You could do a lot worse on this boat than a tumble with me

[sovay]

That was nine hours straight of pre-Code Paramount Pictures. Six features, three shorts. The sun had just risen by the time we were wandering the cool, shuttered streets of Harvard Square. I am not sure that I have, presently, the brain for a film-by-film writeup such as I produced for the Somerville's sci-fi 'Thon in February, but it was a wonderful thing to meet rushthatspeaks, derspatchel, and ajodasso for and exactly how I wanted to spend whatever stamina I had left this weekend. At this distance, I think I was most impressed by Girls About Town (1931) for its refusal to end in any of the moral directions that would have been inescapable a few years later, White Woman (1933) for everything about Charles Laughton (although his mustache alone would have sufficed), and Cleopatra (1934) for the way it retained only such minute and passing fragments of historical accuracy as would cause its audience to splutter all the more incoherently at the rest of the film, viz. the panther girls leaping through flaming hoops or Rush's speculation that Claudette Colbert's costumes were contractually obliged to reveal more of her breasts with each change until she got down to two feathers and a necklace and had to start building up again. The Wild Party (1929) mostly proved that Clara Bow should have flourished in the sound era (and that we are all very glad some things about gender in this country have actually changed) and the ending of Hot Saturday (1932) seems to have left everyone in the theater confused. There is no other word than "phenomenon" for Mae West in She Done Him Wrong (1933). Betty Boop Talkartoons are sort of amazingly surrealist. There were free donuts and coffee. And free pizza. Which I did not eat at the time, because that was two or three in the morning and I was doing fine on bitter lemon and chocolate with cornflakes in, but I have just made up for it by reheating some of the pizza from yesterday's adventures in moving and now I am going to lie down. I really, really hope an all-night pre-Code marathon becomes a regular feature of the HFA. I wouldn't at all mind two institutional excuses to lose sleep with film and people I like.

Comments

[sovay]

It's a shame some of these films are only available on YouTube, of all places.

I couldn't even find more than the last scene from White Woman when I was trying to double-check the line quoted in the title of this post. That one, I was surprised by. I can't claim it's a neglected treasure; it's a humid melodrama in a setting so indiscriminately exotic (British expatriates speak of coming to "the islands" and address the natives in pidgin, but there are rubber plantations located up the river, mudbank channels full of crocodiles and Victoria amazonica, and a pet chimpanzee lollops nimbly around the listing steamboat on which Horace H. Prin, self-proclaimed "King of the River," makes his home) we couldn't pin down a hemisphere until the second act and even then we didn't believe it, but it would make a very striking double feature with Island of Lost Souls (1932). rushthatspeaks thought Francis Ford Coppola must have seen it; I thought Werner Herzog. derspatchel said Laughton would have made an incredible Kurtz in a contemporary Heart of Darkness. I'd love to have seen that, but until such time as we get access to the same alternate universe as Wuthering Heights with Robert Newton and Powell and Pressburger's Earthsea, White Woman is the closest we're going to get and despite its dire title, it should be on DVD. The ethnography will make everyone's teeth hurt, but it's not like Carole Lombard was chopped liver, either.

I do hope the festival becomes a regular feature. The more folks see these films, the better their chances of survival.

We said things strongly to this effect as we were leaving, so I hope the organizers take note once they've gotten some sleep.