Chris Sullivan (perhaps best known to local cinephiles for playing the creepy guru in Melika Bass’ Shoals) is up to. The consistently inventive visuals (the images are comprised of cutout, stop-motion and traditional hand-drawn animation) are a delight from beginning to end even if I must confess that at 136 minutes this tested my endurance. But given that Sullivan shot Consuming Spirits in 16mm and HD over a 15 year time span, he brings a whole new and awe-inspiring meaning to the word “painstaking.” I certainly enjoyed the end result more than most of the animated films I’ve seen from Hollywood in recent years. Sullivan will attend the screening on 10/16.
Next to Charlie Chaplin’s His New Job, the most important surviving film made by Chicago’s Essanay Studios, and arguably the masterpiece of all of their extant movies, is From the Submerged, a drama released in November of 1912 that was written and directed by Theodore Wharton and starring the beautiful Ruth Stonehouse.
Theodore Wharton, a fascinating figure virtually unknown among cinephiles today, began his career as a director for Pathe Freres in 1910 and had the reputation of being something of an innovator. He was one of a crop of new directors that Essanay Studios had hired following an exodus of many of their top talent to the American Film Manufacturing Company. Wharton’s 1912 Essanay production of Sunshine, now lost, made a big impression on critics at the time for its creative use of superimpositions; one scene featured a character making a confession to a priest where the story of the confession appeared as an image within the same frame as the shot of the guy telling the story. A similarly visually flamboyant device serves as the emotional climax to Wharton’s From the Submerged, also from 1912, a movie that more than lives up to its evocative and poetic title.
From the Submerged tells the story of a young, homeless man (E.H. Calvert) who is prevented from committing suicide in a public park by a complete stranger, a young woman (Ruth Stonehouse) who reminds him that God loves him. In a melodramatic plot twist, the young man soon inherits a fortune and, two years later, becomes engaged to a wealthy socialite. With several of their friends, the couple attends a “slumming party” where they visit a bread line that offers handouts to the homeless. The young man confesses his destitute past to his fiancée, who laughs and says, “How funny.” Realizing her shallowness, the young man decides to break off the relationship. Remembering the woman who saved his life, the young man then dons his former shabby attire and returns to the public park where he almost killed himself years earlier. There, he runs into the same woman from the beginning of the film and reminds her of their previous encounter. After a quickie wedding, he takes her to his home where she realizes, for the first time, that her husband is actually a wealthy man.
While the plot of From the Submerged is similar to that of the contrived Victorian-style melodramas common to the era (a lot of narrative twists are crammed into a running time of less than ten minutes), the film is sensitively directed and well acted. There is also a lot more psychological and emotional complexity than what one typically finds in a movie from 1912. A scene of the young man tearing up a photograph of his fiancée, for instance, visually represents the end of their engagement. While this is, in itself, a familiar movie image, what really impresses about the moment is the way that E.H. Calvert slowly and sadly shakes his head while tearing up the picture, a subtle and exquisite bit of film acting. This is immediately followed by an even more impressive moment where the young man slowly starts to nod as he remembers his encounter with the young woman in the park, a flashback shot of which is superimposed above his head (a la Sunshine).
The film’s social criticism, the ironic juxtaposition of wealthy and poor characters, the bread line scenes, the musical editing rhythms and the use of an internally rhyming structure (e.g., bookending the film with scenes in the same park) all show the obvious influence of D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking A Corner in Wheat from 1909. In turn, the opening scene of From the Submerged may have influenced the Estonian-born French director Dmitri Kirsanoff, whose avant-garde masterpiece Menilmontant from 1926 (recently listed in my “Silent French Cinema Primer”) features a nearly identical sequence in which a character is prevented from committing suicide by a stranger in a park.
From the Submerged can be viewed in its entirety on Dailymotion below. Chicagoans should take note that the climactic park scene was shot beneath “Suicide Bridge,” the now-extinct high bridge over the Lincoln Park lagoon. The exterior of the man’s home at the end was almost certainly shot on Argyle Street in Uptown directly across from Essanay Studios.
So far, the only films I’ve discussed in my Secret History of Chicago Movies posts have been those produced between the years 1896 and 1953, or roughly the first half of the twentieth century. The reason for this is simple: it’s easier to write about under-appreciated or unknown Chicago movies by digging into the distant past. I’m majorly shifting gears today however to write about an extraordinary new Chicago-shot short film that recently debuted on the web: Melika Bass’ Varðeldur, the latest music video in an ambitious anthology project engineered by everyone’s favorite ethereal Icelandic pop band Sigur Ros. The intriguing concept behind the band’s ongoing series known as the “Valtari Mystery Film Experiment” is that they have commissioned 12 different directors, including such luminaries as Ramin Bahrani, Alma Har’el and John Cameron Mitchell, to make music videos for the eight tracks on their latest album. According to the band’s website, each filmmaker was given the “same modest budget and asked to create whatever comes into their head when they listen to songs from Valtari. The idea is to bypass the usual artistic approval process and allow people utmost creative freedom.”
Melika Bass, readers of this blog may remember, is an internationally acclaimed experimental filmmaker based in Chicago whom I interviewed in 2011. Bass has described her contribution to “Valtari” on her own website as a “film portrait of an unstable entity in a haunted vessel, drawn into and floating away from a siren song.” As that description suggests, it is less of a music video than a legitimate experimental short in which the images happen to interact with the gorgeous instrumental Sigur Ros song “Varðeldur” in ways both direct and oblique. The film, shot on good old Super 16mm stock (oh yeah!), depicts Croatian performance artist Selma Banich doing a kind of interpretive dance to the music in an interior location that looks simultaneously industrial, dilapidated, warmly lit and spartan. Banich, wearing a beige colored sweater and skirt and sporting red hair that curiously fits into an overall graphic pattern with what look like rust stains on the wall behind her, doesn’t dance in the traditional sense so much as explore the space around her by moving her body in an evocative and stylized fashion. At first her movements, like the film’s editing and the song itself, are slow and plodding. At one point, she extends her left hand and begins wiggling her fingers in a manner that seems to correspond to the song’s gently tinkling piano notes. Varðeldur‘s undeniable emotional high point comes later, in two consecutive takes where Banich shakes her head from side to side. As the speed of her head movements increase to a whiplash-like velocity, her image transforms into a sepia smear of shocking abstract beauty. In the film’s penultimate shot, Banich sinks languidly into a shadow in a corner of the frame like a character out of a German Expressionist movie. This is followed by an overhead shot of Banich slowly collapsing to the floor, an appropriate image of finality on which to end this mysterious and strangely poignant film.
I’ll be surprised and pleased if I see a more vital 6 and a half minutes of filmmaking anywhere else for the remainder of this year. You can check out Varðeldur in its entirety below:
Today’s post is a continuation of last week’s essay concerning Edwin S. Porter’s landmark 1903 production of The Great Train Robbery and the subsequent career of its star “Broncho Billy” Anderson.
The Great Train Robbery had its world premiere at Huber’s Museum in New York City on December 1, 1903, where it played at the end of a vaudeville show. Legend has it that the audience was so enthusiastic they demanded the film be run again . . . and again before they would leave the theater. The following week, it opened in eleven theaters in the greater New York City area. It is impossible to know the exact box office figures but, by all accounts, the movie was a commercial phenomenon. After watching the film with one of these early audiences and noting their rousing reception, Gilbert Anderson said to himself, “That’s it. It’s going to be the picture business for me. The future had no end.” (Brownlow) The Edison Manufacturing Company likewise quickly realized that they had something special on their hands as this description from a 1904 catalogue indicates:
“This sensational and highly tragic subject will certainly make a decided ‘hit’ whenever shown. In every respect we consider it absolutely the superior of any moving picture ever made. It has been posed and acted in faithful duplication of the genuine ‘Hold Ups’ made famous by various outlaw bands in the far West, and only recently the East has been shocked by several crimes of the frontier order, which fact will increase the popular interest in this great Headline Attraction.” (EDISON FILMS CATALOGUE, NO. 200)
One of the side effects of the film’s popularity was that other filmmakers immediately began to copy its techniques (one even remaking it shot for shot) as well as individual moments: train robberies, fights on top of trains, and scenes of men being made to dance by having their feet shot at soon became standard conventions of the genre. Another side effect was that everyone associated with the film found themselves in demand for future motion picture productions. Although The Great Train Robbery, like all movies of its era, does not feature credits, a movie star was nonetheless born: Anderson, who played three different roles in the film (a robber, a train passenger who dies a spectacularly melodramatic death and the aforementioned man who is “made to dance”), would change his moniker again, this time to “Broncho Billy” Anderson, and become the cinema’s first true cowboy star.
