Louise Brooks film to screen at Kansas Silent Film Festival in New Hampshire

This month, a New Hampshire theater will host a relocated version of the Kansas Silent Film Festival, an annual vintage film event cancelled this year due to Covid-19. In honor of the scrubbed Kansas festival, a three-day program of classic silent films with live music will be shown on the last weekend of February at the Town Hall Theatre, a two-screen independent movie house in Wilton, N.H. 

The"Kansas Silent Film Festival in New Hampshire," running from Friday, Feb. 26 through Sunday, Feb. 28, will feature vintage comedies and dramas starring performers with ties to the Sunflower State.

Among highlights: Kansas-born starlet Louise Brooks in 'The Show Off' (1926); and Buster Keaton (born in Kansas when his parents were in a traveling medicine show) in the classic silent comedy 'The Navigator' (1924.)

 

 

The festival also includes a rare screening of 'The Little Church Around the Corner' a 1923 melodrama featuring Kansas-raised Claire Windsor and actor Walter Long, a native of Milford, N.H. 

Also on the festival's program: the original silent film version of 'The Wizard of Oz' (1925), with comic Oliver Hardy playing the Tin Man. 

 

All screenings will feature live music by Jeff Rapsis, a New Hampshire-based silent film accompanist who travels each year to perform at the Kansas Festival, held at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas."When this year's Kansas festival was cancelled," Rapsis said, "we figured we could stage a tribute event here in New Hampshire, where movie theaters are able to show films while observing Covid-19 safety precautions."

 

 

The Town Hall Theatre, a well-known independent movie house, reopened in July. It currently shows only classic films and other specialty programs due to the lack of first-run features in release. The theatre follows all recommended Covid-19 safety guidelines.

 

All "Kansas Silent Film Festival in New Hampshire" screenings are free and open to the public, with no tickets needed or available in advance. Donations are welcome, with proceeds going to support the Kansas Silent Film Festival, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Organizers plan to add Kansas flavor to the event by bringing in selected local delicacies from the Sunflower state. Between screenings, movie-goers may sample sunflower seeds alongside Porubsky's hot pickles, to be shipped in from an iconic Polish deli in Topeka. 

 

 

In Kansas, in lieu of live performances this year, the Kansas Silent Film Festival will host a program of virtual screenings for online viewing. For more info, visit www.kssilentfilmfest.org. In New Hampshire, each day of the relocated tribute festival includes two feature films separated by an intermission.

 

• Friday, Feb. 26, 2021, 7:30 p.m.: Claire Windsor in 'The Little Church Around the Corner' (1923) and Fatty Arbuckle in 'The Round-Up' (1920). Kansas-born star Claire Windsor stars in 'The Little Church Around the Corner' (1923), a labor relations melodrama with a role for Milford, N.H. native Walter Long; followed by 'The Roundup' (1920), a rarely screened feature film starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (also from Kansas) that wasn't released in the U.S. following accusations of murder against the comedian, leading to a notorious series of court trials that exonerated Arbuckle, but left his career in ruins.

• Saturday, Feb. 27, 2021, 7:30 p.m.: Silent screen icon Louise Brooks in 'The Show-Off' (1926) and Kansas-born actress Zasu Pitts in 'Casey at the Bat' (1927). In 'The Show Off,' actress Louise Brooks (from Cherryvale, Kansas) stars in the story of a working-class family's reluctance to accept their daughter's suitor. The film also stars Ford Serling in the title role, and Lois Moran. In 'Casey at the Bat,' Zasu Pitts (from Parsons, Kansas) stars with Wallace Beery, Ford Sterling and Sterling Holloway  in a cinematic retelling of the classic baseball story.

• Sunday, Feb. 28, 2021, 2 p.m.: The original silent 'Wizard of Oz' (1925) plus Buster Keaton in 'The Navigator' (1924). In the final program, we're definitely not in Kansas anymore with the original silent version of 'The Wizard of Oz,' starring comedian Larry Semon as the scarecrow and featuring Oliver Hardy as the Tin Man! Then it's the timeless visual comedy of Kansas-born Buster Keaton, often called the most silent of the silent comedians. In 'The Navigator' (1924), Buster sets sail on a deserted ocean liner, riding a high tide of hilarity. Classic silent film comedy! 

