Saturday, May 2 – The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (Film Studies Center) Screening Room 201
– 915 E. 60th St – Free Parking
Tickets: $10 at the door or Purchase in Advance
3:00 PM
THE LETTER
Directed by Jean de Limur • 1929
W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Letter was a salacious sensation in 1927, with its tale of an adulterous wife in Singapore who murders her lover when he takes on another mistress. Katharine Cornell originated the role of Leslie Crosbie on Broadway, but Jeanne Eagels took over the job when it came time to adapt the property to the newly audible screen. It was a lucky break for Eagels: the volatile actress had recently been suspended from Actors Equity, which effectively barred her from working on Broadway and forced her to seek employment elsewhere. Eagels had already starred in a few silent films, but none of them afforded her the opportunity to present her raw performance style with the immediacy seen here. (By the end of 1929, she would be dead from a drug overdose.) The first talkie filmed at Paramount’s East Coast studio in Astoria, The Letter was an improbable, almost experimental production: direction was entrusted to a novice from France and the facility had not yet been fully prepped for professional sound recording. Remade in 1940 with Bette Davis and the edges sanded down for Production Code compliance, this first version of The Letter remains notable as Eagels’s only surviving talkie — and what a showcase it is. Mordaunt Hall warned in TheNew York Times that Eagels’s climactic scene was “a severe test of the audible device.” Challenge accepted! Restored by the Library of Congress and the Film Foundation with funding from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. (KW)
60 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Library of Congress
Preceded by: “Dangerous Females” (William Watson, 1929) – 21 min – 16mm from the Chicago Film Society collection
5:00 PM
THE WISER SEX
Directed by Berthold Viertel • 1932
Margaret (Claudette Colbert) doesn’t want to marry a man who’d prioritize his job over their relationship — not even if he’s a district attorney (Melvyn Douglas) on the trail of the ruthless gangster Harry Evans (William Boyd). But when Margaret finds that the hapless D.A. has been framed by Evans for the murder of his own cousin (Franchot Tone), she’s forced to go undercover as a blonde good-time gal and expose the truth. If only a jury of the ‘wiser sex’ could be impaneled, justice might just prevail. One of the last films produced by Paramount at their Astoria studio, The Wiser Sex epitomizes a bold, brassy style of East Coast filmmaking. Despite working from a play from 1905 that had been filmed twice already, director Berthold Viertel valiantly tried to spin his version as a ripped-from-the-headlines gloss on the then-current Seabury investigations of New York political corruption. (KW)
76 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Universal
8:00 PM
WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD
Directed by William A. Wellman • 1933
William Wellman’s sleek, gritty melodrama about teenagers faced with the reality that their parents don’t have enough money to feed them stars Frankie Darro and Edwin Phillips as two high school sophomores who leave home in search of work. Trainhopping their way through the Midwest, they meet several other orphaned teenagers — among them Dorothy Coonan, who was doing fine until her aunt’s brothel was shut down — and ride from town to town and slum to slum as they are run out by the terrifying local authorities. Few people worked as efficiently in pre-Code Hollywood as “Wild Bill” Wellman, who often balanced a strong social conscience with as much sex, violence, and humility as could fit into a six- or seven-reel feature. His work for First National and Warner Brothers in the early ’30s represents much of what made movies as important as they were during the Depression. (JA)
68 min • Warner Bros. Pictures • 35mm from the Library of Congress, permission Warner Brothers
Preceded by: “Their First Mistake” (George Marshall, 1932) – 21 min – 35mm from the Library of Congress
NEXT UP: Pre-Code Picture Party on Sunday, May 3 at the Logan Center for the Arts