Blondie of the Follies is the story of two girls living in Depression-era New York who escape poverty by going on the stage and then becoming kept women. How scandalous! This pre-Code film opens with an all-out slap fight between its female leads (played by Marion Davies, who also produced the film, and Billie Dove in her last film role). From there, it moves on to depict heavy drinking and child neglect as part of life in a poverty-stricken New York tenement.
For all the glitz and glamor of the stage, this is actually a fairly dark film about the situation of women during the Depression. It seems a far cry dialogue-writer Anita Loos’s earlier works like the snappy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or even the lavish silent film Intolerance.
As one character outright states: ”This big gay life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”
I do have to agree with Laura, who felt, “At 91 minutes the film does go on a bit too long, with Blondie and Lottie fighting and making up repeatedly, but it has a number of striking sequences, particularly in the early going.”
The scene that sparked my interest the most features a party performance of a song spoofing director Edmund Goulding’s other 1932 film, Grand Hotel. ”One look at that guy Barrymore and you’re out!”
Sadly, the performance isn’t up on YouTube, but you can listen to this lovely song from the soundtrack:
I’m just getting going on writing this first chapter — I’m at that terrible beginning part where I can’t figure out what to say first — so I’m not researching as heavily right now. Still, it’s nice to put some things together and remind myself why this project is fun.
One song
I chose this piece, a modern performance of an old-time banjo song, to correspond to the excerpt below about “negro melodists.” Hugh Reginald Haweis names it as a song one might have heard by African-American performers abroad at the turn of the century.
Sometimes while reading Wharton, it’s easy to forget that these types of American culture were happening in concert with the more rarefied air of Renaissance art scholarship (like the Berensons did, below).
It’s kind of hard to imagine, but Renaissance art wasn’t always the hot tip when it came to collecting. In fact, a market for Old Master paintings didn’t take off in the US until the early 1900s. When it did, American art historian and attribution-poineer Bernard Berenson was perfectly poised to become the preeminent authority on the topic. He helped Isabella Stewart Gardner grow her art collection; he was praised by William James for his manner of applying ”elementary psychological categories to the interpretation of higher art”; and, importantly for my research, he served as friend, reader, and traveling companion to Edith Wharton.
Born Mary Smith, Berenson’s wife was also an art historian. According to Wikipedia, she is now thought to have helped Berenson write some of his influential books on Renaissance art. Sadly, as happens all too often, she has been overshadowed by her husband and his memory. Her writing appears to be entirely out of print, though Harvard has an extensive archival collection dedicated to her and her husband.
The daughter of Philadelphia Quakers, she had attended Smith College and then the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College) as one of its first eight students. She studied Berkeley, Hegel, and other philosophers, and recalled how once, after hearing the English art critic Edmund Gosse mention the “sacred word Botticelli” during a Harvard lecture, she looked at her brother, essayist Logan Pearsall Smith, “with eyes brimming with emotion and excitement,” and exclaimed: “Oh Logan! We are at the very centre of things!”
Madame de Trezac had lately discovered that the proper attitude for the American married abroad was that of a militant patriotism; and she flaunted Undine Marvell in the face of the Faubourg like a particularly showy specimen of her national banner. The success of the experiment emboldened her to throw off the most sacred observances of her past. She took up Madame Adelschein, she entertained the James J. Rollivers, she resuscitated Creole dishes, she patronized negro melodists, she abandoned her weekly teas for impromptu afternoon dances, and the prim drawing-room in which dowagers had droned echoed with a cosmopolitan hubbub.
— Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country
…
Further adventures
For a random assortment of photos, quotes, video, and other items tangentially related to my thesis, check out nonmodernist on tumblr.
And as always, you can follow all my grad school adventures in real-time via the “grad school is forever” tag on tumblr.
Link round-ups: I plan to post these to nonmodernist once a week. Drop me links to your reactions, related fanworks, or anything else — in comments, tweets, emails, or by carrier pigeon!
On Twitter: Tag your tweets #ParadesEnd, then check the tag to see what others are saying.
On Tumblr: Tag your posts #Parade’s End, then check the tag to see what others are posting. (I for one would love to see some gifs or manips/fanart start making the rounds!)
LJ/DW discussions: I’ll throw up regular discussion threads at LJ and DW.
