Wednesday Dec 3

Home & movies

------------

Matt's Notes

Papa doesn't say what movie he saw, but he had a few newcomers to choose from:

• Isn't Life Wonderful, directed by the already-legendary D.W. Griffith. This serious effort about the struggle of Germany's poor to feed themselves met with good critical response when it was released and is still considered by film historians to be one of Griffith's landmark efforts. Still, Time Magazine correctly predicted
  that "the film will not be popular."
  
  Here's a bit of it on YouTube:
  
• Sundown, a Western of no apparent merit, at least according to the New York Times. Interestingly, the scan of this article in the Times archive also includes a snippet about Abraham Goldberg, an important figure in the Zionist Organization of America who Papa had met earlier in the year. Apparently, Goldberg spoke out of turn about the Z.O.A.'s positions on private investment in Palestine while visiting Germany, and the Z.O.A. disavowed his comments. This article also makes reference to the "Brandeis-Mack break," a shakeup in the Z.O.A. that Papa had previously discussed.
• Romola, an adaptation of George Eliot's novel starring Lillian Gish and directed by Henry King. (King also directed The White Sister, which brought Papa to tears earlier in the year.) Its lavish production values and Florentine settings drew praise from both the New York Times' and Time Magazine's critics, as did Gish's performance. The scan of this article in the Times also contains a blurb about Thomas Edison's interview in that week's Collier's in which Edison predicted the perfection of the helicopter.
• The Roughneck, an action-adventure story dismissed by the Times as "a boy's idea of adventure with plenty of scenes of George O'Brien's biceps and ankles."

Friday Nov 28

Movies

--------------

Papa doesn't say what movie he saw, but a few new choices have come to town since the last time he went:

• Wages of Virtue, a Foreign Legion story starring Gloria Swanson and directed by Alain Dwan. (Dwan, who made movies from the early 1900's through 1961, provides one of the more fascinating interviews in Peter Bogdanovich's Who The Devil Made It.) If Papa saw this film at the Rivoli, he would have particularly enjoyed the accompanying Flying Fist two-reeler because it starred the great Jewish boxer, Benny Leonard.
• A Sainted Devil, a tale of passion and revenge starring Rudolph Valentino
• The Price of a Party, a melodrama starring Hope Hampton and the first actor to go by the name Harrison Ford.
• The Breath of Scandal, panned for its dullness by The New York Times
• The Silent Accuser, starring the police dog Peter The Great, who, though "not as good looking as Strongheart or Rin-Tin-Tin," according to the Times, still made a graceful screen star.
• The Black Swan, a depiction of high-society intrigued dismissed as "very weird" and amateurish by the Times.

Monday Nov 17

Movies & home

---------------

Matt's Notes

Papa went to the movies the other day, so the list of what he might have seen hasn't grown that much. Still, here are a couple of newcomers listed in the New York Times:

• Forbidden Paradise, a light drama about an imaginary Eastern European royal court starring the great Pola Negri and directed by the similarly great Ernst Lubitch. I hope Papa got to see this since the accompanying musical program at the Rivoli included "On Volga's Shores" by Pawlowsky's Ukranian Ensemble (Papa was from the area now known as Ukraine) and the overture from Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony (Tchaikovsky was Papa's favorite).
• The Siren of Seville, described by the Times as "the latest bullfighting film" to hit the screen; was there a whole bullfighting genre in the silent era?
• The Fast Set, directed by William C. De Mille, a well-known director and older brother of the more well-known director Cecil B. DeMille, whose hit The Ten Commandments was still enjoying a long theatrical run
  
• K - The Unknown, starring Virginia Vallie, directed by Harry Pollard, and summarily dismissed by Mordaunt Hall, the Times' movie reviewer.

Other films in town included The Midnight Express, Married Flirts, The Iron Horse, and Madonna of the Streets.

