Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle (director/lead)
Mabel Normand (lead)
Harry Gribbon (lead)
Minta Durfee (lead)
Al St. John (lead)
Frank Hayes (lead)
Keystone Cops (lead)
Echo Park (location)
Keystone 5-step Porch (location)
Keystone (production)
Ah, spooning...brings to mind some of life's sweetest intimate moments, doesn't it? Huddled over your heroin as it gently cooks up, or guiding that coke to the nostril flared in eager anticipation...But here “spooning” is used in the dated sense: i.e., what you do by the light of the silvery moon with your honey while you croon love's tune in June. That is, what other generations have called “making out”, “necking”, “petting”, “smooching”, “suck face”, “swapping spit”...you get the idea. So think of this as “Fatty's Suck Face Days”, where we get the rare cinematic treat of seeing crazy cops who are also bad cops: inept buffoons who also frame, rob and beat you.
Reginald Barker (director)
Joseph August (cinematographer)
Thomas H. Ince (writer)
C. Gardner Sullivan (writer)
George Beban (lead)
Clara Williams (lead)
Leo Willis (lead)
When a film opens with someone reading a book titled the same as the film, slowly reading while puffing pipe...you know this film is in no big hurry. But if time is valued, skip to 17:26, where the story actually begins, and nothing will be missed. But it still doesn't move any faster, because this is D..R..A..M..A, where ultra-slow movements are the hallmark of reknown stage professionals. So if time is valued, skip this film entirely and nothing will be missed.
Francesca Bertini (director/lead/writer)
Gustavo Serena (director/lead/writer)
Salvatore Di Giacomo (author)
Luciano Albertini (lead)
Carlo Benetti (lead)
Caesar (production)
Assunta has guy problems. Her ex can't accept that he's been dumped, so he still skulks around flashing sexy poses (that sometimes hit the mark with Assunta). Her fiance works out of town and is tormented by suspicions, jealousy, and violent impulses - yet she remains attached to him. Clearly trouble lurks, yet Assunta's responses to her troubles are not melodramatic but enigmatic - as if helplessly driven to a cursed destiny. In short, this one's for noir fans.
August Blom (director)
Louis Larsen (cinematographer)
Otto Rung (writer)
Ebba Thomsen (lead)
Olaf Fønss (lead)
Johanne Fritz-Petersen (lead)
Nordisk (production)
Denmark punked out of The Great War, and so missed out on the Great Debut of two of modern technology's Great Weapons of Mass Death and Misery from the air: bombing of cities, and clouds of poison gas. Sniffing out the profit potential from Denmark's movie fans who'd pay to get a taste of that action in their own hoods (safely), Nordisk's exploitation film division went into overdrive and came up with a winner and released it on April Fool's Day. Grounded in an engaging story of class and family struggle with a healthy dose of hiss-worthy villainy, executed with strong performances (aided by authenticity of masses of nonprofessionals), and crowned with credible special effects and stunning cinematography revealed in this excellent restoration, this deserves greater recognition.
Frank Griffin (director)
Louise Fazenda (lead)
Charles Murray (lead)
Mary Thurman (lead)
Wayland Trask (lead)
Harry Booker (lead)
Edgar Kennedy (lead)
Al St. John (lead)
Keystone (production)
A surprise from Keystone: an actual story, that's even impressively tight. Surely must be lifted from somewhere. Add in a car chase, Italian bombers du jour, and a diving horse and you've got a bona-fide Keystone.
William S. Hart (director/lead)
Joseph H. August (cinematographer)
Charles Kenyon (writer)
Vola Vale (lead)
Robert McKim (lead)
J.P. Lockney (lead)
Dorcas Matthews (lead)
George Nichols (lead)
Harold Goodwin (lead)
Surprise: this drops Hart's standard cowboy-changed-by-a-woman formula. Bigger surprise: it's a total mess...
Fritz Lang (director/writer)
Karl Freund (cinematographer)
Carl de Vogt (lead)
Georg John (lead)
Lil Dagover (lead)
Ressel Orla (lead)
Erich Pommer (producer)
While in hot pursuit of conspicuous leisure, a delusional elite spots a bottle trashed in the sea. For no apparent reason, he takes it home and struggles to get to the urgent message he has convinced himself is inside (not wanting to simply break the valuable trashy bottle). He claims the bottle contained an urgent message (although its pedantry seems quite incongruent with the circumstances under which it was purportedly written). The message tells of “unbelievable treasures” and a gold mine “which appears to be inexhaustible” (claims that modern viewers will be familiar with from their encounters with the bottle's cyber-twin: scam spam). When he spins this tale to his fellow elites at Club Inbreeders, it gets picked up by an agent of a diabolical gullible mastermind, and leads to an intensely silly spectacle of competing blundering murderous international thieves - with one posing as White Savior - that modern viewers will be familiar with from their encounters with its political-twin: the new “Cold War”.
head city
has waived all rights to all work here that's not stolen from somewhere else.