When Uncle Tom’s Cabin is condensed to fit into a one-reel (12-15 minutes) format, the result shows clearly what filmmakers at the turn of the century considered to be the most crucial features of the work – and also shows that they expected an audience familiar with the work and sophisticated enough to fill in the elisions. Can we do the same today? This lecture will use many slet films as examples, but will predominately focus on the two films being presented by Dr. Carli – Mantrap (1926) and Sign of Four (1923)
MANTRAP (1926)
With live piano accompaniment by Philip Carli
Friday, Feb 4 at 6:30pm
Mantrap takes a fairly humorless book by Sinclair Lewis and turns it into a roaring comedy (Lewis hated it, but the film, for once, is infinitely better than the book). This late silent comedy features Clara Bow as Alverna, a young woman living it up in the big city. She first meets Joe Easter (Ernest Torrence), in town from his cabin in the woods of Mantrap, then his pal Ralph Prescott (Percy Marmont), a big-city divorce attorney who visits Joe on vacation. They fall into a love triangle that contrasts Joe’s country simplicity with Ralph’s cold demeanor. (86 min. Rated NR, Silent) Victor Fleming went on to direct a dozen more films, most famously The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind.
SIGN OF FOUR (1923)
With live piano accompaniment by Philip Carli
Saturday, Feb 5 at 3:00pm
Arguably the best of the surviving Sherlock Holmes silent features, The Sign of Four shows off the Stoll Film Company’s capacity for producing high-budget dramas with visual flair. Director Elvey minimizes the flashback structure of the novel upon which it is based to integrate the strands through a superimposition device that keeps the action moving forward while explaining Holmes’ logic. This enables the audience to clearly follow Holmes’ line of reasoning while keeping the focus on the great man himself, furthering the identification with the character that’s such a vital element of the stories. (100 min. Rated NR, Silent) 35mm print is being provided courtesy of the British Film Institute
