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

Sunday, February 2, 2020

The Squaw Man (Cecil B. DeMille, Oscar Apfel, 1914)


Cast: Dustin Farnum, Monroe Salisbury, Winifred Kingston, Mrs. A.W. Filson, Haidee Fuller, Red Wing, Dick La Reno, Joseph Singleton, William Elmer. Screenplay: Cecil B. DeMille, Oscar Apfel, based on a play by Edwin Milton Royle. Cinematography: Alfred Gandolfi. Art direction: Wilfred Buckland. Film editing: Mamie Wagner.

Apart from its historical interest as the first feature to be filmed in Hollywood, The Squaw Man holds up well enough as drama for Cecil B. DeMille to have remade it twice, in 1918 (a version now lost) and again in 1931. Today it's mostly of archival interest for its rather naïve treatment of Native Americans, but also because its use of outdoor locations shows why Southern California, with its varied landscape and good weather, became the center of American filmmaking. It also helped establish the Western as a major movie genre.
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