All Quiet on the Western Front. 1930. USA. Lewis Milestone

These notes accompany screenings of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, July 28, 29, and 30 in Theater 1.

Lewis Milestone (1895–1980) was born Lev Milstein near Odessa, Ukraine. He immigrated to America in 1913 and served in the photographic unit of the Army Signal Corps during World War I. He began working in Hollywood in 1919, and directed his first film in 1925. Even before his Oscar for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), he had won a “Best Comedy Direction” statuette for Two Arabian Knights (1927), beating out Charles Chaplin’s The Circus. Read more

The Dawn Patrol. 1930. USA. Directed by Howard Hawks

These notes accompany screenings of Howard Hawks’s The Dawn Patrol, July 21, 22, and 23 in Theater 1.

Like his friendly rival John Ford, Howard Hawks (1896–1977) began work as a Hollywood property man (in Hawks’s case, while still attending school). He received a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell, and his films reflect both the precision this implies and the erudition of a college boy. (Ford, by contrast, spent about two minutes in college.) After a stint in the Army Air Corps and a job designing airplanes, Hawks wound up directing his first film at the Fox studio—where Ford was also under contract—in 1926. Read more

Morocco. 1930. USA. Directed by Josef von Sternberg

These notes accompany screenings of Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco, July 14, 15, and 16 in Theater 2.

On March 31, 1930, Marlene Dietrich appeared on the stage of Berlin’s Gloria Palast for the premiere of The Blue Angel before sailing that very night for America to work on Morocco. The director of both films, Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969), had long since departed, expecting never to see the actress again. Read more

Applause. 1929. USA. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian

These notes accompany screenings of Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause, July 7, 8, and 9 in Theater 3.

Rouben Mamoulian’s (1898–1987) career as a film director showed potential for five years, before limping into a disappointing second act and then virtually disappearing. He was a promising newcomer like George Cukor—another of the many imports from the Broadway stage who turned to film around the advent of sound technology—but unlike Cukor, whose career lasted more than a half-century, Mamoulian never quite figured out how to survive and thrive within the Hollywood system. The great success of his stage production of Porgy in New York made him and everyone else think he was notably inventive, but his cinematic gifts proved limited and transitory. Read more

Walter Huston as our sixteenth President in Abraham Lincoln. 1930. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith

These notes accompany screenings of D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, June 30 and July 1 and 2 in Theater 3.

D. W. Griffith (1874–1948) came to the end of his professional road in 1931. It is now time both to bury and praise him.

He remained an enigma to the end. His final feature, The Struggle (1931), was a passionate plea against alcohol made by a committed, unredeemable, and self-destructive drunk, and if Abraham Lincoln (1930) was intended as some sort of apologia for The Birth of a Nation (1915), the director seems to have missed the point of the outrage he inspired. Read more

Blackmail. 1929. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

These notes accompany screenings of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, June 23, 24, and 25 in Theater 2.

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) is the leading example of a commercially successful film director who never lost his taste for innovation and experimentation. He must be something of an anathema to those on the avant-garde fringes of film whose whole career may not attract the audiences that Psycho (1960) or The Birds (1963) could garner in a single day. Yet, his body of work remains extremely personal and unified in its vision of a precarious universe. Read more