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

Friday, April 11, 2025

Mother Hummingbird (Julien Duvivier, 1929)

Maria Jacobini in Mother Hummingbird

Cast: Maria Jacobini, Francis Lederer, Hélène Hallier, Jean Dax, Jean Gérard, Jean-Paul de Baere, Lya Lys, Madame Baume. Screenplay: Julien Duvivier, Noël Renard, based on a play by Henry Bataille. Cinematography: Gaston Haon, Armand Thirard, René Guichard. Art direction: Christian-Jacque, Fernand Delattre. 

A sumptuous production and adroit camerawork distinguish this rather too-familiar domestic melodrama about a Parisian woman (Maria Jacobini) who leaves her icy husband (Jean Dax) and her two sons (Jean Gérard, Jean-Paul de Baere) to run off to Algeria with a handsome but ultimately fickle legionnaire (Francis Lederer). Jacobini's performance is solid, but she's undermined by the silent film's slowness, with too many long closeups as she agonizes over her choices in life. 


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