 

 

"Thanks to everyone at the Kansas festival for giving us permission to stage this socially distanced tribute," said Rapsis, who has attended every Kansas Silent Film Festival since 2000. "We may be 1,500 miles away, but our hearts are in the same place." For more about the Town Hall Theatre in Wilton, N.H., please visit www.wiltontownhalltheatre.com or call (603) 654-3456. For more about the Kansas Silent Film Festival, visit www.kssilentfilmfest.org. For more about the music, visit www.jeffrapsis.com.

 

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark sings of Louise Brooks in Chile two years ago today

Two years ago today -- which seems like an eternity, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark played a concert at teatro La Cúpula in Santiago, Chile. During their show, they performed a bunch of their greatest hits including the much loved "Pandora's Box." That 1991 song, a tribute to the silent film star Louise Brooks, is known far and wide. As can be seen in this 2-2-19 concert clip, OMD fans in Santiago sing along in English to this song of Lulu. 

O.M.D. LIVE IN CHILE - Pandora's Box (Saturday, Feb. 2nd 2019)

It is worth noting that more than a handful of fans of Louise Brooks in the United States and England and Canada and elsewhere around the world have told me that their path to discovering the actress began with this OMD song. That is also the case with this Portuguese fan, who said as much during the recent listening party on twitter. 

 

A few days before OMD performed in Chile, they gave a concert in Lima, Peru at Domos Art, Costa Verde. And again, the crowd sang along in English.

  

OMD en Lima Peru "Pandora's Box"
( The Punishment of Luxury Tour )

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark on Louise Brooks and Pandora's Box

During yesterday's online listening party for the Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark album Sugar Tax, I tweeted lead singer Andy McCluskey a question about "Pandora's Box" - and he responded instantly.

"Pandora's Box" -- a tribute to the silent film star Louise Brooks, is the second track on Sugar Tax (1991). It is also a longtime concert favorite. Here is an rather delicious early live version from UK television, from the popular "Wogan" show from 1991. (As well, check out the image of Brooks on the laminated badge hanging on the lanyard of the black keyboard player in this "Top of the Pops" video, also from 1991.)

While "Pandora's Box" was streaming, OMD lead singer Andy McCluskey tweeted out a few more rather interesting comments. 

"Pandora's Box" has remained a fan and concert favorite, as have the song's association with Louise Brooks. Here is concert footage of the band performing live in 2007, with images of the actress featured prominently.

A few more comments regarding "Pandora's Box" followed, including the desire by their American label to NOT feature imagery of Louise Brooks.

Speaking of that original music video, here it is from way back in 1991. It remains, and shall always be, a great song.

The Challenge of Researching Louise Brooks and Silent Film

I continue to look for any sort of documentation of Louise Brooks films showing around the world. Not just in Europe or the Americas, but also in Asia, the Middle East, and north Africa. I have to date found a few advertisements and other clippings from Turkey, Palestine (now Israel), Egypt and Algeria. I was fortunate to do so because the actress or one of her films was mentioned by name either in English or French, or Turkish.

 

I was not so fortunate while searching through the Tangier Gazette, an English language newspaper based in Morocco. I thought to post the image below which shows the difficulty in documenting film exhibition in some countries. This 1929 ad, for example, which is nearly identical to ads I found from 1928, shows that the American films screened in Tangiers were not named. Instead, it was just movies made in America at 6 pm and 10 pm. And notably, they were not shown in a cinema, but rather in a casino hall. What films were they? We may never know.

Is anyone able to come up with an image of this venue? I would be interested to see something. I have been able to find images of theaters which showed Brooks' films -- not just in Europe, but also in India, Vietnam, Mexico, etc....

