http://www.leonardschradercollection.com/
A Great Gallery Site for Lovers of Older Films and Popular Art Buffs--a collection of very rare lobby cards stretching from the Hollywood silent era to the 1950's. Hundreds of great photos and animated artwork are featured here. The music's good, too. Just click, sit back, and enjoy!
Wow! What a great link Doug, I have put it on my favourites list to have a good read through. Thank you...
ReplyDeleteJudging by the date, I am late in finding this. *Grins*
I'm just glad someone in my regular friends list finally took a look at the site, Cassandra. I should have played this link up a little when a put it on my home page I guess.
ReplyDelete*Look of chagrin*
With the music and the wonderful choice of film posters and lobby cards from the collection, its really a unique little site. Some of these I've seen, they are mostly just regular studio movies with some great stars, others I am altogether ignorant of, especially the 1920's melodramas. But I love the glimpse into a vanished age. :-)
you could re load it, but maybe now I have woken up, it will be more widely read, hahahahaha.
ReplyDeleteYes, it looks excellent and I'll take a good look tomorrow. It is now way past my bedtime, nite nite Doug.
nite, Cassandra. Thanks for stopping by.
ReplyDeleteIt was a pleasure Doug.
ReplyDeleteI had chance to look through the pages in the link today and drooled over the lobby cards. What a great time those early days were in the film industry and how lucky we are that so many of these movies are still available. If you know where to look for them, one can have great fun ordering from a list.
ReplyDeleteIt must have been such an exciting time to pay a visit to the cinema, after all there wasn't always a television at home. From what I can remember at the university film club, the guy running it mentioned, some films in those early days, were shown in serial form. This was so families could go along and take the children and indeed women took babies in arms with them. The duration of each episode was quite short making that possible. I know it happen here but I'm not sure about the States?
I was looking at the short film of Leonard Schrader. How secure childhood seemed in those days- children were allowed to be children. It was interesting to see the boys with guns, which to me is a natural thing. To some extent it gets it out of the system. In the UK, this is considered not to be PC, hahahaha. However, they simply use a finger and point........deadly is a finger?
Thank you, I enjoyed that trip back to a time when the cinema wasn't a bingo club. Thank you Doug.
Cassandra
Yes, from what I've read, your film club leader was right on concerning both Britain and America.
ReplyDeleteEarly US private movie exhibitors struggled to get families to the films. There was an early stigma attached to "the flickers" in the puritanical sections of 1900's America. The only way to break bans on showing movies on Sunday--one of the "blue laws" they called it--was to make programs like serials that would appeal to wide audiences who would then make movie-going habit forming.
It worked. By some estimates, by the 1930's over half the American population went to the movies on average at least once a week! Moviegoing must have been a different experience back then. As you infer, the theaters were often quite beautiful inside, like a West End or Broadway theater. Not like the "blockhouse" design we as movie-goers experience today.
The only drawback was a blacklash of censorship that required that adult subjects like divorce or adultery be treated in very guarded terms. The Production Code started in the 1920's over here and was made more draconian in the early 1930's thanks to organizations like the Legion of Decency, overseen mainly by Catholic and some Protestant organizations keen on censorship.
I have to admit I never looked at the Leonard Schrader home movies--I was always just fascinated by the lobby cards and posters. Nor did I know Leonard Schrader was the brother of the celebrated writer-director Paul Schrader, and an accomplished screenwriter in his own right.
How great is the Internet that we can see this collection of often badly-served early quality American films in our own homes, and not have to wait for it to come to some museum!
Re: the boys. When I was a child, I used to play "Army" outside the house with my fellow young "collegues". One year my dad even bought me a plastic toy bazooka, much to my mother's consternation as I found out later. "Getting it out of the system" must have worked in our case, as the three or plastic gun wielding "kids" (now adults of course) I keep in touch with from my primary school days don't even own real guns. The bazooka, alas, went by the wayside long ago ;-)
Yes, different times, different standards. *sigh* Anyway, thanks for opening the site up to me Cassandra. I wouldn't have known otherwise.
I read on one site and I can't remember where, that at the time the serialised films were being shown, there were rumours going round about the white slave market. Women became frightened that they would be injected with a sleeping drug and whisked away to foreign shores. Whether this started because it was shown in a film, or because there was a case of it happening, I don' know, but it spread real fears amongst English women.
ReplyDeleteThese rumors you mention about women being at risk from abduction in film theaters reminds me of a popular craze I read about in early 20th Century American culture: books and silent films about the "white slave" trade. How much of this was actually happening, or blown out of proportion ( I imagine) by those who scorned the new medium of cheap commerical films for everyone, or simply used as titillation for consumers would be difficult to say. But it was a definate fear here in America as well.
ReplyDeleteHere's a bit of background from Kat Long, a social historian from New York City, who wrote a short article on the topic this year for the website Suite101.com:
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"Prostitution and “white slave” films were the most popular genre of early cinema. From the beginning of the twentieth century to the start of World War I, hundreds of white slave films thrilled and frightened audiences by demonstrating the perils of prostitution and dangers of the white slave trade.
New York City's White Slavery Connection
"Especially in New York City, people would have been very familiar with so-called white slavery—the kidnapping of innocent (white) women by foreign (non-white) men, who forced them into prostitution. Newspapers drummed up shocking stories about brothels full of fallen women and the pervasiveness of prostitution in the Gilded Age.
"New York was then the capital of the film industry, both in film production and in the population of moviegoers: at least 225,000 children and adults went to the movies every week. The incredible popularity of white slave films was virtually assured in the sensation-hungry city.
The white slave films may have had roots in two United States laws. In 1896, the Chinese Exclusion Act attempted to limit the number of Chinese immigrants in New York by allowing only male workers to immigrate; some suspicious whites then spread alarmist rumors about these Chinese men allegedly kidnapping and raping white women. Then, Congress passed the Mann Act in 1910, which forbade men from taking women across state lines for “immoral purposes.” Unfortunately movie audiences’ imaginations were easily stoked by these racist laws."
Read more: http://americanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/prostitution_and_white_slave_films#ixzz0VI4hd2nZ
Thank you for that article, Doug.
ReplyDeleteI suppose we have to remember that these were different times for women, who for the most part been sheltered at home. Then the movies came along and they joined the crowds in attending these places as a real way of escapism from the daily grind. One can see how the flame of fear could be lit.
I can just see these woman sitting enjoying a film, eyeing up some poor innocent man next to them with real terror in their eyes. The more they looked at him the more he looked at them! One wonders where the real drama was going on, in the cinema or on the screen, hahaha.
Good points, Cassandra. America was a very rural place and most women were not in the workforce or in college back then.
ReplyDeleteThat's a funny idea you have--two women who think the guy they are looking at is some kind of fiend; the poor guy--just in from the farm--thinking these two women looking at him are "vamps" about to lure him to his doom.
It's the makings of a two-reel comedy! :-)
ReplyDeleteHahahaha, they could even make the film into a comedy, if we still had Buster Keaton with us and those great big eyes of his hamming it up like mad!
Perfect!
ReplyDeleteIndeedy!
ReplyDelete