The Museum of Modern Art’s festival of recently restored films, called To Save and Project, is winding into the final week of its latest annual edition through the end of January. PopMatters has examined many of its offerings in Part One and Part Two of our coverage of this series’ cornucopia of classics and curiosities.
Some programs are being shown again, while several premieres are still about to hit the screens. For example, MoMA’s restoration department has been working on a special project to be unveiled on 30 January. Shoulder Arms and The Bond are two 1918 Charles Chaplin films reflecting WWI. The Bond is fundraising propaganda for the Liberty Loan Drive. Shoulder Arms was a popular war comedy released during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
As MoMA’s notes explain, Chaplin discovered the negative was damaged when he wished to reissue it during WWII, so a new version was cobbled together from alternate takes and unused footage. By piecing together footage of original 1918 release prints from around the world, MoMA aims to reconstruct the original edition with funding from the Lillian Gish Fund for Preservation. The other restorations making their premiere are a rediscovered silent masterpiece, a piece of low-rent Depression-era exploitation, the telling of a Flannery O’Connor story from an acclaimed Florida filmmaker, a Chicago woman’s funny avant-garde shorts, and the first Latin American film to win the Grand Prize at Cannes.
Contents
The Wages of Sin (1938) – Director: Herman E. Webber
The Wages of Sin (1938) is better acted than most examples of 1930s independent, cheaply made exploitation movies that delivered salacious material in the guise of moral lessons. As usual for such films, it opens with a lengthy scroll of philosophy and exhortation over its vital burning issues. The story it unfolds has been told many times: a “good girl” or “nice kid” gets led astray by the wrong fun, the wrong crowd, the wrong cigarettes, and the wrong pimp until she ends up a pregnant prostitute.
Marjorie Benton (Constance Worth) is presented as a case study. She’s among the women working in a huge laundry; we see documentary footage of such labor. She goes home to a lazy family where the men don’t work, and there’s much political talk that signals the conservatism of most exploitation movies. She exclaims, “Oh, you make me sick with your sit-down strikes and relief and your Bolshevik schemes for living without working.” Her pop says, “There’s no need for you to talk about things you don’t understand. We’re living in an enlightened age. We ain’t just wage slaves anymore.”
That conversation is held after, for once, Marjorie has gone out on the town with colleague Florence (Blanche Mehaffey), who says, “I knew she was green, but I had no idea anybody could be that dumb.” They’re on a double date in a roadhouse where people pad the running time by performing musical acts probably recruited from a local variety stage. For example, an eccentric dancer does a version of Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher“, and then burlesque performer Rose La Rose jumps up for an interrupted striptease.
When Marjorie’s date gives her a Tom Collins (“a kind of soft drink”) and a “reefer”, her head spins. Florence knocks the joint away and says, “That’s marijuana, worse than cocaine .. Marijuana’s called the murder weed.” Marjorie catches the eye of slick, mustached Tony (Willy Castello), who manipulates her life until he sweet-talks her into bed with a promise of endlessly postponed marriage.
Her introduction to prostitution culminates in a house run by a tough cookie named Pearl, played by silent film star Clara Kimball Young. It all ends in a courtroom and jury room whose members bicker about justice. “What would YOU decide?” appears on the screen, and we’re given an address to submit an essay and possibly win $1k. It’s unlikely the cash was handed out, although perhaps a few viewers were green and dumb.
This courtroom sequence, in which Marjorie provides tearful testimony, is its own form of exploitation. Worth was probably cast in the role because she needed the work, and her divorce from actor George Brent the previous year was a sensation in the news. They were married only briefly, and Brent tried to annul it because a marriage of Americans performed in Mexico wasn’t legal. In The Wages of Sin, much is made of the point that Marjorie wasn’t legally married, and audiences would have been reminded of Worth’s case and her widely reported tears on the witness stand.
Canadian-born Herman Webber spent most of his Hollywood career as an assistant director or production manager and only dabbled in exploitation. The Wages of Sin is really the product of producer-writer Willis Kent, who made a string of such dramas. Kent’s swan song in the genre was Confessions of a Vice Baron (1943), comprising clips from five films, including this one. In the ’50s, Kent moved into filmed burlesque acts. The Wages of Sin looks very good in a restoration by UCLA Film & Television Archive.
The White Heather (1919) – Director: Maurice Tourneur
Maurice Tourneur was the bomb. An import to Hollywood from the French industry, to which he eventually returned, Tourneur made beautifully pictorial silents, often based on literary sources. He didn’t much believe in moving the camera but seemed incapable of framing or composing a dull shot. His atmospheric outdoor scenes show a debt to classic landscape painting that feels perfect for what are often period dramas.