A poem on the theme of love, and an advert of a Louise Brooks film on the theme of love

Late last year, I ran a short series of blogs highlighting some of the new and unusual material I have come across while researching Louise Brooks' life and career. This was research conducted over the internet during the stay-at-home doldrums of the 2020 pandemic lock-down. My research has continued into 2021, as have the stay-at-home orders. Thanks to longtime Louise Brooks Society supporter Tim Moore, I have recently come across a handful of new and unusual items which I wish to share. This post kicks off another short series of blogs highlighting that material.

Here is a little something I recently came across which caught my eye, an advertisement for the Louise Brooks film, Love Em and Leave Em (1926), which appeared in the Jewish Chronicle, a newspaper published in Newark, New Jersey. Next to the ad is a poem on the theme of love by Louis Ginsberg, the father of the famed poet Allen Ginsberg. Together, the poem and the film ad make for an interesting juxtaposition.

Unlike his son, Louis Ginsberg is not considered a major poet. Rather, he was an accomplished versifier whose poems appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Masses, the New York Evening Post, Argosy, and other periodicals and newspapers, as well as in Modern American Poetry: A Critical Anthology, Third Revised Edition (1925) and Modern British Poetry, both edited by Louis Untermeyer.

Though not shown, the poem printed above is titled "Reasons" and it was dedicated "(For Naomi)" -- Louis Ginsberg's first wife and Allen Ginsberg's mother. As indicated, it appeared in Anthology of Magazine Verse For 1926 And Yearbook of American Poetry, edited by William Stanley Braithwaite.

Let me end with another curious Louise Brooks-Beat Generation overlap.... On Dec. 15, 1948, Lowell, Massachusetts journalist (and future Jack Kerouac in-law) Charles Sampas mused about the silent film star in his newspaper column, writing “I can remember Way Back When and actress named Louise Brooks was the Number One favorite of the Square Beaux….”

A little more about Erskine Gwynne and the Eskimo

While writing my previous post about Erskine Gwynne, Louise Brooks, and the Eskimo, I was intrigued to learn more about Gwynne, a somewhat obscure figure in history. Despite his accomplishments as an American writer and publisher in early 20th century Paris, there is no Wikipedia page devoted to him. His sister Kiki Preston, née Alice Gwynne, has her own Wikipedia page, but Erskine does not.

Last night, I continued to dig around through various newspaper archives in search of  anything more about Erskine Gwynne. I found a couple of profiles of Gwyyne (shown below), articles about his publication The Boulevadier, including one about the time it was banned as being too "naughty," as well as a 1928 clipping which explicitly states that it was Gwyyne who gave "the Eskimo" (Carl Wijk) his "cold" nickname.

Here, is lieu of a biography of Erskine Gwynne, are a couple of Parisian newspaper articles which sketch his life till then. The first dates from May, 1927 and comes from the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. The second dates to February, 1928 and comes from the Paris Times, one of the English-language newspapers in French capitol serving the many Americans and English speaking expats then living there. (When Gwynne died in 1948, the New York Times published a short obitiuary. It can be found HERE.)

Louise Brooks, a Berlin caricature and an historical nexus

Late last year, I ran a short series of blogs highlighting some of the new and unusual material I have come across while researching Louise Brooks' life and career. This was research conducted over the internet during the stay-at-home doldrums of the 2020 pandemic lock-down. My research has continued into 2021, as have stay-at-home orders. Thanks to longtime Louise Brooks Society supporter Tim Moore, I have recently come across a handful of new and unusual items which I wish to share. This second post continues a short series of blogs highlighting such material.

In the early 1930s, a well-connected American (related to the Vanderbilt family) named Erskine Gwynne wrote a column called "The Cavalcade" for the Paris-based European edition of the New York Herald (later known as the International Herald Tribune). It covered things of interest to Americans not only on the continent, but also back in the States. The Paris-born Gwynne, no doubt a man about town, was also the publisher of a monthly magazine titled The Boulevadier, as well as the creator of a famed Jazz Age cocktail also called "The Boulevadier." He was also the author of self-published novel, Paris Pandemonium, a 1936 title whose pre-publication blurbs vowed that the city’s “loosely moraled married women and their gigolos will be faithfully etched,” but was panned for delivering “only rudimentary devilishness.”

Erskine Gwynne

 
What brought Gwynne to my attention was his New York Herald column from September 2, 1933. It mentions Louise Brooks, and "the Eskimo." Gwynne's column begins this way: "BERLIN --- This city certainly has changed. It is difficult for anyone who has been here scores of times, but always on a flying visit, to judge. But every German I see, and invisible ones around me too, whisper "'Don't you think Berlin has changed?' The Nazi uniforms, of course, are there. . . . "

Gwynne's look-around-Berlin column continues. "What I like about the Eden Hotel is that facing it is the aquarium. On its walls are sculpted various kinds of unpleasant monsters, dinosaur, etc., and they are the first thing I see in the morning on getting up. I fear more and more that the day will come when I'll wake up to find them crawling around all over my bed. Then it'll be 'Quick, Watson, the needle'.  There are also funny things on the wall inside the hotel bar. Jimmy, the barman, has a gallery of important customers caricatured. Several years ago one Carl Wijk, better known as the Eskimo, was in Berlin. His face figured prominently in Jimmy's collection with Noel Coward and Louise Brooks. The last two mentioned are still there. The Eskimo has been thawed out."

Of course, the Eden Hotel is known in Louise Brooks lore as the place where the twenty-year old actress stayed for five weeks while filming Pandora's Box in late 1928. Brooks even mentioned the famed hotel in Lulu in Hollywood, writing "Sex was the business of the town. At the Eden Hotel, where I lived, the cafe bar was lined with higher priced trollops. The economy girls walked the street outside...." But wow, I hadn't known there was a caricature of Brooks hanging in the Eden, not to mention still hanging four years after she had made her last film in Germany. I WONDER WHAT THAT CARICATURE LOOKED LIKE, AND WHERE IT IS TODAY?

Brooks arriving at the Eden Hotel in 1928, greeted by a bell-hop wearing a Eden Hotel cap.

What also surprised me was mention of "the Eskimo." In Louise Brooks lore, he is a somewhat mysterious figure, a hanger-on who Brooks met in Paris after making Pandora's Box. He also hung around Brooks while she was making Diary of a Lost Girl, and later, was with her when she returned to Paris between films. In his biography of Brooks, Barry Paris tentatively identifies him thus, "He was half-Swedish and half-English.... His real name appears to have been Karl von Bieck, and he was supposedly an impoverished baron." I wonder, could the Eskimo referenced in Gwynne's column be the same mentioned in the Paris book? They are both associated with the Eden Hotel and Brooks, and their first names are similarly Carl / Karl, though spelled differently.

I haven't been able to learn much about Carl Wijk, except that there was a Baron named Carl Wijk who in July 1931 married Catherine (or "Kitty") Kresge, daughter of S. S. Kresge and heiress to the 5 and 10 cent store fortune. In articles from the time, Carl Wijk is described as both a "naturalized British subject" and as the "eldest son of Lady Reginald Barnes of Devonshire, England." Reportage from the time also suggests that Carl Wijk and Kitty Kresge met through her sister Ruth, who was friends with the famed Jazz Age illustrator Ralph Barton, who killed himself in May of 1931.

Is Carl Wijk the same person as Karl von Bieck? Might their identities have been conflated? I don't know. (In Richard Leacock's filmed interview with Brooks, she identifies the Eskimo simply as Baron Beek, never spelling out the name). Here is a picture of Brooks at Joe Zelli's famous Parisian nightclub. The person sitting close to the right of her might be the Eskimo, as he is a young man and blonde. The man sitting on the far right is Joe Zelli. The man to the far left is unknown.

Brooks at Joe Zelli's in Paris, October 1929

Back to Erskine Gwynne. I don't know that Gwynne and Brooks ever met, but it is possible as both were likely in Paris at the same time. Brooks was a popular figure in Paris in 1929 and 1930 -- both as a personality and a film star; and Gwynne was certainly aware of her in the years before he penned the above mentioned column. (Gwynne seems to have known just about "everybody." His wife was fashionable, and was once photographed by  Hoyningen-Huene for Vogue. Gwynne himself shows up in pictures from the time with likes of Jack Pickford and Marilyn Miller, among others, each of whom also knew Brooks. He also seems to have known Leon Erroll, Brooks' Louie the 14th co-star. And too, Gwynne was the brother of Alice "Kiki" Gwynne, a rich, charismatic beauty and famed American socialite and the alleged mother of a child born out of wedlock to Prince George, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George V. She also reportedly had affairs with the likes of film star Rudolph Valentino and writer Evelyn Waugh.)

As mentioned earlier, Gwynne was the publisher of a monthly Paris-based magazine titled The Boulevadier, which ran from 1927 to 1932. It is described as a Parisian New Yorker type magazine. In its day, it had a small reputation, and was read on occasion by the likes of Janet Flanner and other American expatriates. According to the New Yorker article referenced below, it "did not leave much of a legacy, other than commissioning a few illustrations by Alexander Calder and—par for the course for vanity magazines run by Americans in Europe—once or twice publishing Hemingway." Nevertheless, I hope to track down copies to see if Louise Brooks was ever mentioned. This vintage advertisement for Gwynne's magazine certainly has the air of liquor about it.

As also mentioned, Gwynne was the creator of a still popular Jazz Age cocktail called "The Boulevadier." If you look it up on the internet, you'll come across a surprising number of references, articles, blogs, and webpages about the drink. In 2019, the New Yorker named it the perfect Thanksgiving cocktail. Did Louise Brooks ever drink one? Who knows. She preferred gin, later in life, and the picture of her celebrating at Zelli's shows her table stocked with champagne. 

The Boulevardier’s origins trace back, at least on paper, to the 1927 book Barflies and Cocktails by Harry McElhone, the raconteur proprietor of Harry’s New York Bar in Paris. Harry's was a celebrated drinking establishment, one favored by socialites and expats including Ernest Hemingway. Here is the way the recipe for the drink as it is given in McElhone's book (which is pictured below). 

The Boulevardier that has come down to us today has remained pretty much the same. It still uses Bourbon, and features an equal parts combination of the whiskey alongside Campari and sweet vermouth. (An alternate recipe can be found at the bottom of the New Yorker article referenced above.)

30ml Bourbon
30ml Campari
30ml sweet vermouth
Orange or lemon twist garnish

Stir the ingredients together over ice, then strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with your choice of an orange or lemon twist, expressing the peel over the glass.

Criterion version of Louise Brooks' film Pandora's Box streams online

The Criterion version of the 1929 Louise Brooks' film Pandora's Box is streaming online through Alamo on Demand. Individuals may purchase the film for $14.99, or rent it for $2.99. More information about this offer may be found HERE.

The film is described thus: "One of the masters of early German cinema, G. W. Pabst had an innate talent for discovering actresses (including Greta Garbo). And perhaps none of his female stars shone brighter than Kansas native and onetime Ziegfeld girl Louise Brooks, whose legendary persona was defined by Pabst’s lurid, controversial melodrama Pandora’s Box. Sensationally modern, the film follows the downward spiral of the fiery, brash, yet innocent showgirl Lulu, whose sexual vivacity has a devastating effect on everyone she comes in contact with. Daring and stylish, Pandora’s Box is one of silent cinema’s great masterworks and a testament to Brooks’s dazzling individuality."

Writing on BayFlicks.net, longtime blogger Lincoln Spector wrote: "Nearly 70 years after her last film, cinephiles still debate whether Louise Brooks was a first-class talent or just a beautiful woman in the hands of a great director. Either way, her oddly innocent femme fatale wins our sympathy and our lust as she sends men to their destruction without, apparently, understanding what she’s doing. A great example of what the silent drama could do in the hands of a master; in this case, G.W. Pabst. Gideon Freudmann will provide musical accompaniment on an electric cello."