Every year the San Francisco Silent Film Festival offers movie fans a chance to peer into the Hundred Year Looking Glass. In that mirror’s amber-tinted glare they discover not just curious museum artifacts from a century ago, but an ever-changing, always-fresh cache of stories about people who are not that different from anyone just outside the door, right now, on the street in 2023.
That’s the big reason why the Silent Film Festival, firmly ensconced in San Francisco’s historic Castro Theatre, is one of the very few “must-see” events in the festival-mad Bay Area. In its 26 seasons the film festival has earned the reputation as a pantheon destination, a see-and-be-seen gathering spot for film fanatics and professionals, a palatial time machine packed with dazzling cinematic swag. A place to discover Alice Guy-Blaché, Dorothy Arzner, Lya de Putti and Anna May Wong, as well as Abel Gance, Boris Barnet or Allan Dwan.
Speaking of Dwan, the astoundingly prolific Hollywood filmmaker with 408 directing credits on IMDb.com, from The Boss of Lucky Ranch (1911) to The Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961), has a pair of entries in this year’s SFSFF. The opening night presentation on Wednesday, July 12 is Dwan’s The Iron Mask (1929), starring the always-electrifyingly physical Douglas Fairbanks.
Produced at MGM on the cusp of the sound era as a sequel to Fairbanks’ and director Fred Niblo’s 1921 The Three Musketeers, Dwan’s immensely entertaining Mask picks up the thread of author Alexandre Dumas’ sword-fighting epic, with the dashing D’Artagnan (Fairbanks) saving France from tyranny in the person of the nefarious Cardinal Richelieu (Nigel De Brulier).
As befits its release at the dawn of talkies, Mask inserts a Fairbanks spoken-word introduction plus a few brief sound segments. A second Dwan effort, the 1926 Padlocked, starring Lois Moran, is a social-problem drama about a family’s convention-defying daughter, with cinematography by the magnificent James Wong Howe. It screens July 14.
Perhaps the rarest of the festival’s offerings this year is The Dragon Painter (1919), which features an almost all-Asian cast in the story of a talented fine-art painter—Japan native and Hollywood star Sessue Hayakawa—who lets his desire for a woman derail his career. Produced by Hayakawa’s Haworth Pictures Corp. and co-starring his real-life wife Aoki Tsuru as the object of esthetic affection, The Dragon Painter is directed by William Worthington and takes advantage of Yosemite National Park as the on-location setting for the painter’s passion. Their love story is anything but carnal. Showing July 14 at the Castro.
One of the most intriguing entries in the festival for admirers of Soviet-era filmmaking is Pigs Will Be Pigs (Stantsiya Pupky), a 1931 railroad comedy from Ukraine by writer-director Khanan Shmain. A freight train is halted at Pupky station due to a pair of pregnant guinea pigs in the cargo, and everything humorously devolves from there.
The movie makes fun of bureaucrats and proletarians alike, which may be the reason for the added-on title-card disclaimer from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. It’s a message, from Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, that the film is prohibited from public screenings in Germany, and that “It is strictly forbidden to tell unauthorized people about this screening and the content of the movie.” So go ahead, tell everyone all about it when it plays on July 15.
Laurel and Hardy fans will rejoice at the news that a clutch of Stanley and Oliver’s early pics as a comedy team has been restored. Three of the newly spiffed-up shorts are showing at the festival, including The Battle of the Century (1927), a previously hard-to-find depiction of the biggest pie fight in movie history. Catch the “Stan & Ollie” program on July 15.
Twenty three separate programs comprise the festival, from such directors as Buster Keaton, John Ford, Paul Leni, Ozu Yasujiro, Jacques Feyder and Joseph De Grasse, in addition to those named above. All films are accompanied by live music performed by a collection of renowned international musicians.
July 12–16 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. silentfilm.org
Hello Kelly Vance!
“Pigs is Pigs!” Loved that story in English. Which came first, Ukraine?