When Seeing Stuff Was Really Work

 

The Everson Want-To-Watches of 1954

All Hail Films in Review, around and prominent from early 1950 until print publication ended in 1997 (web presence still). They sold comparative lots, as never did I pace a dealer room w/o stumble-over a box of FIR’s, a dollar-to-five generally, or take ten for a discount. Films in Review was for its time a best there was. Historians w/ industry background (Cat People’s DeWitt Bodeen for instance), still-active execs, like Dore Schary, contributed thoughts and essays. The National Board of Review was umbrella over FIR and lent prestige, reviews for current films with career profiles, many which remain definitive source on respective subject. This is to preface a piece I came across in March 1954’s issue, William K. Everson on “The Films I Missed,” his reflection of when rare meant unattainable, a list of can’t-sees surpassing what-can by fretful margin, Everson at the time given largely up on titles we slip into disc trays and play pristine. Lesson learned (we hope): Don’t crybaby on one or few that stay elusive, not when what Everson and kin sought are close as Amazon buttons. The historian tells of quest made for 100 titles he most wanted to see since boyhood in England (b. 1929) and how it took twenty-five years and counting to almost reach that goal. Would you go AWOL from armed service to see Sunrise? Everson did. Also snuck into a German theatre, forbidden to Occupation personnel, for sake of The Big Trail. Worth risking the brig? Who could say amidst latter-day horn of plenty. (Sunrise and The Big Trail both stream in High-Def and are available on Blu-Ray).

Everson was my writing role model from when a Statesville cousin got for Christmas 1964 The Bad Guys, WKE’s survey of screen villainy from silents to Dr. No. There was wit to his words and informative besides. It came eventually to me seeking every book he did, whatever the topic. His Films in Review quest was personal, Everson “getting” movies by age six, fully grasping the art by ten when he saw Stagecoach and Of Mice and Men in theatres. He wasn’t long realizing that greats had come before him, a silent era just gone when he was born, quest thus begun for films voiceless that too few cared to be reminded of. The wish list taken down at age eleven was sixty silents to forty early talkers, process from there mere matter of checking them off, a struggle amidst poverty of resource that was the UK of late thirties and early forties where they had much to worry over besides Bill Everson satisfying his film crave. Friendly showmen gave him promotional material (shades of Colonel Forehand sharing pressbooks with me) and he bought trade magazines where they surfaced. Everson got an industry job at age fourteen thanks to wartime manpower shortage and so found out about film societies active in the area, for which he was eventually able to book titles thanks to distribution contacts. First struck off the hundred list was The Blue Angel, a tall order to locate in midst of war and again thank our latter luck for having it handy, and in multiple languages. The Blue Angel floated long a sea of non-access. I had but one televised swat growing up, thankful for mere that. How long was wait for classics? As long or more than Everson had to wait, I’d guess, for certain titles at least.

Image Restoration Courtesy of Mark Vieira/Starlight Studio

And what of The Blue Angel, his-then and ours-later? I’ll guess Everson was able to see it on 35mm judging by impression the film made upon him. What we got was off Educational TV, a Tennessee station barely materializing for a single broadcast, essence of “making do.” Truth is, I only sort of saw The Blue Angel that age-sixteen night, and it would be years before repeat occasion. Such was reality of much I gave myself credit for seeing, service stripes earned but barely. I faint understood what these pictures were supposed to look like, so little exposure there was to quality presentations. Again to ask: How did we stay interested in this stuff against ongoing odds? And shouldn’t there be many more embracing classics just because they can finally be watched properly, spectacularly in fact? Everson’s first view of Intolerance, in tinted 35mm, a full, live orchestra performing the original score … a transforming experience. “I emerged into the sunlight afterwards quite stunned by it all.” He was convinced that day that Intolerance was the Greatest Film Ever Made. A friend of mine years later felt nearly the same, even as his Intolerance was 8mm and he was obliged to change reels twelve times. So much is in the how we watch, and adjustments that must be made to see greatness through crack-glass of compromised presentation. In most ways of course, we are ahead of Everson, but miss his thrill of pursuit and unexpected discovery. He saw The Covered Wagon as did I, mine and perhaps his a 16mm Kodascope. Kino presently offers Blu-Ray of vastly better quality. Trouble is me consuming latter casually, a happening not at all a Happening like those Everson routinely had.

Foolish Wives was always lost treasure. Erich von Stroheim took a first of career-to-come ritualistic beatings from it. Universal gelded his masterpiece even between first and second weeks of New York premiere play, again tampering between a second and third frame. What all of us have seen since 1922 is palest shadow of what Stroheim wished, but therein lay essence of him as abused and misunderstood genius, representing what art film could be if only talent were left alone to express themselves. Stroheim was that kind of hero to pioneer film scholars who needed martyrs they could admire and identify with. Historians who took cinema serious were outsiders too, so who better than Stroheim to speak for them, how good his films were a point quite beside the point. Now that movies have become at least somewhat more legitimized, we don’t need EvS so much, and it’s finally OK to call flaws where found. I enjoy Foolish Wives in ghost form, even as Blu-Ray barely helps, 143 minutes to remind me that despite tables cleared a hundred years ago, this was once a visual feast. Here too was chance to ID with Everson watching-as-act-of-faith, seeing through Stroheim’s heartbreak to what his goals ideally were, like going through an art gallery where canvases are bent, torn, splattered by mud. There should be award for traversing Foolish Wives today, honor the more as many if not most silent titles look so much superior than what once was hoped for. I almost expect Biograph shorts to seem shot yesterday, thanks to what surfaces at You Tube. Taking-for-Granted has become film appreciation’s worst enemy.