Friday Nov 14

Home & Movies

----------

Matt's Notes

Papa doesn't say what movies he saw on this night, but some choices included:

• The Fast Worker, a light comedy starring Reginald Denny
• East of Broadway, the story of a young man who fails his entrance exam for the New York City police force because he thinks the Tropic of Capricorn is in the Bronx
• The Lover of Camille, and adaptation of the play "Deburau" deemed by the New York Times to be a mere shadow of its stage production
• The Greatest Love of All, an interesting-sounding experiment in which, it seems, the film stops in the middle and its actors appear live on stage to finish out the story. The Times liked the conceit but not the story: "This novelty is worth seeing because of the combination of actors in shadow form and in the flsh, but cuts should be made in both chapters."
• The Garden of Weeds, a disappointing effort, according to the Times, from James Cruz, director of the huge hit The Covered Wagon. (The Covered Wagon played for over a year in New York and was Photoplay Magazine's choice for best picture of 1923. I've never seen it, but the VHS version will soon be on its way.)
• The Battling Orioles, a slapstick comedy written and directed by Hal Roach.
• He Who Gets Slapped, a serious drama starring Lon Chaney and called "faultless" by the Times.
• The Beloved Brute, a Western starring the ex-boxer Victor McLagien, who would go on to receive a best actor Academy Award for his role in 1935's The Informer and a nomination for his supporting role in 1952's The Quiet Man.

Other films in town included Hot Water with Harold Lloyd, Dante's Inferno, The Ten Commandments and The Iron Horse.

Friday Sept 12

Went to Miss S.S. a
fine type of a girl, I wish
I had some affection for
her, went with her to the
park (Prospect), and another
picture of flaming youth,
by just getting friendly
with her.

The Enchanting atmosphere
in the stillness of the night
tempted me to take her in
my arms and kissed her.

Flaming youth

Nettie made an appointment
for me without my knowledge, but
I could not keep it as I had the above, the
girl came, according to
Nettie, she is a very pretty girl,
she will come again.

-------------

Matt's Notes

The expression "flaming youth" sounds like one of Papa's own romantic turns of phrase, but it's actually a reference to the title of a racy novel and its 1923 film adaptation. The story deals with the romantic trials of Pat Fentriss who, among other things, gets involved with her deceased mother's ex-lover. The movie "endeavors to establish that young men and maidens wild are going up in the smoke of their own cigarettes," said Time Magazine's film reviewer, who nevertheless found it "rather ingenious."

Flaming Youth became a sensation partly because its relatively unknown young lead, the proto-flapper Colleen Moore, launched an era-defining trend by appearing on screen with bobbed hair. Moore became an immediate superstar and went on to appear in dozens of films, remaining "at the vanguard of fashion's first revolution of the 20th century as skirts rose above the knee, bosoms vanished and waistlines slid down to the hips," according to her New York Times obituary. While her name isn't as recognizable as those of other silent greats, it's easy to see from the clip below why she was so appealing:



Anyway, Papa's feelings about such modern women were subject to change. To call a woman "naive" was one of his higher compliments (though he could also use it disapprovingly) and he hated a party earlier in the year because it was full of "wild women" and "Jazz babies...none of that good type which appeals to me and [is]so rare among women." Later on, though, he became infatuated with a woman he nicknamed "The 20th Century Girl" because he admired, among other things, her "passion for cigarette smoking," and still later he battled turbulent, mixed feelings for his distant cousin Clara and her outspoken, seductive ways.

It would be easy to say his standards were inconsistent because, like most mortal men, he had no standards that a pretty face couldn't derail, but he really might not have known where he stood regarding the emerging flapper phenomenon. He was certainly possessed of an old-world, formal approach to courtship, and he disliked men who took advantage of women and "did not act gentlemanlike." Also, at age twenty-nine in an era when twenty-nine was not so young, Papa may have had trouble embracing emerging dating habits and meeting the expectations of younger women who wanted to act like Colleen Moore.

Papa mixes tenses in this paragraph so I can't tell whether he actually kissed "Miss S.S." in Prospect Park or if he was just tempted to, but to even think about kissing a woman he didn't feel strongly about clearly threw him for a loop and sent him searching the popular vernacular for the right words to describe it. The expression "flaming youth" was obviously in circulation by the time Papa wrote this entry¹, and the way he repeats it makes me think he was either taking it for a test run (as he did with the phrase "date her up" a few days earlier) or was genuinely amazed by the bold, permissive world in which he now found himself.

---------------

Additional references for this post:

• 1 - "Flaming Youth" would also become the title of a Duke Ellington song, a Kiss song, and the name of Phil Collins' first band.
• Colleenmoore.org - As you would imagine, this site has everything you want to know about Colleen Moore
• Flaming Youth's synopsis at allmovie.org. Alas, it looks like only a short piece of the film survives.
  

Wednesday Sep 3

Went to movies this
eve after a long absence,
as I could not stay home
all eve.

Today's cool weather was
certainly relieving after yester-
days terrible heat, which tired
me so,

I see daily countless
beautiful girls, and I am
longing, getting older
and longing, and no
relief in sight.

---------------

Matt's Comments

Yishane, a regular reader, noted in a comment on August 10th that she had "been wondering these past few weeks whether Papa [will] ever finally be overjoyed in the diary...The year is more than half over!" And while I happen to know he won't, I do find myself looking each day for signs of his emergence from the sadness he's felt all year, some sign that he's turning a corner. So, when he writes about how today's "cool weather was certainly relieving," the amateur psychologist in me wonders if he mentions it not just because temperatures dropped from the low 90's to the low 70's overnight but because he was feeling some sense of emotional relief.

Similarly, I'd like to believe his first movie outing in months signals a lightening mood, small step back into the world at large. Unfortunately, the rest of this entry points to an opposite conclusion: he still longs for romance, still longs for marriage, still longs for the next step in his own evolution. He goes to the movies not because he wants to be entertained, but because the emptiness of his apartment, the prospect of spending another night there by himself, is intolerable.

Papa wrote earlier this year of the escapism the movies afforded him, how they transported him to a "land of enchantment" where dreams ruled and reality had no place. Since then, though, the death of his father has triggered in him a struggle to leave his childhood and his childish daydreams behind and become more acquainted with reality. (He knows, for example, he must stop imagining the perfect life he might enjoy with each woman he meets only to be disappointed when he discovers their imperfections, yet he cannot keep himself from doing it.) Today's return to the movies therefore has the bitter edge of a fall off the wagon, a reluctant return to the dreamworld that no longer serves him well.

Then again, sometimes a movie is just a movie, and here are a few that he might have seen that night.

• Lily of the Dust with Pola Negri
• The Roman spectacle Messalina
• Little Robinson Crusoe with Jackie Coogan (I hope Papa didn't see this at his first movie outing in months; it was panned by the New York Times)
• The Iron Horse, John Ford's depiction of the transcontinental railroad's construction (Let's hope Papa got to see this one -- it's described as "one of the finest of Western epics" in American Silent Film by William Everson, which I'm reading now.)
• Youth For Sale
  
• The Female, with Betty Compson as Dalla, an unconventional South African woman who marries into British society
• The Man Who Came Back, geared, according to the Times, toward "ardent enthusiasts of lurid melodrama saturated with tears, sighs, drink and drugs." Sounds good to me, even if the production did need "a lot of trimming."
• Flirting with Love
• Empty Hands, a story of the Canadian wilderness directed by Victor Flemming
• Fools in the Dark, a minstrel comedy centering on the misadventures of what the Times calls "a burnt cork negro."
• The Covered Wagon (this one's been hanging around for months)
  
• The Sea Hawk
• Janice Meredith
• The Thief of Bagdad (also enjoying a long run)
  
• Monsieur Beaucaire
• Secrets
• Love and Glory
• The Fire Patrol
• Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall
• Fools in the Dark
• Love and Glory

Sunday July 6

Enjoyed with friend
Blaustein the cooling waters
at the beach at C.I. concluding
the evening at an open air
movie at Brighton.

