Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/07/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, August 7, 2019

The Better 'Ole (Charles Reisner, 1926)

Syd Chaplin in The Better 'Ole

Cast: Syd Chaplin, Harold Goodwin, Jack Ackroyd, Edgar Kennedy, Charles K. Gerrard, Theodore Lorch, Doris Hill, Arthur Clayton. Screenplay: Darryl F. Zanuck, Charles Reisner, intertitles by Robert E. Hopkins, based on a play by Bruce Bairnsfather and Arthur Eliot. Cinematography: Edwin B. DuPar. Art direction: Ben Carré. Film editing: Ray Enright. Music: Maurice Baron.

Slapstick comedy starring Charles Chaplin's older brother Syd Chaplin as "Old Bill," a British soldier in World War I. Based on a 1917 stage musical that had been filmed once before, The Better 'Ole was released in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process with a synchronized music track and sound effects but no dialogue. The character of Old Bill was created by Bruce Bairnsfather in a newspaper cartoon published as a morale builder during the war. The film, which centers on Bill's involvement in exposing a German spy ring, tends to drag a bit as it works out some plot switches, and most of the physical comedy is old hat.