For the prestigious Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (later called Paramount), Tourneur produced and directed The White Heather from one of his typically old-fashioned sources, an 1897 play by Cecil Raleigh and Henry Hamilton. From the start, he frames indoor scenes under curving arches or decorates the frame with fascinating backgrounds and props amid which his players stand just so. He frames the image with filters around the lens if there’s no handy frame in the set. There’s a montage about seeking someone in various places, each more exquisitely lit than the last. The outdoor shots, as usual, are gorgeous.
The White Heather is a yacht named after a good-luck flower. The name didn’t provide enough luck to prevent it from sinking, along with proof that poor but honest housekeeper Marion (Mabel Ballin) was legally married to wealthy speculator and scumbag Angus Cameron (Holmes Herbert), and that their little boy is legitimate. Fortunately, Marion has two square-jawed young men to defend her, one of whom is played by future idol John Gilbert. Angus denies the marriage and will stop at nothing to keep the evidence sunk.
Since the fabulously expensive 1916 productions of Stuart Paton’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Herbert Brenon’s A Daughter of the Gods, movies have been luring audiences with the novelty of underwater photography. The bubbles had settled, and Tourneur provides a thrilling, green-tinted underwater struggle between hero and villain. Such scenes and outdoor shots are the kind of thing that couldn’t be provided in a stage production, which is part of how Tourneur made old properties cinematic.
As an insight into the importance of film preservation, only a single print of The White Heather is known to exist, a tinted Dutch nitrate discovered in 2023. The film had been lost for a century. Eye Filmmuseum worked wonders on the film restoration for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and what we have is another masterpiece of visual and emotional silent drama.
The screening, with live music, is accompanied by a short comedy, Alfred J. Goulding’s Peg o’ the Mounted (1924), in which five-year-old child star Baby Peggy becomes a Canadian Mountie to capture a band of moonshiners. Shot in glorious Yosemite National Park, this parody of popular Mountie adventures has jokes that probably wouldn’t be used today, including getting the child tipsy, having her shoot a real gun, and getting her clothes shot off! Them days were wild and woolly.
A Circle in the Fire (1974) Written and directed by Victor Nunez
Mrs. Cope (Betty Miller) is the widowed owner of a thriving farm near the border of Florida and Georgia. “You don’t like anybody’s attitude,” says her sullen young daughter (Katherine Miller, Betty’s actual daughter). However, Mrs. Cope is fond of declaring that she’s thankful every day for what God has given her, and everybody should be. When a sour, bad-news-bearing neighbor says she has four abscessed teeth, Mrs. Cope’s answer is, “Be thankful you don’t have five.”
A Circle in the Fire (1974) adapts a story by Flannery O’Connor, so you can guess that Mrs. Cope’s name and philosophy will be tested by the seemingly indifferent malevolence of what intrudes on her world. In this case, it’s three mouthy adolescent boys who drop in out of the blue, expecting to stay. One convention of this brooding, apprehensive tale is that the boys are seen only when the Copes see them, never on their own. For example, the daughter spies on them skinny-dipping. What happens is bred by misfortune, envy, class resentment, and self-hatred.
The title A Circle in the Fire alludes to the Biblical Book of Daniel’s tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, which O’Connor’s story references in its final lines, and her story must be regarded as a perverse re-invention. Writer-director Victor Nunez adapts it with notable fidelity.
Nunez is an independent Florida filmmaker who first caught critical attention with his feature debut, Gal Young Un (1979). He’d previously made several shorter films, including the 50-minute A Circle in the Fire (1974), now scanned in 5K from the filmmaker’s 16mm negative.
The screening is accompanied by a short documentary, Carolyn Jones Allport’s Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver (1974). Pierce was an African-American, born in 1892 in Mississippi, who became a carver and a barber before moving to Columbus, Ohio. In 1973, Pierce became one of the first people to receive a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was starting to become nationally recognized. Allport curated the first museum exhibition of his work in 1973 and starred him in two documentaries.
María Candelaria (1943) – Director: Emilio Fernández
Over ethereal black-and-white abstractions of reflective water, the opening credits of María Candelaria inform us it’s a tragic romance in the Indigenous corner of Mexico called Xochimilco in 1909, placing it one year before the start of the country’s revolution. In other words, within living memory yet safely in the past.