-----------

Matt's Notes

Papa and his friend Blaustein (who was also Papa's brother in the Zionist fraternal organization Order Sons of Zion) were among half a million visitors to Coney Island on this day. The large crowd was apparently well-behaved, though one young man was arrested for violation of the Volstead Act and another broke his neck diving into shallow water. (My grandmother, who lived nearby and would have been 15 at the time, probably heard about this incident and vowed never to so much as say the word "dive" within half a mile of water for the rest of her life.)

I like to think that the "open air movie" Papa saw was something appropriate to the surfside setting like the recently-released The Sea Hawk, a rip-snorting tale of Spanish galley adventures deemed by the New York Times to be "far and away the best sea story that has ever been brought to the screen." If first-run films weren't available to Brighton Beach exhibitors, Papa might have seen something that had hung around for a while, like The Thief of Badgad, The Ten Commandments, or Girl Shy with Harold Lloyd.

My own memories of visits to my grandmother on Brighton Beach make it hard for me to picture the screening setup (I keep thinking that someone must have just pointed a projector at a makeshift screen near the end of the boardwalk where my grandmother and her friends would congregate at night) but I'm sure it must have been in a formal outdoor amphitheater with wooden bleachers and roving concessionaires and a regular weekend movie lineup. I wonder if the memory of this night stuck with Papa: images flickering on the screen, ferris wheel turning lazily in the distance, ocean breeze blowing cool. Did he close his eyes for a moment, think to himself that everything would be okay if he could just find some way to stay right there? Did he remember the feeling years later when he moved out to Brighton to raise his family?

------

Update:

Here's how the parking lot at Coney Island's Dreamland looked on a crowded day (this photo was taken on July 22, 1923):



References:

• Review of The Sea Hawkfrom the June 3, 1924 New York Times
  
  
• HALF A MILLION AT CONEY ISLAND; Visitors Top the High Record of 450,000 Made on the Fourth of July.

Tuesday May 6

Movie at Academy of Music

-------------------

Matt's Notes

As we've discussed before, the Academy of Music was a storied venue that had fallen on hard times by the time Papa went there to see movies.

Once the home of New York Opera, and therefore the very seat of Knickerbocker society, it's primacy came to an end at the hands of William H. Vanderbilt. Some time around 1880 Vanderbilt, who was considered nouveau riche by the standards of Knickerbocker society, was so incensed by the unavailability of boxes at the Academy that he simply decided to build his own opera house. Other like-minded millionaires jumped on board, and by May of 1883 their project, the old Metropolitan Opera House on 39th and Broadway, was in business.¹

The Academy, having remained on top for forty years since its 1849 opening, took another forty to expire from Vanderbilt's vengeful blow. Its popularity (and box seats) were gone by the late 1800's, and bit by bit it conceded to host lower-brow attractions like wrestling, musical theater, and, finally, movies. The wrecking ball ended its misery in 1926, when the Consolidated Gas Company knocked it down and built new corporate headquarters in its place (the Con Ed building still stands in the same spot at 14th and Irving).

Did Papa know the Academy had but two years of life remaining when he wrote the above entry? We can't be sure, but we do know he most certainly didn't see any of that week's first-run movies like Men, with Pola Negri, or Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, with Mary Pickford. The Academy wasn't considered an important enough venue to make the New York Times listings, but it probably showed movies that had been hanging around town for a few weeks, like "The Thief of Bagdad," "America," "Three Weeks" or "Beau Brummel." (While searching the Times archive I did come across a couple of enjoyable feature stories about the sorry state of subtitle writing and Hollywood's lack of good scripts, complaints that persist today in movie journalism. Check them out if you're a movie fan.)

--------------------------

References

1 - As noted by Irving Kolodin in his History of the Metropolitan Opera 1883-1950:

Few of us today could imagine a society in which a mere whim could determine the existence of such a structure as the Metropolitan. Lilli Lehmann has recorded the circumstances in her memoirs, My Path through Life (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons; 1914): "As, on a particular evening, one of the millionairesses did not receive the box in which she intended to shine because another woman had anticipated her, the husband of the former [Vanderbilt] took prompt action and caused the Metropolitan Opera House to rise."

Thursday Apr 24

Enjoyed movie
The Song of Love, at Clinton

I am alarmed I have
not heard from parents
for a long time. --

-------------------

Matt's Notes

As Papa mentioned in an earlier entry, he loved to escape from his daily worries to the "land of enchantment" he found at the movies, an easy enough vice to indulge since both the Clinton Theatre and the Loewe's Delancey were around the corner from his apartment.


View Larger Map


The Song of Love would have met Papa's need for escapism; it was a big-budget Arabian extravaganza starring Norma Talmadge ("the highest-salaried screen actress," according to the New York Times review) playing a French spy masquerading as an Algerian belly dancer. Time Magazine described this as Talmadge's "first semi-vamp role," certainly a big deal at the time, though I imagine it was equally unusual for films to have a female co-director as this one did in the person of Frances Marion.

I haven't seen The Song of Love and it doesn't appear to be available on video (has anyone out there seen it?) but I did find this picture of Normal Talmadge at the Library of Congress Web site:



Papa had little relief from his anxiety over his ailing father in the old country -- his "alarmed" words at the end of this entry even look anxious on the page -- so I hope the lovely Ms. Talmadge's excursion into cinematic sensuality was enough to distract him, for at least a little while, from his worries.

------------

Additional References

• The Song of Love first opened at the Rivoli Theatre, described here in loving detail at cinematreasures.org. According to the write-up, one of the last movies to show there was the exploitation semi-classic Class of Nuke 'Em High, a film I know quite well since I co-wrote the sequels (Class of Nuke 'Em High Part II: The Subhumanoid Meltdown and Class of Nuke 'Em High Part III: The Good, The Bad and The Subhumanoid). I'm not sure why I mention this, other than to say it's weird to run across a reference to my own past while researching Papa's.
  
  
• Here's more on The Song of Love at IMDB.com

----------------

Image source:

Norma Talmadge. Library of Congress #LC-B2- 5472-10

Wendesday Apr 2

Movie & home
Sent home to parents $10.00

It is funny how I am trying
to pass my idle hours,
nothing seems to cheer me.

Its a period of one great
longing for me.

----------------

Matt's Notes

Movies Papa might have seen in this day included:

• Sporting Youth, a car-racing comedy starring Reginald Denny ("a good-looking, virile young man who does not overact," according to the New York Times)
• Try And Get It, a farce about competing salesmen, accompanied by a short film of boxing match recreations called Great Moments in Great Battles (the latter sounds more interesting to me)
• Woman to Woman, a Moulin Rouge drama with Betty Compson condemmed by the Times for its overuse of rain effects, a bad habit perpetuated, unfortunately, by modern movies
• Three Weeks, an adaptation of an Elinor Glyn novel by the same name (Papa probably saw this if he was in the mood for a first-run movie at a big movie palace, since it was playing at The Capitol Theater, one of his preferred venues)
• Beau Brummel, starring John Barrymore in the title role and Mary Astor as Lady Margery
• Virtuous Liars, a light comedy dismissed by the Times as "a modern entertainment, the story of which does not bear close scrutiny."

Papa's local theaters like the Loews Delancey or the Clinton Theatre probably showed movies a few weeks after they had opened rather than first-run movies, so if he was in the mood to pass his "idle hours" in the neighborhood he might have seen:

• The Covered Wagon
• America
• Secrets
• The Thief of Bagdad
• The Ten Commandments

And for those of you just joining us, note that Papa's $10 disbursement to his family back in the old country was larger than usual. He was no doubt worried about his father's ongoing convalescence from an injury sustained in a fall a few weeks earlier. This, along with a bevy of romantic woes including his infatuation with an aloof woman named Henriette, would have contributed to his ongoing malaise.

-----------------

Additional notes

We've talked about the Loews Delancey Theatre and Clinton Theatre before. Both were within walking distance of Papa's apartment on Attorney Street.

Monday Mar 17

Movies & home

My only companion radio
is again entertaining me
this evening.

My heart is full of dreams,
I am longing for a girl to
love me sincerely.

I can't bear the emptiness
of my life.

H. whom I met Saturday
is a girl that appeals to me
most. I'm planning inviting
her to the opera --

But have I the right as a
wage earner to propose to
a girl like her?

I'm happy in the thought
that she is my friend now
being having been introduced to me by
my friend Rothblum.

---------------------

Matt's Notes

"Perhaps in the pursuit of action yesterday's dream will be forgotten before the day is over..."

Papa wrote those words a few weeks earlier after staying out all night with friends and acquaintances from the old country. How well he knew himself, or at least enough to dread his own swings from dreaminess to disappointment.

And here it is again: Just day ago, lost in fantasies, Papa dared to think he'd met the woman who would change his world. Now he corrects himself abruptly, angrily, declares himself unworthy of her, prepares himself to settle for mere friendship. A day in the factory, an evening alone, a night with his humble possessions -- radio, chair, photo of his faraway parents -- have shamed him, dissolved his illusions.

To see this reminds me of why Papa's diary feels so important to me. His beautiful, spare prose speaks richly of his struggle to reconcile what he wants with what he has and is worth reading in its own right. But taken in view of his whole life, it testifies to a deeper, more difficult struggle -- the struggle for perspective familiar to those of us who swing between extremes of expectation and judgment.

Papa has as little reason to call his life "empty" as he does to think "H" can transform it, yet he is convinced each is true, and the contrast is unbearable to him. Still, we know he rode out the stormy swings of his inner life to become a man who conveyed and imparted a sense of modulation, realism, and calm. I have idealized Papa, but the more I read about him, the more I realize he must have always retained a trace of his internal changeability; perhaps it was, in part, his mastery of it that made him so remarkable. I'm certainly no stranger to the private, stormy swings he writes about. (Is anyone?) It's good to think they might be worth it.

-----------------

Additional Notes:

Movies Papa might have seen that night include:

• The Thief of Bagdad
• The Covered Wagon
• Thy Name is Woman
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (I wonder if he saw this -- it would have matched his mood)
• The Great White Way
• America
• The Ten Commandments
• A Society Scandal
• Yolanda
• The Hoosier Schoolmaster
• The Fighting Coward

The New York Times also published an article that day on the potential of the "phonofilm," or sound movie. Author Lee De Forest takes on those who doubt its prospects and makes a strong case for the use of sound movies in news reporting and political coverage. While he's not sure how it might help dramatic films, he seems most excited about the potential use of music. It's worth reading here.

Monday Mar 10

Sister night & Movies
& home & radio

-----------------

Matt's Notes

Movies Papa might have seen that night include:

• America, D.W. Griffith's take on the Revolutionary War
• Yolanda, a medieval costume drama in which Marion Davies played two parts
• The Song of Love, a spy story with Norma Talmadge
• Icebound, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Owen Davis
• Daughters of Today, a cautionary tale of flappers gone wild originally released as What's Your Daughter Doing?
• A Society Scandal, with Gloria Swanson
• Flowing Gold, which prompted the New York Times' amazement over "the amount of movie hokum that can be packed into eight reels"
• Happiness, directed by the same King Vidor whose film Wild Oranges Papa had seen a few days before
• Love's Whirlpool, also dismissed as a trifle by the New York Times
  

And here's Papa listening to the radio at home:

Friday Feb 15

Movies & home.

I've a nice little home
but it is awfully lonesome.

-------------

Papa doesn't say what movie he went to, but here are a few that were in town that week:

• The Yankee Consul
• Bachelors and Children
• My Man
• An Innocent Sinner
• Name The Man
• When a Man's a Man
• The Ten Commandments
• The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln
• The White Sister
• The Great White Way
• The Eternal City
• The Covered Wagon

When he wanted to take a break from his "awfully lonesome" apartment on Attorney Street, there were at least two theaters right around the corner:

Friday Feb 1

Evening at Loew's Delancy
Saw Chaplin's serious
movie production
A Woman of Paris

- Fine work. -

-----------

Matt's Notes

My special friend Netflix recently afforded me the opportunity to see A Woman of Paris, and while I was excited just to watch something that Papa saw, I think it's a fine movie on its own merits. It's also an unusual work for Chaplin because, as Papa points out, it's a "serious movie production" and, as its opening title card cautions, Chaplin doesn't appear in it.



I don't see a lot of silent films, so when I do I'm often surprised by their technical sophistication. Early talkies could be stagy and static because primitive microphones forced actors and cameras to stay in place, but it's easy to mistake those limitations as endemic to 20's films in general. In fact, silent directors were not so restricted, and Chaplin displays a masterly command of pacing, editing, composition and camera movement. Chaplin directed the films he starred in, too, but as Vincent Canby noted when A Woman of Paris was revived in 1978, Chaplin's directorial talent is "so closely bound to the performer's personality we can't easily tell where one starts and the other leaves off." If you're a movie fan, A Woman of Paris is worth checking out just to evaluate Chaplin's behind-the-camera talent without distraction.

The story concerns a young provincial woman named Marie St. Claire (Edna Purviance, a Chaplin regular) who heads off to Paris when her plans to elope with Jean, her earnest young beau (Carl Miller) go awry. Within a year she's living in high style, kept by the unapologetically lascivious playboy Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou, who really stands out). Jean resurfaces in Paris, and a moral crisis ensues for Marie.

I have to remind myself, when I see better silent films, that their broad performances and dramatic scores do not mean the films inherently lack nuance, and A Woman of Paris is a great example. Though he's a cad, Pierre is not unsympathetic, and he's far more honest with Marie than Jean, who claims to want her back but is unable to really pursue her for fear of offending his mother. Marie may be a kept woman, but Chaplin does not judge her too harshly, and resists the urge to force her into a climactic rejection of her comfortable life (as I've been conditioned to expect from major Hollywood releases). Jean is just too wishy-washy to merit such a change. While everything ends in a rush with Jean's sudden death and Marie leaving Paris to work in a provincial orphanage, the resolution is not as corny as it sounds. As Canby notes, the film is "a highly moral tale that teaches that the wages of naivete is death, while the wages of sin may well be a better understanding of the true values of living."

The film was apparently critical darling (the New York Times called Chaplin a "director par excellence...a bold, resourceful, imaginative, ingenious, careful, studious and daring artist") but disappointed the public, who didn't want to see a Chaplin movie without Chaplin. My wife, Stephanie, finds it consistent that Papa liked an ambiguous, commercially unpopular movie because I generally prefer difficult, ambiguous, or depressing movies over popular ones, as do my mother and my sister. It's not quite clear what Papa, who prided himself on being a gentleman, would have liked about a story in which gentle behavior is a dubious virtue, but maybe he just liked interesting art for its own sake. Or, perhaps, the film's final title card cemented his approval:



It was right in line with what he believed (and after the previous day's romantic roller-coaster, something he probably needed to tell himself). Perhaps he nodded quietly to himself as he read it.

---------------

Additional Notes:

According to Cinematreasures.org, The Loews Delancey Theatre was located at 140-146 Delancey street, next to Ratner's (the legendary dairy restaurant that tragically closed a few years ago). It's amazing to think that there were once at least two independent movie houses on the Lower East Side within a few blocks of each other (the Clinton and the Delancey) when so few independent theaters survive in New York today. Anyway, there's a great thread about the Delancey at Cinematreasures, so head over there if you want to learn more.

------------------------

References:

• A Woman of Paris on IMDB

• Canby, Vincent. "A 'Lost' Chaplin Masterpiece", The New York Times, April 23, 1978 (subscription required)
  
  
• "Paris and Parisites", The New York Times, October 2, 1923 (subscription required)

Friday Jan 11

The evening partially at home
& radio. Later went to a movie,
The Clinton, where I so often
go and I must mention once
in here, of that place where I
spend hours, going to a movie
is the best way to forget my troubles
for awhile,
It carries me away to a land
of enchantment where all
dreams are realized, where
every story has a happy ending.
I suffer with the heroes during
the plots and am happy with
them at the conclusions, Some
people go to this place of illusions
while their own beautiful dream is
still in process of development,
and others (soldiers of misfortune as
I would call them) who have played

continued from page 11

the game of love or some other (usually
the love game) which did not turn out
to their expectations, or utterly disappointed
and [are] ironically watching the picture
which in their pessimistic mind is nothing
but fiction (MY OPINION: SOME ARE AND SOME ARE NOT FICTION)
Yes the movies are a great relief

-------

Matt's Notes

Movies!

I've been thinking about this entry ever since I transcribed it, and now I don't even know where to start. Film fanaticism is a defining trait for my mother, my sister and me, so reading this entry is like watching my own DNA get decoded and seeing the movie gene first express itself in the presence of flickering light.

I always like to think about the origins of seemingly self-evident ideas, so what I like most here is how novel the idea of cinema as escapism is to Papa, how he needs to work it out on paper and make a case for it. It's like reading an an optimistic position paper on the prospects of the Information Superhighway. His sincerity, too, is striking. Evocative phrases like "land of enchantment" and "house of illusions" remind me of the warmed-over sentiments we expect from Oscar presenters, but to Papa they're vital, fresh and original, so enchanted is he by the very act of sitting in a movie house.

But even while waxing poetic on cinematic diversions he's never quite diverted from his real concerns. On New Year's Eve he searched the crowds for lonely souls; so too does he evaluate his fellow moviegoers. Are their lives ahead of them, or are they broken by disappointment? Do they believe in happy endings, or do they sneer at them? Papa carefully strikes a balance for the record ("MY OPINION: SOME ARE AND SOME ARE NOT FICTION") but the very presence of this meditation shows how preoccupied he was with whether his own life was still beginning or starting to end. With all this churning in his head, I wonder if he's being ironic when he says "Yes the movies are a great relief."

Update

Looks like Papa got his movie fixes at the Clinton Theater at 80-82 Clinton Street, around the corner from his apartment on Attorney Street. According to cinematreasures.org, The Clinton featured Yiddish vaudeville as well as movies and operated from around 1914 to 1950. It's now a store called Home Basics. A fan of old movie houses has a photostream over at Flickr that features The Clinton, so head over there if you want to see what the spot looks like now.

Papa doesn't mention the movies he saw that day, but my new best friend the New York Times Archive helped me cobble together a list of what was playing in town in January of 1924, including a few biggies. Here's what he had to choose from:

- The Temporary Husband
- The Great White Way
- West of the Water Tower
- Through the Dark
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- The White Sister
- Scaramouche
- Black Oxen
- Pleasure Mad
- The Ten Commandments (Papa must not have seen this -- I can't imagine that he wouldn't mention it in his diary if he had)
- The Courtship of Miles Standish
- Anna Chrystie
- Reno
- Under the Red Robe
- Let no man put asunder
- Lucretia Lombard
- The Humming Bird
- Unseeing Eyes
- The Man from Brodneys
- The Shepherd King
- The Covered Wagon
- The Acquittal
- The Steadfast Heart
- A Lady of Quality
- Don't Call It Love

Another Update:

Here's a 1938 article from the New York Times (subscription required; PDF) in which William Hays publicly acknowledges that, yes, American movies are officially escapist.