Anderson’s “spectacularly melodramatic” death in The Great Train Robbery:
Historian Kalton C. Lahue notes that it was both ironic and fitting, given the “make believe” nature of the movies, that its first western star was born with the “unlikely” (and, though Lahue doesn’t say it, Jewish) name of Aronson and that, at the time The Great Train Robbery was made, he couldn’t ride a horse and had never travelled “west” of Chicago. This irony is precisely what Clint Eastwood had in mind when he directed and starred in the poignant and highly personal 1980 comedy Bronco Billy, the fictional story of a New Jersey shoe salesman who decides to become the headliner of a modern day “Wild West show.” In an age of mechanical reproduction, long after the west had actually been settled, the story of the real Broncho Billy must have resonated with most of the “authentic” cowboy stars that followed in his footsteps.
Following The Great Train Robbery, Anderson starred in three more Edison westerns in 1904 and 1905 (Western Stage Coach Hold Up, A Brush Between Cowboys and Indians and Train Wreckers), all of which provided variations on the basic formula of their first big hit. But Anderson had his own ideas about what constituted “western authenticity” and wanted more creative control. In 1905 he left Biograph to work for their chief competitor Vitagraph. It was there that Anderson directed his first film, Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman.
The financial success of Anderson’s directorial debut led to an offer the following year by Colonel William Selig, who was willing to allow Anderson to both direct and star in his own movies. After making a few Chicago-shot shorts, Anderson convinced Selig to allow him to shoot a series of westerns and “stunt comedies” on location in Colorado. All of these were released in the spring and summer of 1907 and boosted Selig Polyscope’s profits considerably. (Of these, His First Ride and The Bandit King still exist today as fragments).
Anderson and Selig, however, were not a good fit. Anderson thought his brief but successful run at Selig Polyscope meant that he deserved more money but Selig thought differently. Anderson quit. Upon returning to Chicago, Anderson met George Spoor, whose Magniscope projector had made the inventor a fortune. In a 1915 interview with Motion Picture Magazine, Anderson recalled convincing Spoor to start a Chicago-based studio that would rival the Selig Polyscope Company. According to Anderson, the agreement was that Spoor would put up the cash and Anderson would do “the work.” In the summer of 1907, they incorporated as The Peerless Film Manufacturing Company, setting up headquarters at 496 N. Wells Street (1300 N. Wells in modern numbering).
Just as Spoor and Anderson were getting their new company underway, Thomas Edison was implementing a “licensing system” that would maximize the profits from the many motion picture camera and projector patents he owned. Soon, Selig, Spoor and Anderson and most of the nation’s other major studios (Kalem, Pathe Freres and Vitagraph) joined forces with Edison to form The Motion Picture Patents Company (also known as the MPPC or Edison Trust) in something of a Faustian bargain. This trust would control the industry for a decade by suing any motion picture producers who used cameras that allegedly violated Edison’s patents – but it also inadvertently opened the door to new innovations in filmmaking and became one of the reasons why southern California would ultimately become America’s filmmaking capital.
Anderson and Spoor recruited their cross-eyed janitor, Ben Turpin, to star in their first movie, the Anderson-directed stunt-comedy An Awful Skate; or, The Hobo on Rollers. The scenario, reminiscent of His First Ride, features Turpin crashing into things while roller-skating down Wells Street. The scenes may have been staged, but there was little acting involved – Turpin had no idea how to skate.
Ben Turpin, cross-eyed janitor-turned-movie star:
Ironically, the same sort of piracy that Spoor engaged in as an exhibitor became a problem for him immediately as a producer, as independent distributors began duping and circulating their own prints of An Awful Skate. Newspaper ads for the first Peerless movie were run with the following disclaimer: “P.S. ‘An Awful Skate’ has been copied by a rival concern who employed spies to follow our camera. Our picture is the original and best value for your money. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.”