María Candelaria (Dolores Del Rio), always referred to by her full name, is an outcast even among the marginalized. Among her Indian (Nahua) people, she’s despised because her mother was a prostitute. She suffers from poverty (“Why are we poor?”), from the racism and predation of the Patrón (Miguel Inclán) and his economic system and from superstition and prejudice within her oppressed and unenlightened society. We learn immediately that her own people killed her, and it’s over the misapprehension and outrage created by a nude painting.
The heroine is simultaneously an allegory of Xochimilco, a symbol of “los Indios”, and a parallel to the Virgin Mary. For the Painter (Alberto Galán) who narrates her story, she’s “una India de pura raza mexicana” (Indian woman of pure Mexican race) bearing “the beauty of the ancient priestesses whom the conquerors came to subjugate.” That’s a lot of baggage, while her not-quite-married lover, Lorenzo Rafael (Pedro Armendariz), is a Christ-like figure afflicted with bloody hands in prison after behaving a little like the New Testament‘s Barabbas.
María Candelaria sets its scene with indigenous sculptural figures, then a woman’s carved face, and then abruptly a real woman. Reality and art stand in for each other, turning into the other through the magic of a painter or a filmmaker. As the Painter tells her tragedy from his point of view (although he’s hardly in it), he confesses his guilt for exploiting her as a symbol of the indigenous and using artistic trickery. We understand that the Painter isn’t only a stand-in for Diego Rivera, an artist known for native subjects, but a stand-in for Emilio Fernández, the film’s director excusing himself in advance.
María Candelaria, winner of the Grand Prize at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, was important for Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema as well as for Fernández and world-class cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, whose images are responsible for more than half the film’s impact. Entire sequences exist for voluptuous textures of water, beams of light, fire, the night, and the landscape, all ravishingly restored in this example of The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.
Fernández and Figueroa had a way of idolizing and mythologizing “the people” as simple yet dignified, poor but noble, while the camera looks up at them rapturously against land and sky. One part of the agenda seems to have been transferring the themes and images of Rivera and other Mexican painters into cinematic terms, as crossed with the heroic visual poses seen in Russian filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein.
Fernández was commonly called El Indio because of his focus on indigenous characters and because his mother was descended from the Kickapoo. Dolores del Rio, on the other hand, was firmly aristocratic, yet María Candelaria became the role for which she’s most famous. A former star of silent cinema and Hollywood, del Rio reinvented herself as a goddess of Mexican cinema with help from the temperamental Fernández, and this is the second of four consecutive hits they made together.
An Evening with Cartoonist Heather McAdams
Heather McAdams, a Chicago-based cartoonist whose work has some similarities to Lynda Barry’s, appears in person on Monday, 27 January, with an exhibition of her avant-garde 16mm shorts restored by Chicago Film Society. McAdams is a collector and found-film enthusiast whose films are usually a collage of snippets from many films edited in oddball juxtapositions and slapped with a groovy soundtrack.
The Scratchman (1980) and Scratchman #2 (1982) take what must have been boring footage of middle-aged men delivering lectures, replace their soundtracks with cartoony music, and scratch all kinds of images onto the print, like arrows through the head, lines emerging from the mouth, etc. It’s more technically sophisticated than drawing mustaches on a painting, but the same spirit of playful puncturing of dignity is at work.
Holiday Magic (1985) is a themed collage of images of women putting on makeup or working in deluxe kitchens while a male narrator gives inspiring tips about how to look beautiful and younger. There are also clips of Bettie Page wrestling. All Fucked Up (83) is fabricated from sex hygiene and drug warning films for youth, while Fetal Pig Anatomy (1989) mixes other school and instruction films. You (1983) consists mostly of film leader images (number countdowns, etc.) set to a Brian Eno song.
Each of these is only a few minutes long. Years later, Heather McAdams and husband Chris Ligon made the 18-minute Comes to a Point Like an Ice-Cream Cone (1997), a jamboree of footage from circuses, fairgrounds, and sideshows, with emphasis on freak shows. The title is from a ballyhoo for Schlitzie, the famous sideshow performer often billed as a “pinhead” and appeared in Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932).
Then comes McAdams’ most ambitious epic, a documentary profile called Meet … Bradley Harrison Pickelsimer (1983). For those seeking proof of a drag scene in Lexington, Kentucky, in the 1980s, here it is. The subject is an opinionated cuss who owned a bar called Club LMNOP. Several drag acts, including his own, are preserved for posterity. “Film is forever!” says Pickelsimer, who complains there’s no more glamour in the world. During the filming, he lost the bar and moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, where he seems happy. “I loved my little bar, but it almost killed me,” he says.