Thursday, March 27, 2008

Six Pack of Mystery Movies Revealed!


A last minute check to my e-mail confirms my suspicion: I made this way too hard. I myself could only identify three before locating them in old movie books of mine to scan. Next time I offer a real prize I'll try to make a little more winnable.


Number One - Pool Sharks (1915). It was W.C. Fields first movie. That's him on the right. I just bought a book on Fields over the weekend for a dollar from the used bookstore I go to and scanned multiple photos immediately. Prior to owning this book I couldn't have picked out a screengrab from Pool Sharks if the security of the world depended on it.


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Number Two - Albert Schweitzer (1957). It won the Oscar for Best Documentary and has narration by Fredric March. I've read up on Schweitzer and know what he looked like so I could've made a reasonable stab at this one through an internet search but again, until I scanned it in from an old Oscar book I have, I couldn't have identified it outright.


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Number Three - Sons of Liberty (1939). Here I was being deliberately sneaky. This is a short subject that runs from time to time on TCM. It was directed by Michael Curtiz and stars Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard, who acted together in Anthony Adverse, another period piece, and I figured anyone looking at the pic and recognizing the two leads would immediately go with Anthony Adverse, not the short subject Sons of Liberty. I'm a bad boy.


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Number Four - The Patriot (1928). The classic lost film The Patriot, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Emil Jannings (in the picture with Florence Vidor) one of the most highly praised films of 1928. Oddly, for one of the most highly praised films of any given year, it is lost. It is considered to be near the top of sought after lost films, along with a complete version of Stroheim's Greed. I certainly know about this film, but was unfamiliar with it's look outside of this scanned image.


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Number Five - The Walls of Malapaga (1949). This is one movie I'd love to see and have seen that image of Jean Gabin in so many movie books that I figured this one would be identified more easily than the others. The movie, the story of a criminal on the run who falls in love with a girl in Italy, was directed by Rene Clement and won the Honorary Oscar (at the time it wasn't yet a full-fledged category) for Best Foreign Language Film. It takes place in Italy but the dialogue is in French. I've never seen it but would very much like to. However, it is not available on DVD. Yet.


*****


Number Six - Underworld (1927). Josef von Sternberg directed this classic late-era silent film. It is one of the true forerunners of the gangster films made so popular in the thirties and still holds up on its own as a terrific crime movie. It's not available on DVD but I saw it years ago on a local PBS station and even in it's grainy degraded condition it looked quite good. I hope this, and more great silents, find a good digitally transferred home on DVD soon. Pictured is Clive Brook. The lighting makes him a bit hard to identify but the cleft chin gives him away.