Produced for only a couple hundred dollars, it has been estimated that An Awful Skate made between five and ten thousand dollars in profits in spite of the “bootleg situation.” The new influx of cash saw the studio change its name and move into a much larger complex of buildings on the city’s far north side. Rechristened Essanay Studios (a phonetic spelling of the first letters of the names of Spoor and Anderson – “S an’ A”), the studio opened for business in earnest in early 1908 at the address of 1333-45 W. Argyle Street in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood (St. Augustine’s College today). The rivalry between Selig Polyscope and Essanay was on – but that will be the subject of another post.
The Great Train Robbery is available on Kino Video’s essential The Movies Begin Vol. 1 DVD. It can also be viewed on YouTube here:
Works Cited
1. Brownlow, Kevin. Hollywood, the Pioneers. New York: Knopf, 1979. Print.
2. Lahue, Kalton C. Winners of the West: the Sagebrush Heroes of the Silent Screen,. South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1971. Print.
A lot of classic American movies – from F.W. Murnau’s City Girl to Howard Hawks’ Scarface to Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot – take place either partially or entirely in Chicago but the majority of them were unfortunately shot on Hollywood studio backlots. More often than not, filmmakers wanting to depict my fair city during Hollywood’s golden age had to settle for recreating the city’s Board of Trade, tenements, diners and outdoor ‘El’ Station entrances on elaborate sets. As I mentioned in an earlier post, motion picture production in Chicago did pick up significantly in the film noir boom years of the post-WWII era. One terrific example that I recently stumbled across for the first time is Paramount’s Union Station from 1950, a tense little crime thriller starring the great duo of William Holden and Barry Fitzgerald. Although set in Chicago, most of it was shot in Hollywood with Los Angeles’ iconic Union Station standing in for the title location in the Windy City. (The film actually contains such a deft use of L.A. locations that it is prominently featured in Thom Andersen’s brilliant “gray market” documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself.) However, at least some prominent location work took place in Chicago; the movie’s first third features an exciting daylight chase between cops and kidnappers on the Chicago Transit Authority’s now-defunct Stockyard Branch Line and the the final action climax takes place in the Chicago Tunnel Company’s underground railroad tunnels. Anyone interested in seeing “old Chicago” on film can’t afford to pass up Union Station for these two scenes alone. Fortunately, there’s plenty else to recommend the movie too.
The primary virtues of Union Station are its efficiency, tightness and speed. Directed by former ace cinematographer Rudolph Mate (who once upon a time was Carl Theodore Dreyer’s D.P. of choice), this noir gem is expertly shot and paced and, as a piece of storytelling, does not contain an ounce of flab. As a director, Mate may not have been a great artist but he was a very good craftsman and, God knows, Hollywood has always needed those too. Union Station starts on a train and it fittingly also moves like one: Joyce Willecombe (Nancy Olson), a secretary commuting home from work via rail, spies two suspicious-looking men, one of whom appears to be wearing a gun. Anticipating the CTA’s “If you see something, say something” ad campaign by about sixty years, Joyce reports her concern to a skeptical train conductor, who turns the matter over to railroad cop William Calhoun (Holden). Calhoun also has misgivings but because he is clearly the best and most dedicated railroad cop on earth, he soon finds out that the suspicious men are at the center of a kidnapping plot involving the blind teenage daughter of Joyce’s boss, local millionaire Henry Murchison. Calhoun soon finds himself teaming up with a local cop named Inspector Donnelly (Fitzgerald) in order to apprehend the kidnappers and return the girl safely to her father – all within a briskly paced 80 minutes.
Barry Fitzgerald, William Holden and the “Venetian blind effect”:
Alfred Hitchcock famously said that a film was only as good as its villain and Union Station has a memorably nasty baddie at its core: Joe Beacom (Lyle Bettger), the lead kidnapper, is a sadist who takes delight in tormenting the terrified blind girl in his clutches and also has no qualms about shooting his own girlfriend (the great character actress Jan Sterling) when she gets in his way. But the cops in Union Station can be pretty nasty too; Calhoun and Donnelly recklessly break into one suspect’s apartment and, in order to get pressing information from another, completely disregard his civil liberties by threatening to throw him in front of an oncoming train – more than twenty years before Dirty Harry. Through parallel editing, this allows director Mate to generate suspense about what will happen when these characters eventually do collide in the memorable underground tunnel climax. Fortunately, although Joyce is young and attractive and sticks around until the end of the film in order to help the police, there is no real sense that she and Calhoun are going get together romantically (as would unquestionably happen if the film were to be remade today). Union Station is too much of a work of termite art par excellence to allow itself to be saddled with a superfluous love subplot.