After working with D.W. Griffith on several smaller silent film projects, Anita Loos helped write some of the title cards for Griffith’s 1916 epic, Intolerance. She is often not credited for this work, which is a shame.
The film is considered one of the great classics of the silent era, due largely to its epic scope and unconventional plot structure:
The three-and-a-half hour epic intercuts four parallel storylines each separated by several centuries: (1) A contemporary melodrama of crime and redemption; (2) a Judean story: Christ’s mission and death; (3) a French story: the events surrounding the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572; and (4) a Babylonian story: the fall of the Babylonian Empire to Persia in 539 BC. (from Wikipedia)
The various plots have their own detailed visual styles, not only matching sets and costumes to the time period, but also utilizing color coding and themed title cards to help audiences tell them apart at a glance. The Babylonian story, for example, has a yellowish cast and detailed title cards with historical footnotes. The French story’s blueish title cards feature a fleur de lis motif. The contemporary melodrama, on the other hand, has a more standard black and white look and simple title cards like the one below.
Loos worked on the titles for Intolerance, but it is impossible to know which ones she wrote. Laura Frost, in the essay I linked last week, hazards some educated guesses about which titles might have been Loos’s:
In most cases, we can only speculate which writer was responsible for which title, but the stylistic differences are suggestive. Loos was clear about her role. In her memoir, she recalls, “D. W. bade me put in titles even when unnecessary and add laughs wherever I found an opening. I found several” (GI, 103). Interspersed among the instructive and weighty inscriptions are lighter and more ironic captions that seem more reflective of the “Loos-style.” For example, in the scene in which The Dear One, who has jealously watched a woman’s undulating walk draw men’s attention on the street and decides to imitate her by tying her skirt into a hobble, a title dryly comments that “The new walk seems to bring results” as men flock to her ridiculous gait.
Intolerance is popping up a lot recently; the still above has appeared in both the video game L.A. Noire and this year’s big Oscar nominee, Hugo.
It is by all counts a marvel of silent cinema, one that demands a huge attention investment from its viewers and rewards them in turn with a complicated intercut narrative structure and many gorgeous visual moments.
Loos worked Intolerance into her own later work by giving Lorelei, the protagonist of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a story about her cameo in the film. Fittingly, Lorelei is supposed to have played one of the vampish Babylonian maidens — frankly a perfect role for her buxom chorus girl character. And given Lorelei’s later screen life as the perfectly-cast Marilyn Monroe, it is hard not to search those maidens’ faces for her half-lidded eyes and trademark pout.
Intolerance is now in the public domain; you can watch it for free or download it from the Internet Archive. However, that version doesn’t include the color-coding of storylines, which I found really fascinating and helpful. Netflix’s streaming version does, if you’d like to watch it like that.
Borrowing liberally from Esther’s Innogen and the Hungry Half preview posts, Research Round-up will be a small, curated collection of neat stuff that comes across my desk during my academic research. Currently, I share one song, two people, and three lines, and I hope to do so each week. (And if you still haven’t read Innogen, what are you waiting for?!)
The semester has really only begun, but I’m off to the races on my masters thesis. I have a reading calendar that is rapidly filling up, a personal goal to write 2 pages every day, a thesis group that has already proven invaluable, and initial deadlines for each of my three chapters.
The first, which I’ve just started drafting, focuses on Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country. I took a class on Wharton during my first grad semester, but it only scratched the surface of her extensive bibliography. Now I’m getting a chance to dig a little deeper (though not much, seriously, she wrote so. many. things). While it’s tangential to my argument about Wharton’s work, I’m really struck by her engagement with modernist culture, something that isn’t always clear in her novels.
One song
The 1913 Paris première of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps has been well-documented; the crowd, offended by the modern music and strange dance style, rioted in the theatre. The moment is now considered one of those turning points of the modern era. (For an excellent discussion of the ballet and its relationship to modernism and the Great War, I highly recommend Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring.) A long list of modernist culture-makers were associated with the production, either through Ballet Russes or by being in attendance.
But it wasn’t just the darlings of the avant-garde in the theatre that night; Wharton witnessed the ballet and the riots as well. She noted in her journal that she found the performance “extraordinary.”
Wharton was close friends with James up until his death in 1916. He famously encouraged her to “do New York,” but the shadow of his influence also hung over her writing for her entire career. He visited her in Paris in 1908, while she was just beginning to work on Custom; while there, she convinced him to sit for this portrait by Jacques-Émile Blanche.
Wilson was an accomplished literary critic and famously kind of a dick. In an essay seeking to do “Justice to Edith Wharton,” he described the main character of Custom as “the prototype in fiction of the ‘gold-digger,’ the international cocktail bitch.” This phrase, and its attendent weird literary misogyny, inspired my thesis project.
Three lines
She wanted to be noticed but she dreaded to be patronized, and here again her hostess’s gradations of tone were confusing. Mrs. Fairford made no tactless allusions to her being a newcomer in New York—there was nothing as bitter to the girl as that—but her questions as to what pictures had interested Undine at the various exhibitions of the moment, and which of the new books she had read, were almost as open to suspicion, since they had to be answered in the negative. Undine did not even know that there were any pictures to be seen, much less that “people” went to see them; and she had read no new book but “When The Kissing Had to Stop,” of which Mrs. Fairford seemed not to have heard.
The silent film has gotten a bit of a boost recently: The Artist, a modern silent “classic,” scooped up many BAFTA nominations, won big at the Golden Globes, and will probably fare pretty well at the Oscars too. I haven’t seen it yet, but my thesis research into the career of Anita Loos has meant that I’ve recently spent time immersing myself in the art of silent cinema.
Loos wrote an incredible number of screenplays, treatments, and scenarios during the silent era, and continued working in the talkies both pre- and post-Hayes Code. Many of these films are now lost, but several of them have luckily been preserved. Even better, a handful are available to watch for free through the Internet Archive.
While these early silents aren’t the best demonstration of Loos’s vivid wit and style, they are a fascinating glimpse into the work of a young (very young) artist who is just getting started.
The New York Hat was directed by D W Griffith for the Biograph Studio in 1912. It has many of Griffith’s stock players in it. You may spot Mae Marsh as a gossip or Lillian Gish as a customer in the store but the main roles are played by Lionel Barrymore as the pastor and Mary Pickford as he girl. The script was written by Anita Loos.
This 16-minute short film was Loos’s third screenplay and the very first to be produced. She earned $25 for it. It was filmed at Fort Lee, New Jersey, where many silent films were produced in the early days of cinema.
Loos would go on to write title cards for Griffith’s Intolerance, a huge boost for her burgeoning career.
His Picture in the Papers | 1916
A young man can only get the woman he loves if he becomes famous, and manages to get his picture in the newspapers. He determines to let nothing stand in the way of his doing exactly that, and in the process winds up getting involved with a gang of criminals and a locomotive chase.
This hour-long silent film was written by Anita Loos (still quite early in her career) and directed by her future husband, John Emerson. It starred Douglas Fairbanks. Loos write five films for Fairbanks and made him quite a star.
Her witty writing style is on display here in the title cards, which play with ideas of language, reading, and thinking. For example, a title card introduces Count Xxerkzsxxv, with a note reading, “To those of you who read titles aloud, you can’t pronounce the Count’s name. You can only think it.” Continue Reading »
I took a brief jaunt up to New York this week to visit Josh on a work trip. It was a bit of a work trip for me as well — I used the time to visit the Met and see some art related to my thesis (and some not), and I spent a little time working in the NYPL reading room.
Below are some highlights from my walk around the Met, which I’ve decided once and for all is my favorite US art museum. Occasionally I pretend that I will bother visiting a new museum when in the city, but then I inevitably end up on the train back to 86th Street, strolling the clean and usually empty streets on the east side of Central Park, and then ascending the giant, famous staircase.
Caryatid, Gilded Age New York.
John Singer Sargent, Lady with the Rose (Charlotte Louise Burckhardt).
Philippe Pavy, In a Courtyard, Tangiers.
Iranian textile art.
The new galleries for Middle Eastern art were an absolute delight, and I wish I had spent more time in them. Definitely a must-see for the next visit.
On the topic of textile art, I bought an engagement book for myself that presented a rather interesting, thesis-related research challenge. The book’s text misattributed a work of textile art inspired by Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I did a bit of sleuthing and tracked down what was really going on over at my tumblr.
This will be a fandom-friendly* read-along of the Ford Madox Ford tetralogy, spanning several months, in anticipation of the (as-yet-undated) airing of Parade’s End, written by Tom Stoppard, directed by Susanna White, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall.
When: The read-along will begin on February 1, 2012. At that time, we’ll publish a schedule guide for each section of the first book.
Why: Because of ~reasons~ obviously. For instance, we love early twentieth-century literature; we’re excited for the upcoming BBC/HBO television adaptation; we love Downton Abbey and want more things like it in our lives.
Where: All over the internet! This read-along will primarily be hosted through nonmodernist and on Twitter (using #ParadesEnd), but we love all the corners of the internet and we want them all to join us! Look for discussion posts on Dreamwidth and Livejournal, and links to content all over the place. Feel free to blog your responses at your own site or the service of your choice — as long as you send them to us, we’ll put the links in our round-ups.
How: Read the books! Post about them! Join our discussions and submit your posts to our linkspams! Livetweet your reading sessions! There’s no right or wrong way to participate.
Get started: First, spread the word! This only works if you all get involved (and corral your friends, enemies, neighbors, and family members to do the same). Follow nonmodernist for more updates as we approach the start date. Then acquire a copy of the book and get ready to start reading!
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* “fandom-friendly”: we mean that this read-along will be a safe space for fandom-style participation. We recognize and defend your right to create fanworks of any and all kinds, flail over anything and everything, and use as much fandom slang as you desire. While some discussions may get a little academic, others will be shallow and all about the pretty.
I promised myself I would blog my reactions to each Sherlock episode this series, but I’m afraid it’s just going to get repetitive if I keep writing, “Well, that was basically the best thing ever.”
But it was. Again.
In a series of three episodes, the middle has a tendency to be the closest thing to filler: a little running-in-place, a little time-wasting between the triumphant introduction and the dramatic finale. Last series’s middle episode, “The Blind Banker,” was certainly the weakest of the three. But this time around, versed as we all are in Sherlock’s style of deduction and no need to continue introducing him to us, we’re treated to a standalone episode that reworks Conan Doyle’s detective-horror tale. The choice to bank on adrenaline to overcome the placeholder status of the middle episode was a smart one, to be sure.
Mark Gatiss is a brilliant purveyor of horror in any form, be it detective story, documentary, or sketch comedy series. ”The Hounds of Baskerville” not only upped the horror quotient, it continued with the current series’s mission to humanize Sherlock through his relationships. Out in the Devon countryside, his friendship with John took center stage. I enjoy that the series has yet to let the mistaken-for-boyfriends gag drop; but jokes aside, it continues to mine their interactions for emotional depth. Again, this is all build-up for next week’s “The Reichenbach Fall,” which I’ve already heard is a tearjerker in the extreme.
Sherlock was at his most manic last night as well, at least at the episode’s start. Benedict Cumberbatch is a tour de force whose work must be seen to be believed. He’s fearless, thrilling, and always on. There are literally not enough things in the world that I could say about Cumberbatch as an actor.
Lastly, last night’s episode was yet another reference-hunters dream. It featured, among other things:
Being Human‘s resident werewolf, Russell Tovey, as a man haunted by memories of a giant hound in the woods
John Philip Sousa, Elvis, and a whole range of other references, during an inspired depiction of Sherlock’s mental indexing and cross-referencing process
an episode tag that led into the BBC’s tie-in viral marketing with this eerie video blog
And with all this under our belt, we’re only one away from the end! Time to brush up on the canon with “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle’s attempt to shuffle off his hero’s mortal coil.
“I’m always impressed at how infantile and unreasonable and petulant I can still become with my own editor.” The Telegraph talks to poets who are editors and editors who are poets. (Via.)
On Cornwall: "Individual rocks on cliffs come with reviews and some do, in fact, look as if they were rough-hewn by ancient thrill-seekers hell-bent on making an Odeon of the ocean." Turns out Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens is a fine writer.
"If Gesualdo had not committed such shocking acts, we might not pay such close attention to his music. But if he had not written such shocking music we would not care so much about his deeds." Alex Ross is excellent as always in this week's New Yorker [subscription required]. Also: Ross's photojournal and a selection of music related to the article.
"The problem is that most books about drifters -- your Beats, your bohemians, your nomads -- don’t understand, or really get at, the longing that can come with someone without a permanent address. There are those who carry their homes along on their backs, and everything feels like a big adventure, but that’s not true for everyone. Rootless can sometimes feel homeless." Jessa Crispin uses her library as the basis for an advice column, thereby further proving she's the best friend one wishes one had.
