My spidey sense is tingling

A movie that's been on the FXM schedule for a while now is the 1955 Fred Astaire version of Daddy Long Legs, which is going to be on again tomorrow at 12:50 PM and Thursday at 7:55 AM. I had DVRed it on the old DVR to watch and do a full-length post on here, but the old DVR died. I did get a chance last month to watch the last ten minutes or so just before Désirée, and noticed that the print was both letterboxed and pillarboxed, boo his.

Anyhow, the brief subject of the movie is that Astaire goes over to France and at an orphange, meets one orphan (Leslie Caron) he's taken with, so he anonymously sponsors her to study at college in the US. She falls in love with her unseen benefactor, and then meets Astaire not realizing he's the benefactor. Dance-filled complications ensue.

Anyhow, in doing a bit of research on the movie, I noticed that it's based on a novel from the beginning of the century, and that the Astaire version is at least the third movie version. Janet Gaynor starred in a 1931 version, and there's a 1919 silent with Mary Pickford, who did a whole bunch of these much younger than her actual age roles. That version being from 1919, it's in the public domain, so you can find it on Youtube. I didn't check if any of the versions on Youtube have scores:

Ramona (1910)

TCM is running Coquette this morning at 11:00 AM. It's the movie that won Mary Pickford her Best Actress Oscar, although I can't help but think it's a career achievement award since the acting is overwrought and because Pickford made most of her movies before the Academy Awards. But if you haven't seen Coquette before, it's worth at least one watch.

Pickford's career goes back a long way, to when she was an 18-year-old which would mean around 1910. One of her earliest is a version of the oft-filmed novel Ramona. This one was made out in California before the movie community decamped there for the better climate; most of the time D.W. Griffith and the other filmmakers were still back in the New York area.

A lot of Griffith's silent work survives, or at least more than a lot of other directors; as I understand it Griffith donated some of his work to the Museum of Modern Art for preservation. Ramona survives and, being from 1910, is in the public domain, which means that it's unsurprisingly ended up on Youtube:

The Love Light

Another movie that I got around to watching over the New Years holiday is The Love Light. It seems to be available on DVD, but it's also in the public domain and you can catch it on Youtube if you want.

Mary Pickford plays Angela Carlotti, a young woman living in a rural seaside Italian town with her two brothers Mario and Antonio around the time World War I is just breaking out. Of course, Italy gets involved in the war and all the young men of soldiering age eventually get called or go off on their own accord to join the war effort, and this includes not only Angela's two brothers, but also the man who's had a yen for her, Giovanni.

While all the men are away, Angela is tending the lighthouse since they're right on the coast and it's a dangerous coast. Sure enough, eventually there's a shipwreck or something on the coast, as Angela sees a man being washed up along the rocky coast. Except that the man isn't dead. Angela rescues him, and finds out that he's not Italian, since he speaks the language with an accent. Joseph (Fred Thomson) is American, and it's turned out he's deserted. His boat was in port in Genoa, and he and some buddies missed getting back on the boat in time. So they tried to take a smaller boat out to their ship, but the storm came up and, well, here's Joseph along the Italian coast. But since Joseph is a deserter, won't Angela be kind and hide him from the authorities?

It's love at first sight between the two, and Angela eventually asks the local priest to marry the two of them in secret. However, it turns out that there was another reason for Joseph wanting the marriage to be a secret. It turns out that he's really not an American deserter, but in fact a German. If you know your World War I history, you'll recall that Italy was on the side of the Allies in that war, which means they were against the Germans so Joseph is actually an enemy. And when he gets Angela to send him her "I love you" signal using the lighthouse, he's actually sending a signal to the German navy to attack a ship carrying returning Italian soldiers, including Angela's younger brother, who is killed in the German attack.

The townsfolk discover they've got a German in their midst, and set up a summary trial, executing him and leaving Angela a widow. But not before she had gotten pregnant by Joseph. She carries the baby, but she's deemed to have a sorry mental state and another woman in town who lost her baby decides to take Angela's. Meanwhile, Giovanni has returned from the war, blinded, and only Angela's love can save him.

There are some good ideas in The Love Light, but the melodramatic third act regarding Angela's child and Giovanni's blindness really drags the movie down. There's some lovely photography, and the print TCM showed has some nice tinting, but if I were going to recommend a Pickford movie to start off with for people who don't know her work, I'd start with Sparrows. Peoplr who already like Pickford's work will probably enjoy this one, however.

As I said at the beginning of the post, The Love Light, being in the public domain, has made its way to Youtube: