Films at the 2022 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

This year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival features a stellar line-up of films. Along with the debut of the restoration of Louise Brooks' first film, The Street of Forgotten Men (1925), there are a number of other new restorations, some old classics, and a selection of films from around. There are films from Japan, India and the Soviet Union, as well as promising examples of Brazilian experimentalism, French melodrama, Danish science-fiction, and German horror. 

The SFSFF is the largest festival devoted to silent film in the Americas. This year’s event includes 19 recent film restorations. Notably, nine of those restorations will make their North American premiere at the May event. More information about the San Francisco Silent Film Festival as well as this year's event can be found HERE.

Most notably, the festival will screen Arrest Warrant (1926), an Ukrainian film directed by Heorhii Tasin. This briskly paced gem tells the story of Nadia (played by Vira Vareckaja), who’s revolutionary husband flees the city in the midst of civil war, leaving her behind with a cache of secret documents. Expressionist effects, at times riveting and then distressing, highlight Nadia’s psychological torture at the hands of the authorities. It is a must-see film, poignant, and timely. 

Along with other fans of Louise Brooks, I have long been a fan of Clara Bow - the original "IT girl." This year's Festival includes the SFSFF restoration of The Primrose Path, one of 14 features Clara Bow made in 1925. Who doesn't want to see another Clara Bow film? She lights up the screen.

I have also been a long time fan of director / actor Erich von Stroheim, "the man you love to hate." I adore his classic silents The Merry Widow (1925) and The Wedding March (1928), both of which have been shown at the festival in the past. In fact, they are two of my favorite silent films. This year, Erich von Stroheim’s study of decadence, Foolish Wives (1922), opens the festival. It has been newly restored by the SFSFF and New York’s MoMA, and will be accompanied by Timothy Brock’s SFSFF  commissioned score. The following day, the festival will show the Austrian Film Museum’s restoration of von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919), a film the celebrated director also stars in and wrote.

What follows is the SFSFF's complete line-up of films.

The Street of Forgotten Men in Tulsa black and white

Not a negative review, but a negative photocopy from Tulsa, Oklahoma in August, 1925.

The Street of Forgotten Men - yet more trivia, some previously unknown

On May 10th, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will screen its new restoration of Herbert Brenon's The Street of Forgotten Men - Louise Brooks' little seen first film. More information about that special event can be found HERE. 

This month, and ahead of that special event, I am running excerpts from my forthcoming book, The Street of Forgotten Men, from Story to Screen and Beyond, which I expect will be published later this year. This excerpt gathers some of the noteworthy trivia I have come across during my ongoing research on the film. Among it are a few previously unknown cast and crew credits. 

Some of my recent posts have focused on some of the actors, including Louise Brooks, Lassie, Whitney Bolton, and Anita Louise, who had uncredited bit parts in The Street of Forgotten Men. Just recently, I came across the names of five other characters in the film, each of whom was given a name but played an uncredited part. Regrettably, the reportage I found did not mention who played these characters. The five characters are:

Bertram the Barber
Blind Ben
Dumb Dan
Harry the Hop
Legless Lew 

Some of them, I believe, may have appeared in the missing second real, or in some of the bar room scenes. I have yet to go through the film and associate their character name with some of the many unidentified characters in the film. 

Also, recently, some of this same pre-release reportage i came across identified some of the film crew, two individuals who played an uncredited role in the look of the film. The articles I came across identified each as having worked on the film. They are:

Harold C. Hendee (head of the research department at Paramount’s Long Island studio)

R.M.K. Smith (head of the costume department at Paramount’s Long Island studio)

Another individual who "worked" on the film was mendicant officer John D. Godfrey (1863-1950). According to a studio press release and articles from the time, this veteran of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charity served as an adviser for scenes shot inside the dingy cripple factory. The image below shows the white-haired Godrey on set, seated, next to a standing Herbert Brenon, who is wearing a white hat. Some of the unknown actors referenced above may be included in this production still.

