Sunday, June 8 @ 11:30 AM / Music Box Theatre — 3733 N Southport Ave
Tickets: $12 at the door or purchase in advance
ALIAS JIMMY VALENTINE
Directed by Maurice Tourneur • 1915
On Christmas Day, 1909, Chicagoans at the Studebaker Theater were the first to see a stage production of Alias Jimmy Valentine, which Paul Armstrong had adapted from O. Henry’s short story “A Retrieved Reformation.” A month later, the play about a debonair safecracker and his tempestuous path to rehabilitation opened on Broadway and became a sensation. The film version would wait until 1915, when New Jersey’s World Film Corporation was bringing stage successes to the screen at the rate of one per week. Robert Warwick starred as Lee Randall, a society swell who moonlights as bank robber Jimmy Valentine because, alas, he is cursed with talent: his sensitive fingertips can detect minute tremulations from combination locks. He repeatedly tries to return to the straight and narrow but finds his efforts foiled by criminal confederates, merciless cops, and the irony of fate. The movie version of Alias Jimmy Valentine had two advantages that the stage rendition lacked. First, from the perspective of verisimilitude and ballyhoo, it boasted scenes actually shot in New York’s Sing Sing Prison. (As a token of appreciation, the film screened at Sing Sing, with an inmate providing piano accompaniment, before opening theatrically.) More significantly, Alias Jimmy Valentine benefited from the extraordinary visual sophistication of director Maurice Tourneur, a French émigré who’d been working in America for less than a year. Finding odd angles and painterly lighting to enliven a familiar story, Tourneur established the contours of the gangster film in high style. (KW)
50 min • World Film Corp. • 35mm from Library of Congress
Preceded by: “The Narrow Road” (D.W. Griffith, 1912) – 17 min – 35mm from Library of Congress
Live musical accompaniment by David Drazin
NEXT UP: WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS on Tuesday, June 17 at Music Box