There is, however, one scene where the movie slows down just long enough to allow us to get to know the lead characters a bit better. Calhoun and Donnelly retire to the latter’s home for a drink and conversation the night before the final showdown with Beacom. (Since Barry Fitzgerald was Hollywood’s favorite drunken leprechaun, such an alcoholic detour is pretty much a foregone conclusion from the film’s beginning.) As Donnelly adroitly prepares hot rum toddies, Calhoun informs him, “I’m a cop twenty four hours a day. All I care about is my railroad station.” Donnelly’s sensible reply is, “A good cop has to be working full time but a man has to be careful he doesn’t become all cop.” It is a quiet, touching scene, the only one in the movie that is not there expressly to move the plot forward and yet somehow it makes the entire movie.
If you decide to watch Union Station and feel like enjoying a hot toddy along with Chicago’s finest, here is what appears to be Inspector Donnelly’s recipe:
- a shot of rum
- 1 teaspoon of sugar
- hot water to taste
- one clove
- a cinnamon stick
Union Station is available on DVD in a serviceable edition from Olive films. Thanks to David Hanley for bringing this “Chicago film” to my attention.
Chicago Plays Itself in Union Station:
Death in the Stockyards:
The Chicago Tunnel Company’s Underground Railroad Tunnels:
“…from the Honky Tonks to the penthouses…the creeps, the hoods, the killers come out to war with the city!”
- Original tagline for City That Never Sleeps
Longtime readers of this blog know that prior to the rise of Hollywood, Chicago was the unlikely center of American film production in the early silent era. Unfortunately, in the decade following the U.S. Justice Department’s 1915 dissolution of Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, when powerful Chicago studios like Essanay and Selig Polyscope closed up shop and moved to California for good, my fair city went from being the nation’s movie capital to a veritable cinematic ghost town. Then, the arrival of “talkies” helped the major Hollywood studios to consolidate their power and location shooting (i.e., shooting outside of southern California) became virtually unheard of in the early sound era.
It wouldn’t be until after the Second World War that a gritty new documentary-style aesthetic would become popular in American cinema, spurred on by the success of the massively influential New York-shot film noirThe Naked City in 1948. Soon afterwards, Hollywood crews came to the Windy City for evocative crime films like Call Northside 777, which is often cited (with some justification) as the best “Chicago movie” of all time. I recently however stumbled upon a more obscure, lower budget Chicago noir from a few years later that, for me, easily takes that title from under Northside‘s nose – the 1953 Republic Pictures production of City That Never Sleeps directed by one John H. Auer.
I had heard of the title for years but was unaware of its significance until a piece in Film Comment by Dave Kehr last year offered a reappraisal of Auer as a forgotten auteur and cited City as his “masterpiece.” After tracking the film down on a dubiously legal DVD (the transfer I saw had a television station logo pop up occasionally in the bottom right hand corner), I can only concur with Kehr’s assessment. Aficionados of Chicago movies and/or film noir cannot afford to miss this small, quirky B-movie gem, whose tight budget and extensive use of real locations (which, judging by reviews from the time, may have seemed a liability) only serve to add an impressive feeling of authenticity as well as a certain oddball charm when viewed today; City That Never Sleeps is a genuinely strange combination of documentary realism, stylized noir visuals and a subtle, inspired tinge of the supernatural (it is strongly implied that one character is a guardian angel not unlike Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life). Somehow it all works.
The story concerns one long night on the beat of veteran Chicago cop John Kelly (Gig Young), who is suffering from burn-out when the film begins. Kelly is basically a good-hearted guy who occasionally works the other side of the law by doing favors for corrupt attorney Penrod Biddel (Edward Arnold). Kelly is also unsatisfied with his marriage and is involved in a tryst with a stripper known as “Angel Face” (Mala Powers). Like Kelly, Angel Face is a former idealist (she moved to Chicago with the dream of becoming a professional ballerina) who has since become beaten down and made cynical by the ravages of time. Steve Fisher’s script, ably assisted by Auer’s taut direction, details Kelly’s attempts to make some easy money off of Biddel by illegally escorting a crook across state lines. Kelly figures this will enable him to quit his job and run off to California with Angel Face in the morning. But, this being a true film noir, things don’t quite work out that way.
