Tweet Gallery of Mastheads

Hey! Happy Anniversary to us!Fred

I'll second that!

[Mike Gebert]

And so a new year begins... in a couple of hours, Central time... but it's already 2009 in Italy, so time to honor one of the few silent movie star names everybody knows... Clara Kimball Young! Er, Rudolph Valentino, seen here being brutishly ethnic with Ms. Young in The Eyes of Youth, thanks to Rudyfan for the pic.



Some notable past threads re: Valentino: Beyond the Rocks, Valentino sings, Judging Rex Ingram, and Do guys find Valentino appealing?

OOOH, Clara, thanks! (oh yeah, and for Rudy too!). Actually, i can't remember ever not knowing who either Clara or Rudy was. And of course in the middle of the teens Clara was a huge star.

Anyway, great masthead!

greta

[Mike Gebert]

I've got a little mini-salute to lost films planned here for this month and next month, starting with this image of ever-game Joan Blondell giving a pretty good idea of why Convention City was seen as unfit ever to be reissued post-Code:



It comes from a good piece on Convention City and other saucy pre-Codes at the invaluable Greenbriar Picture Shows. There hasn't been a lot posted about Blondell here yet, but there is this, at least.

Reminds me of the scene QUAI DES ORFERVRES in which the old pervert insists that the young girl he's having pictures taken of wear her shoes.

Bob

A bit back when I posted a post in regards to my tattoo, someone responded with "MASTHEAD".
I assume to presume that this is the thread to which the aforementioned person refered?
Speaking only for myself, I would love to see my tattoo permanently immoralized in the temporary ether of the internet on a masthead. I honestly do not know what that means.

Huh?

Ignore him, he is Koto, my driver and valet. Seriously, what does masthead mean. I know what masturb......

Stop.

[Mike Gebert]

The masthead is... uh... the thing that there are visual examples of throughout this thread.

And I'm not sure how a tattoo could be integrated into the format, I was just joking, really. It does make an excellent avatar for you, though.

[Mike Gebert]

So here's the second half of a little mini tribute to lost films (which my wife reminds me is also the theme of Rodney Sauer's calendar-- which she stole and took to her office). It's [correction] Esther Ralston in von Sternberg's The Case of Lena Smith, with an apropos message for this group:



The full size image (which is quite nice) is here.

N'est-ce pas Esther Ralston? Evelyn Brent did not appear in The Case of Lena Smith, although the original source might have misidentified the film.

-Harold

[Mike Gebert]

Oops! Synapse dysfunction. Wrong actress or Sternberg film, you are correct. Esther Ralston in The Case of Lena Smith. If it wasn't lost, I'd have realized that!

There's something very different about the full picture. At first I thought the star for March was Jackie Cooper!

Bob

[Mike Gebert]

No, this is NOT an April Fool's joke...



...though I have no idea what the context of this photo really was. (I found it attached to this very interesting interview.) The image, in any case, is some starlet with one of the great film historians and collectors, William K. Everson, who would have been 80 this April. More here.

No, this is NOT an April Fool's joke...



...though I have no idea what the context of this photo really was. (I found it attached to this very interesting interview.) The image, in any case, is some starlet with one of the great film historians and collectors, William K. Everson, who would have been 80 this April. More here.

I find it a little odd that I have to click the reload button to get the new masthead each month. Is it based on a cookie of some kind? My computer's set up to refuse cookies, and if you'll recall, that's why I can't use the automatic log-in feature, too.

Jim

[Mike Gebert]

Your computer caches certain images so it doesn't have to reload them every time you go to a new page at NitrateVille. That means it might take a few visits before it figures out that the image has changed. Nothing we can do about it (and most of the time, it's a major benefit).

What's kind of interesting about the Everson-Monroe masthead picture, for me, is that it's Everson who looks like a famous star comfortable with his high profile, and Marilyn who looks like the awkward, flustered-by-nearness-to-the-famous fangirl.

Who knows, maybe it was that way in real life, and Marilyn went to bed every night clutching a photo of the beguiling Everson...

Jim

[Mike Gebert]

This month we feature Phyllis Haver and Robert Edeson in Chicago. Why? Because I just saw it the other day and it's a darn good picture, so why not. And Phyllis Haver is a hotsy-totsy in it.

So how many Best Picture Oscar winners can you name that had a silent version, one way or another? Not counting Wings which IS a silent (or Sunrise the same year), I count eight.

This month we feature Phyllis Haver and Robert Edeson in Chicago. Why? Because I just saw it the other day and it's a darn good picture, so why not. And Phyllis Haver is a hotsy-totsy in it.

Phyllis Haver is hot in everything. Plus she's a great comedian, one of the truly unsung comic skills of the golden age of slapstick.

It beats me why she is completely forgotten by both fans of early film beauties and fans of early film comedy. People seem to believe beautiful female comics in the pre-Code era began and ended with Mabel Normand.

Jim

I loved Chicago when I saw it and Haver, you're right, Hotsy-Totsy.

Great choice of a masthead!

I think this is the scene where she suspects Edeson of wearing a toupee.

I think this is the scene where she suspects Edeson of wearing a toupee.

I can't think why.

Fred

I loved Chicago when I saw it and Haver, you're right, Hotsy-Totsy. Great choice of a masthead!

I'd rather look at Phyllis Haver than Marilyn whatzername ANY day.

[Mike Gebert]

In honor of an outstanding release this month (actually I think it comes out in July, but you'll have a chance to get it sooner than that shortly), here's John Barrymore as Sherlock Holmes facing, great profile to great profile, John Barrymore as Mr. Hyde. (Didn't somebody write a Holmes vs. Jekyll and Hyde novel back in the 70s? Seems like a natural; and Gustav von Seyffertitz as Moriarty could as well be Mr. Hyde, frankly.) Anyway, you can read about Kino's big Barrymore box set here, and watch for more news soon.

[Mike Gebert]

Why did last month's masthead feature a July video release? Because this month's was already planned for another July video release— John Gilbert and Roy D'Arcy in Bardelys the Magnificent, which amazingly has gone from lost film to street date of July 14 in record time. Considering that the silent DVD market is supposed to be dead, that makes July a pretty lively month.

Why is John Gilbert dueling with Eric Idle?.....

Gary J.

[Mike Gebert]

I don't normally do anything to celebrate holidays, etc. in the masthead, but in this case we're celebrating the 40th anniversary of an event which has special resonance with the silent film era, so Mr. Gilbert has graciously surrendered a day or two of his month to allow us to commemorate a trip to the moon:



Jack's back on Tuesday.

[silentfilm]

Which one of those guys in the masthead is Georges Méliès?

Both probably - it's a trick film.

[Mike Gebert]

Since we were just talking about Barbara Stanwyck as the standard for actresses, she seemed like a good choice to break our streak of guys with mustaches:



I'm not sure what picture this deliciously overripe example of everyday casual wear is from, if any, though it's almost certainly in that period when she was one of the great comediennes, in things like The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and Jenny Paxson's favorite Remember the Night— which would soon be followed by her most iconic role, indeed one of the screen's most iconic ever, Double Indemnity. (No wonder she won 2 Oscars... oh wait... that was Luise Rainer.)

(No wonder she won 2 Oscars... oh wait... that was Luise Rainer.)

Ya got something against Louise?

Anyway, thanks for a month of Babs.

[Mike Gebert]

Yeah, two Oscars. She's bathetic in The Great Ziegfeld (which is a snoozer in any case), decent but drab in The Good Earth, but all in all, there are about 4,713 actresses of the 30s who are more interesting than she is. Starting with Babs...