Movies had been around a comparatively short time when Everson made his list. Must-sees by his estimation seem less so today, not for selections being unworthy but because there now are so many more to draw from, plus modern inclination toward new to exclusion of old. His naming Sunrise at or near the top is something I don’t expect to see critics or historians repeat. Did Sunrise change or just people’s evaluation of it? Murnau as a name has not the magic once evoked, though his German output continues to surface from labels like Kino. Sunrise was released on Fox DVD as part of a Marnau-Frank Borzage box of silents that took Fox out of the big box classic business. There is a Blu-Ray import I’ll watch for spiritual connect with film canons as once were understood. Like Foolish Wives, Sunrise is not seen for fun (was it ever?), which explains why fewer with passing years see it. Where Everson was enviable to fans born later was 1947 and a sit through Mystery of the Wax Museum which neither he or anybody realized would be lost for a couple decades to follow. For said blighted period, he and that '47 audience would be seeming only humans to experience Wax Museum since 1933 when it was new. There were others Everson caught that few or none shared, outstanding among them London After Midnight, a fifties screening had but a decade before fire claimed MGM’s last surviving print. Everson bore witness also to A Kiss for Cinderella on pristine multi-tinted nitrate before whichever archive permitted it to rot. He’d later classify that boner with what happened at Balaclava Heights. No telling what else we call lost was watched at least once by him. In fact, Everson owned prints that were last of their kind, being an inveterate collector from New York arrival around 1950.

He would live in Manhattan, keep films like Egyptian treasure in an apartment spacious until he loosed an ocean of 16mm upon it. I went once to his Solomon’s mine, a reward for giving nitrate to the AFI once the amass of Moon Mullins. This was summer 1976. Everson hosted a day’s screening and lunch besides. As with favorite writers met, where fortunate, I expected Bill to be like his books, non-stop wit, fun unbound. He was a delight surely, if not the literary stand-up my immaturity figured upon. Everson the man, for me a star on par with anyone in movies, was kind and generous to a fault. Why should he have spent a day making this stranger’s dream come true? --- yet he did. We saw highlights of rarities. One was The Red Dance, a Fox silent directed by Raoul Walsh, with tints. I was invited to pick any feature from his library to see complete. Because Bill had lately written a Films in Review appreciation of Lady on a Train, I chose that, figuring under no circumstance could I ever see it elsewhere, as in for the rest of my whole life. Here was thought occupying us all during years when a one chance was often the only chance to snare a feature brought aground this precious once. Everson knew that sensation well, or better, than anyone. He had missed a mid-forties screening of Orphans of the Storm thanks to a second lieutenant that kept him on camp duty. This time Bill could not risk AWOL, so back went Orphans to MOMA in NY and he’d wait until 1953 to finally catch up with it. I pondered this while watching a hard-drive-preserved HD broadcast off TCM that Photoplay Productions restored from surviving elements. Another day … another watch taken for granted.

For Everson, for anyone in movie quest, it was like chase after serial villains. He hairbreadth-arrived to once-in-lifetime revival of The White Hell of Pitz Palu, as who knew if Leni would ever climb that mountain again? Racing two days across Germany, Holland, and the North Sea for a single screening, “my mental cross-cutting on that journey rivalled the climax of Intolerance!” Is there any film we would make such heroic effort to see? I’d say no, simply for so little left beyond our reach. Dan Mercer and I drove freeway clotted route to Ben-Hur (1927) with a live orchestra, something I’d not attempt today, if forever glad for journey taken then. I expect Everson’s movie memories were more precious than ours could hope to be. A thing got easy is not worth the getting, ancients said. By the by, he recalled in’54 that White Hell was “the only complete print … I have ever seen.” Reward for tenacity! So is Kino’s disc complete as well, or more so? We’ll never know. Everson winds up his essay with a plea for titles still elusive. Did Films in Review readership know whereabouts of A Woman of Paris, Mare Nostrum, Strike, or Hollywood? Three of the four are extant, in fact are available on disc. Exception is Hollywood, lost as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Could we be as eager to see it as was Bill? --- or have other totems been erected in its place? Note quote to effect that there are no “Archival Discoveries,” just films that were mis-stored, improperly labeled, never looked at despite years on site. Might Hollywood be amidst such overlook? Who’s for taking up spiral-bound binder and close inspecting every film in every archive? No more than a hundred years job that, so let’s get started.