Like the horror film, noir is one of the rare genres (or historical movements, depending on your point of view) that is arguably more effective on a smaller budget and without the presence of major stars. The most memorable low budget noirs from Hollywood’s studio system era often relied on surprising, personal and quirky touches to elevate them above the other standard issue programmers of the day; City has all of these qualities in spades. Like Edgar Ulmer’s Detour or Jack Bernhard’s Decoy, City conveys an atmosphere of sordidness, sleaziness and rank desperation precisely because of its limited budget and resources, qualities that Hollywood’s major studios couldn’t have replicated if they tried. After Kelly endures a tragedy late in the film he angrily laments that he feels like he’s “in a cement mixer being slowly chopped and pounded to death.” Noir protagonists don’t get much more bitter than this.
For Chicagoans, the film has much added interest as it provides a look into the Windy City of a bygone era. John Kelly spends most of his free time hanging out at Angel Face’s place of employment, the “Silver Frolics,” a legendary Chicago strip club that plays itself in the film. Many of the movie’s most memorable exterior scenes take place in front of the Silver Frolics’ mammoth neon facade and in the surrounding north Loop environs. We also get several views of the Wrigley Building as well as evocative shots of back alleys nearby. As the plot progresses and Kelly’s situation grows more and more desperate, these nighttime exteriors are shot with increasingly high contrast lighting and canted angles that make downtown Chicago look like the Vienna of Carol Reed’s The Third Man.
As Kelly chases the chief antagonist, killer Hayes Stewart (William Talman), through this urban jungle, the action reaches a memorable crescendo on the ‘L’ tracks. Both characters end up on the platform of the Merchandise Mart stop where Stewart momentarily loses Kelly when he climbs onto the tracks and, in an impressive stunt, disappears between two trains traveling in opposite directions. Although the Merchandise Mart is close to the movie’s other downtown locations, the decision to shoot there may have been pragmatic – that particular stop had been renovated only the year before. According to chicago-l.org, “the most significant alteration during this period was the installation of a 70 foot moveable platform at the south end of the northbound platform in 1952. The purpose was to extend the platform to allow longer trains to berth.” The expanded platform would have more easily accommodated the film’s crew and equipment and greatly facilitated shooting.
One of City‘s most intriguing aspects is a minor character named Gregg Warren (Wally Cassell), who has the unusual job of performing as a window display “mechanical man” to draw attention to the strip club where Angel Face works. Warren’s job consists of covering his face in silver paint and moving about in a robotic fashion; he is so convincing at playing this role that passersby frequently debate if he is a real man or a robot. Like Kelly, Warren is also in love with Angel Face and the love triangle between the three of them leads to a surprising climax that is as poignant as it is clever. I won’t give it away except to say that, like the irresistible death scene of “Mr. Memory” in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, it is precisely the bizarre nature of the Mechanical Man’s job that threatens to cost him his life.
Dave Kehr sees the Mechanical Man’s station as a metaphor for Auer’s own entrapment. In his Film Comment piece, Kehr asks, “Was this how Auer came to perceive his own position, as a filmmaker of ambition confined within a commercial system? If it was, he found his way out much as his protagonists did: by accepting his situation – and turning it into the stuff of his art.” Amen.
Works Cited
1. “Chicago ”L”.org: Stations – Merchandise Mart.” Chicago ”L”.org – Your Chicago Rapid Transit Internet Resource! Web. 28 Oct. 2011.
My new 15 minute short The Catastrophe will receive its world premiere at the upcoming Illinois International Film Festival on Saturday, November 19th at 3pm. The screening will be held at Chicago’s Viaduct Theatre (3111 N. Western Ave) and members of the cast and crew will be present. You can view a 30 second teaser trailer for The Catastrophe here:
In somewhat older MGS film-related news, my 2009 short At Last, Okemah! just completed a 2-year festival run in September. After playing 11 movie and music festivals, it is now available for the first time online in its entirety. Watch the 17 minute At Last, Okemah! here:
