100 years ago this month, Charlie Chaplin became the highest paid entertainer in the world when he signed with the Mutual Film Corporation; the dozen shorts he produced for them include some of the funniest and most brilliant sequences of his career. Program includes: “The Immigrant” (1917, 22 min.) The Tramp sails to America and ... [Read more...]
Our "Retroformat," movies on 8mm series presents “Fatty and Mabel at Keystone” in our intimate, Spielberg Theatre. This two hour program is an evening of silent shorts on 8mm featuring two of the era’s most beloved stars, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Mabel Normand. The program includes a 100th anniversary screening of the beautifully made comedy ... [Read more...]
A famous opera singer lost her voice when her son was born, and has drowned her sorrows in drink. When a murder is committed near her house, she invents a story in order to get herself back in front of the public again. However, the story she comes up with results in her son being ... [Read more...]
A rare comedy from the typically austere D.W. Griffith, Sally of the Sawdust is a delightful gem and the veritable kick off of W.C. Fields’s unmatched career. Based on the 1923 stage musical Poppy, Sally is rife with what we now know as trademark Fields — bumbling idiocy, juggling, dog-kicking — all in the midst of circus antics galore. ... [Read more...]
With Surprise Shorts! In possibly his best pre-swashbuckling comedy, Douglas Fairbanks stars as a young New Yorker who longs for the excitement of the Old West. Energetically directed by John Emerson, with a witty script and wryly ironic intertitles by husband and wife Emerson and Anita Loos, and cinematography by Victor Fleming.
Co-presented by the Art Directors Guild Film Society William Cameron Menzies was likely the most celebrated art director in silent motion pictures for his work on such extraordinary films as THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1924). He won the first Oscar for Art Direction for THE DOVE (1927), and in 1936 directed the landmark sci-fi epic ... [Read more...]
Presented as part of the Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing Series Live musical accompaniment for the silent portion of this program will be provided by Cliff Retallick. Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive His Nibs (1921) Gregory La Cava directs this riotous, slapstick spoof of the goings-on at a rural movie theater, The Slippery Elm Picture ... [Read more...]
35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress Featuring live accompaniment by Cliff Retallick! A glittering social satire staged safely abroad, So This Is Paris passes off the routine infidelities of Jazz Age blue-bloods as “the French way.” Teasing the audience with urbane good humor—and featuring a nigh-surrealist montage of an “artist’s ball” (read: nightclub) ... [Read more...]
