PEGGY LEADS THE WAY. American Film Company-Mutual, 1917; Lloyd Ingraham, director; Mary Miles Minter, Andrew Arbuckle, Carl Stockdale, Alan Forrest, Emma Kluge, Margaret Shelby, George Ahern, Frank C. Thompson, William Spencer. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   Lightning struck a third time, bringing to light a film starring Mary Miles Minter, few of whose films have survived and whose career was, in effect, ended by the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor, with the scandal arising from rumors of her relationship with Taylor tarnishing her screen image.

   I had never seen one of her films and I was completely charmed by her bright, take-charge performance. She returns home after studying in the East to find her father’s country store struggling in the wake of government regulations and the entire community’s livelihood and existence threatened by the dastardly actions of a heartless developer.

   Fortunately, he has a son who’s as charmed by Mary as I was. He takes the side of the locals, and with Mary orchestrating the revolt, helped by a fortuitous storm, happiness and prosperity are restored to the small community.

THE DANGER SIGNAL. Columbia, 1925; Erie C. Kenton, director; Jane Novak (shown below), Dorothy Revier, Robert Edeson, Gaston Glass. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   An incomplete print of this film only turned up in 2002 and even with careful piecing-together and restoration, shows signs of nitrate decomposition and narrative gaps. However, what remains (and is, in fact, only about 900′ short of the original footage listed in the American Film Institute Catalog) proved to be one of the highlights of the weekend.

   It’s the melodramatic story of a an unwed mother who gives up one of her twin sons to a successful father, signing away all rights without telling him there were two boys. Years later, she’s running a small dress shop while the son she raised is working for the railroad his father owns, with his brother being groomed to succeed his father.

   The one son is poor but honest and a genuinely sterling character, while his brother is a lazy good-for-nothing. The plot finds the good son falling in love with his brother’s girlfriend, a love that’s returned. The plot has echoes of classic drama (both French and English/American), with a good dollop of novelistic high-jinks that climax in a thrilling runaway train chase that had the audience literally cheering.

   The resolution reunites all the long-separated parties, rewards the good and provides a way toward redemption for the wayward.

   A moral tale whose charm, coupled with first-rate acting, directing, and scripting, carried the day.

BABY FACE. Warner Bros., 1933. Alfred E. Green, director; Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker, Margaret Lindsay, Arthur Hohl, John Wayne, Robert Barrat. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   This screening of the original cut of a pre-code film restored scenes that contributed to editing and re-shoots that the Hays Office demanded to make the film less morally reprehensible.

   Stanwyck, in one of her most striking roles, plays a gold-digger who makes her way up the corporate ladder by seducing her bosses and moving to the next level when the opportunity presents itself. She leaves destroyed lives behind her until she reaches the top where she finds a love that restores her moral sense even as she loses almost everything she’s schemed for.

   There’s a somewhat happy ending in both versions (with the ending more jarring in the edited version). Arthur Hohl is especially good as her depraved father, while a besotted Donald Cook is the most damaged of her conquests.

   This is a black comedy whose taut direction and uniformly good performances keep it from veering into the absurd.

[EDITORIAL NOTE] Click here for a two minute trailer for the film, and here for nearly five minutes from the movie itself, courtesy of YouTube.   — Steve

THE CANADIAN. Famous Players-Lasky, 1926. William Beaudine, director; adapted by Arthur Stringer from W. Somerset Maugham’s play, The Land of Promise; Alvin Wyckoff, cinematographer; Thomas Meighan, Mona Palma, Wyndham Standing, Dale Fuller, Charles Winninger, Billy Butts. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   For me, this was the revelation of the convention, an outstanding silent film, with superb photography by Wyckoff, dead-on performances by every member of the cast, with Mona Palma lighting up the screen as the English woman, brought up in modest but cultivated circumstances, who goes to live with her brother on a remote Canadian farm in a desolate landscape.

   To escape the indignities she feels she’s enduring from his wife and the rough farmhands she marries his foreman who’s shown her some kindness, a decision that she quickly regrets.

   Every performance is true to the character, seemingly natural and unaffected, the soul reflected in characterizations where there’s not an excessive gesture. The subtitles are almost superfluous, the drama playing out in the visuals, with moments that are almost unbearable in their intensity. It’s this kind of experience that makes attending film conventions an adventure with a potential for transcendence.

   (Fellow attendee Jim Goodrich’s comment on this sentence was “Wow!” Could he be suggesting that I was tripping here?)

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.] The photo of Mona Palma is probably not related to the film, but after reading Walter’s review, I knew you’d like to have an idea of what she looked like at the time. Born in 1897, Mona Palma made only seven movies, all between 1923 and 1927, three of them as Mimi Palmeri. She died in 1989.

   Thomas Meighan is the tall fellow dominating the scene above, which was taken from the movie, and of course that’s him again in the publicity still on the right. His career was quite a bit longer than his co-star’s, consisting as it did of 82 movies between 1914 and 1934. Until talkies came along, he was quite a popular star.

   To make this post a little more crime-related, Meigan’s first movie was Dandy Donovan, the Gentleman Cracksman, in which he played the title role, and his first sound film was The Argyle Case (1929) in which he again played the leading character, this time homicide investigator Alex Kayton.