Monday, December 3, 2012

A Girl in Every Port with Louise Brooks at George Eastman House

The 1928 Louise Brooks film, A Girl in Every Port, screens on December 4th at 8:00 pm in the Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. That's the same theater where Louise Brooks used to watch films in the 1960s. Here's what the GEH website has to say about this event:




A Girl in Every Port
(Howard Hawks, US 1928, 62 min.)

Preceded by:
The Treasurer’s Report
(Thomas Chalmers, US 1928, 10 min.)
 
Silent Tuesdays. Movie theatres were just being wired for sound in 1928, so it wouldn’t have been unusual for a cinema to show a silent starring a tried-and-true draw like Louise Brooks in A Girl in Every Port — where Brooks shows her considerable talent for wearing a tight-fitting bathing suit through most of the film — with one of the newfangled “talkies.” Here it’s humorist Robert Benchley’s film debut The Treasurer’s Report, in which he established his soon-to-be world-famous befuddled public speaker routine. A Girl in Every Port was Brooks’s last film before going off to Germany to make Pandora’s Box, her last American silent starring role, and one of the last silent films Fox made. Can Brooks survive both high diving and the “suave” attentions of Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong?

3 comments:

  1. I was there. Fine print, sturdy accompaniment. Perfunctory introductory remarks; no mention of the Port/Pabst axis. Good attendance, good vibe. (When I arrived, in the rain, shortly before the doors even opened, the parking lot was JAMMED. It couldn't be for--?? It wasn't.)

    P.S. When they renovate the theater this winter, the original seats will GO.

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  2. Thank you for the report. I wonder if those seats will be for sale ?

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  3. You're welcome. ... I wondered the same thing. And they are!! See: http://www.eastmanhouse.org/media/heywoodwakefield.pdf

    If I had the fantasy home theater (and I mean THEATER, à la Graustark/ "Marion's Wall"), I'd order, say, eight pair. If I had a spare room, I'd get four seats, I suppose (and three movie buddies). Alas ...

    If you want, I'll pick up a pair for you and ship 'em via UPS. Or hold 'em until your next visit to the Great Lakes. Or my 2014 vacation to the SFSFF.

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