 

A 1912 article

Another 1912 article

 

Godfrey was a well known figure in New York City. He spoke about his work to various groups, and he was mentioned in newspapers throughout the Teens, Twenties, and Thirties. I wonder if George Kibbe Turner, author of the short story which was the basis for the film, was aware of him?

One actor who did receive credit was Juliet Brenon, who played Portland Fancy. If her name seems familiar, it is because she was the niece of the film's director, Herbert Brenon.

Juliet Brenon

Despite the fact each of her four films, The Eternal Sin (1917), The Lone Wolf (1917), The Street of Forgotten Men (1925), and A Kiss for Cinderella (1925), were directed by her Uncle, Juliet Brenon (1885-1979) was a talent in her own right. By the time she was cast in The Street of Forgotten Men, she had already acted in a number of stage plays (including Nice People with Tallulah Bankhead in 1921), and garnered positive notices. 

Juliet Brenon was at the heart of an illustrious extended family. Her father was Algernon St. John-Brenon, esteemed music critic of the N.Y. Morning Telegraph. Her sister, Aileen, made a name for herself writing about the movies – while Aileen’s husband was the art noted critic Thomas Craven. Juliet was married was Cleon Throckmorton, an equally noted American painter, theatrical designer, producer, and architect considered one of the most prolific set designers of the Jazz Age. During the 1930s, their Greenwich Village apartment of Brenon & Throckmorton became a salon for actors, artists, and intellectuals such as e.e. cummings, Noël Coward, Norman Bel Geddes, and notably, Eugene O'Neill. Around  this time, their politically left salon raised funds for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War. Later, Juliet Brenon contributed articles recounting her early life (and friendship with O'Neill) to Yankee magazine.

In 1926, the Los Angeles Times reported Brenon was to be cast in another of her Uncle’s films, The Great Gatsby (1926), but that seems not to have come about.

Through watching the film, sometimes frame by frame, I have come across two instances when sheet music is included in the frame. I have been able to identify one of these sheets, more of less in the first instance, and will discuss what I have found in an upcoming podcast focusing on music related to The Street of Forgotten Men. 

The second instance is notable. In one scene later in the film, Mary Brian is shown playing the piano. There is sheet music on the piano before her. That sheet music is clearly shown to be from Peter Pan, which Brian had starred in the year before under the direction of Brenon!

An American arcade card

For more on The Street of Forgotten Men, see the Louise Brooks Society filmography page.

Location shooting in The Street of Forgotten Men - the Little Church Around the Corner

On May 10th, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will screen its new restoration of Herbert Brenon's The Street of Forgotten Men - Louise Brooks' little seen first film. More information about that special event can be found HERE. 

This month, and ahead of that special event, I am running a few excerpts from my forthcoming book, The Street of Forgotten Men, from Story to Screen and Beyond, which I expect will be published later this year. This excerpt looks at one of film's location shoots, namely, the historic Little Church Around the Corner.

Production work on The Street of Forgotten Men began on April 6, 1925 and finished around June 6th. The film was largely shot at Paramount’s Astoria Studios on Long Island (located at 3412 36th Street in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens). Shown below is a rare production still from the film. An interior studio ceiling and lighting can be seen, as extras who crowd the street are paying attention to the man with a hat and megaphone standing in the lower center. That man  may well  be director Herbert Brenon. But who, I wonder, is the young woman standing to his right?

Location shooting was done elsewhere on Long Island as well as on the streets of Manhattan, including on Fifth Avenue, and at the landmark Little Church Around the Corner on East 29th. This post focuses on that historic place of worship. (Click here to see the Church's website or its Wikipedia page for more information and images.)

The Church of the Transfiguration, also known as the Little Church Around the Corner (built 1850), was the setting for a scene at the end of The Street of Forgotten Men, where the characters played by Mary Brian and Neil Hamilton are married. (Little Anita Louise is somewhere in the background.) In actuality, the building is an Episcopal church located at 1 East 29th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues on the island of Manhattan in New York City.

Notably, many prominent people from all over the country, including actors associated with both the stage and screen, have visited or been married in this picturesque parish church. Among them is novelist P. G. Wodehouse, who was married there in 1914, and subsequently set most of his fictionalized weddings at the church.

The Little Church Around the Corner got its nickname not long after the Civil War. At the time, actors and other performers were considered morally suspect in some quarters. According to the Church’s website, in 1870, Joseph Jefferson, an actor renowned for his portrayal of Rip Van Winkle, approached the rector of the nearby Church of the Atonement to request a funeral for his friend and fellow actor, George Holland. Upon learning that the deceased was an actor, the rector refused to hold services. Jefferson persisted, and asked if there was a church in the area that would hold a funeral for his friend. The rector responded, “I believe there is a little church around the corner where it might be done.” Jefferson replied, ‘If that be so, God bless the little church around the corner!”

To this day, the church has maintained ties with the theater world. In 1898, stained glass windows were placed in the building memorializing Edwin Booth, who is widely considered the greatest American actor of the 19th century. Since 1923, the Church has served as the national headquarters of the Episcopal Actors' Guild. Over the years such notables as Basil Rathbone, Tallulah Bankhead, Peggy Wood, Joan Fontaine, Rex Harrison, and Charlton Heston have served as officers or council members of the guild. In the 1970s, the Church hosted the Joseph Jefferson Theatre Company, which gave starts to actors such as Armand Assante, Tom Hulce, and Rhea Perlman. In 1986, the Church was featured in an episode of The Equalizer, the television show, as well as in a Woody Allen film, Hannah and Her Sisters. Following his death in 1990, guild member Rex Harrison was memorialized at the church.

In 1967, the Church of the Transfiguration was designated a New York City landmark, and in 1973, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Actors in uncredited bit parts in The Street of Forgotten Men, part 4 Louise Brooks

On May 10th, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will screen its new restoration of Herbert Brenon's The Street of Forgotten Men - Louise Brooks' little seen first film. More information about that special event can be found HERE. 

This month, and ahead of that special event, I am running a few excerpts from my forthcoming book, The Street of Forgotten Men, from Story to Screen and Beyond, which I expect will be published later this year. This excerpt is the forth of four focusing on some of the actors who had uncredited bit parts in The Street of Forgotten Men. Here, I profile Louise Brooks (1906-1985).

Louise Brooks never intended to become an actress. She had started as a dancer, performing locally in her native Kansas before joining the Denishawn Dance Company and later George White Scandals. Following her return from London in February 1925, she landed a job as a dancer in Louie the 14th, a musical farce produced by Florenz Ziegfeld. She began to make a name for herself, and by June of that year, Brooks was a featured member of the chorus in the Summer edition of Ziegfeld’s Follies, whose other cast members included future film stars Will Rogers, Lina Basquette, and W.C. Fields.

The Follies were widely celebrated, and all manner of notables turned out to see the shows; some of them made a bee-line to the performer’s dressing rooms, including Brooks’. Key among them were writer Herman Mankiewicz, film star Charlie Chaplin, and producer Walter Wanger, the latter a Paramount talent scout. Wanger was dazzled by Brooks. According to the Barry Paris biography, he had heard Edmund Goulding (the British-born screenwriter and director then working in the States) rave about her, and so Wanger and Townsend Martin (a writer and another dressing room visitor) arranged to test her for a role in The Street of Forgotten Men, which was already filming at Paramount’s Astoria Studios on Long Island. Brooks agreed, thinking she might shoot movies during the day and dance in the Follies at night.

Brooks’ screen test was overseen by director Allan Dwan. It went well, or at least well enough, with the result being Brooks was given a bit part as a moll, a companion to Bridgeport White-Eye (played by John Harrington).* Brooks started work on the film on May 20, and appears in the second from last scene in the film, in which there is a brawl in a bar. Brooks’ scene lasts just 4 minutes. Not surprisingly, no reviewer or critic took notice of Brooks, except for an anonymous Los Angeles Times writer who said, “And there was a little rowdy, obviously attached to the ‘blind’ man, who did some vital work during her few short scenes. She was not listed.”

Throughout her career, Brooks reportedly didn’t bother to see herself act on screen. The one exception, seemingly, was her bit part in The Street of Forgotten Men. In a late 1928 interview with Pour Vous regarding her just completed role in Die Büchse der Pandora, Brooks told the French magazine that she had not seen the German film, as it was a principle for her “not to go see herself on the screen. ‘I did,’ she said confidently, ‘during my first film. I won't do it again, though I can't say why. Seeing myself gives me an uncomfortable feeling’." 

Later in life, Brooks said little about her first film, except to acknowledge her role in it. In Lulu in Hollywood, she dryly commented, “In May, at Famous Players-Lasky’s studio, in New York, under Herbert Brenon’s direction, I had played with no enthusiasm a bit part in Street of Forgotten Men.”

Truth-be-told, Brooks’ acting is a bit much in her screen debut. At first, she was asked to be solicitous, and she vamps. Then, feigning fright as a brawl begins, she retreats across the barroom floor like a frightened though graceful dancer. The novice actress thought she had done poorly, but Brenon and various studio executives did not. 

Despite any self-consciousness she might have felt, Brooks must have thought her acting not so bad that she wasn’t willing to accept a compliment. In 1928, after she became an established star, the Spanish film magazine El Cine carried a syndicated bit about her debut and her reaction to praise sent by a fan. “Louise Brooks must have been very satisfied when she received her first fan letter from a girl in Brooklyn who said she saw her in The Street Men, because after reading it, she immediately took a photograph of herself that she had hanging in her dressing room and sent it to the girl in thanks.” 

* Brooks path to an acting career may have been more circuitous than suggested. Four days prior to beginning work on The Street of Forgotten Men, the aspiring actress accompanied Herbert Brenon to the 1925 Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs. The race, filmed as a newsreel by Fox, was won by Flying Ebony.

NEXT IN THE SERIES: THE LITTLE CHURCH AROUND THE CORNER

Actors in uncredited bit parts in The Street of Forgotten Men, part 3 Whitney Bolton

On May 10th, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will screen its new restoration of Herbert Brenon's The Street of Forgotten Men - Louise Brooks' little seen first film. More information about that special event can be found HERE. 

This month, and ahead of that special event, I am running excerpts from my forthcoming book, The Street of Forgotten Men, from Story to Screen and Beyond, which I expect will be published later this year. This excerpt is the third of four focusing on some of the actors who had uncredited bit parts in The Street of Forgotten Men. Here, I profile Whitney Bolton, who played a bum in an early bar room scene. Although uncredited, I am sure Bolton appeared in the film. However, I am not 100% sure that I have correctly identified him. The still shown below pictures the individual I believe to be Bolton - the scruffy individual in a coat and hat standing alongside star Percy Marmont. (Notably, the individual I believe is Bolton is the youngest down-and-outer in the saloon, which lends some circumstantial evidence to my claim.)

Whitney Bolton (1900-1969) started out as a sports reporter in Spartanburg, South Carolina before moving to New York City in 1924, where he eventually found employment with the Herald Tribune and later Morning Telegraph. As a journalist, he became well known. In 1925, a wire service story noted in that addition to his newspaper work, Bolton also found time to take “minor roles on the silver screen,” including, according to his later claims, The Street of Forgotten Men.

Over the next few years, Bolton continued his association with the movie world. A 1927 bit in a Walter Winchell column mentioned Bolton had accompanied actress Josephine Dunn to a newspaper ball, and a 1929 article noted his presence among the illustrious of the stage and screen at a meeting of the Theatre Guild in New York City. 

As a celebrated critic and “star reporter,” Bolton also took a stab at Hollywood, where he worked as an occasional screenwriter; his best-known efforts were contributions to If I Had a Million (1932), Apartment House Love (1932), 42nd Street (1933), and The Spirit of Culver (1939). Follow this LINK to read Bolton's IMDb page. Bolton also continued working as a journalist / syndicated columnist into the 1960s.

In four different syndicated columns dating from the 1950s and 1960s, Bolton recalled his entry into films, writing in 1963, “When I first came to New York and was trying to get a job on a newspaper, I paid the rent and put scoff on the table by being a movie actor in two films, The Unguarded Hour and The Street of Forgotten Men.” (The Unguarded Hour is a lost, 1925 American silent directed by Lambert Hillyer and starring Milton Sills and Doris Kenyon.)

In a 1958 remembrance of director Herbert Brenon, who had just recently died, Bolton detailed how the two met. “At a party given for Miss Negri, I was sitting out a waltz when this gentleman came along, sat alongside and we started to talk. He asked me what I did and I told him I was waiting for an opening on The Herald Tribune. He said it might be a long wait, and how about acting in a movie he was about to make for Paramount? I said, well, now, that was a nice thing to suggest but I was not an actor and didn’t know anything about acting. He said: I wish heartily some of the so-called actors were as candid.
And the next Monday morning, at 8 o’clock, I was at Astoria, Long Island, ready to act, no matter what. The picture, The Street of Forgotten Men, was an item about the Bowery, its professional beggars and fake cripples. The star was a Briton named Percy Marmont, I showed up hair-cutted, shaved and in the best suit I could get at Brooks Brothers, a new pair of Frank Brothers shoes, a knit tie, with a neat pearl pin in it, and a supply of bewilderment.

Herbert Brenon, the man I am talking about and at that time one-third of the Great Three: Griffith, DeMille, and Brenon, took one look and turned pale. His Irish face betrayed his concern.

‘My dear young man,’ he said. ‘Your clothes are impeccable, your mustache is waxed and you have shaved to the skin. You look like a junior member of the Union League Club. I had you down to play a besotted young bum in a sordid Bowery saloon. You were to share a table with two young ladies playing unfortunate girls in a distressing profession. You won’t do at all this way.’ I played it the Scott Fitzgerald way: cool, detached, casual.

‘That’s all right. Mr. Brenon,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have been much help to you, anyway.’ ‘But you are going to be,’ he said. ‘I insist.’

He clapped his hands and people came running. He told a wardrobe man to get me a torn, soiled, bedraggled suit, dying shoes, a ragged cap. He told a makeup man to give me a three-day stubble of beard and to put some dirt on my face. He had the hair-man do things with scissors that gave me a look of not knowing even how to spell the word comb. I became, in 15 minutes, a bum, a filthy, furtive, no good bum. I also became an actor for five days at $25 a day. It was a princely income.

Marmont and I became friends in a lasting way and Brenon, seeing me around at parties in the following years, always spoke courteously and pleasantly – but he never asked me to act for him again.”

I wasn't able to find any images of Bolton from the 1920s with which I might compare his features with those of some of the background players in The Street of Forgotten Men. However, I did find this image from the 1950s, which was published in a movie magazine. Notably, the later day Bolton in this image has prominent cheeks, which somewhat matches the features of the actor seen in the second screen grab. If any descendants of Whitney Bolton could provide a picture of him from the 1920s, that would be great.

By the way, Whitney Bolton was married to a real star, radio, stage, and screen actress Nancy Coleman (1912-2000). Check out this bio of her HERE. 

In the clipping below, from the 1930s, Whitney Bolton's name is listed among the "Famous Authors" included in the yellow box, along with Noel Coward, Tiffany Thayer, Max Brand and Zane Grey, etc.... That is pretty good company.

 

 

 

 NEXT IN THE SERIES: LOUISE BROOKS