San Francisco’s Silent Film Festival and Jewish Film Festival
by Andre Soares
In the San Francisco Chronicle, G. Allen Johnson discusses the 10th San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which opens next weekend with Harold Lloyd’s For Heaven’s Sake (1926).
Other silent screenings include Lillian Gish and Lars Hanson in Victor Sjöström’s solid (and still timely) 1926 drama about intolerance, The Scarlet Letter (4 p.m. next Sunday); Gloria Swanson in Allan Dwan’s 1925 Stage Struck (3:20 p.m. Saturday), a middling comedy with scenes in two-strip Technicolor; It (1927), a silly piece of fluff directed by Clarence Badger, with "It’ girl Clara Bow and Antonio Moreno (8 p.m. next Sunday); and The Big Parade (7:45 p.m. Saturday), King Vidor’s monumental anti-war drama starring John Gilbert, and with a heartbreaking performance by Renée Adorée.
On the foreign front, the festival will show the 1929 Brazilian socialite drama Sangue Mineiro (1:15 p.m. Saturday), starring Brazilian diva Carmen Santos under the direction of the unofficial father of Brazilian cinema, Humberto Mauro; and Franz Osten and Himansu Rai’s 1925 Indian epic Prem Sanyas (1:30 p.m. next Sunday), the story of the life of Buddha.
More on John Gilbert and The Big Parade
The 25th edition of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the largest of its kind in the United States, will take place all over the Bay Area in late July.
Among this year’s highlights are the U.S. premiere of Dani Levy’s German hit and top German Academy Award contender, Alles auf Zucker! / Go for Zucker!, and a series of films focusing on the work of Jews who were blacklisted during the House Un-American Activities Committee’s reign of terror. Jews, in particular, were singled out for political persecution.
Blacklist scholar Paul Buhle of Brown University will moderate a panel that will include blacklisted writers Walter Bernstein, Norma Barzman (author of the original story for the psychological thriller The Locket, which is part of the festival’s program), and Dan Bessie, whose father, screenwriter Alvah Bessie, was one of the Hollywood Ten. In the words of festival Program Director Nancy Fishman, the panel will offer a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to talk to people who lived through that period."
The festival, which comprises a total of 49 feature films, documentaries, and shorts from 15 countries, runs between July 21-28 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco; July 31-Aug. 6 at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley; July 31-Aug. 4 at the Mountain View Century Cinema 16 in Mountain View; and Aug. 6-8 at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.
AltFG Quiz of the Day: In which silent film comedy does Marion Davies do a great imitation of Lillian Gish’s performance in The Scarlet Letter?
Los Angeles Film Festival 2005
Last Call for Nazi-Occupied France
Paramount Before the Code at New York City’s Film Forum
SORRELL AND SON (1927) Screening in Los Angeles
Quiz Answer: The Patsy (1928), directed by King Vidor. In the same film, she also does hilarious over-the-top imitations of MGM star Mae Murray and Paramount diva Pola Negri. Additionally, Davies imitates Gloria Swanson in Show People (1928), co-star Jetta Goudal in The Cardboard Lover (1928), and Greta Garbo in Blondie of the Follies (1932).
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