Tag: American films

Little Fugitive

Source: Alan Parker, ‘Little Fugitive’, in Geoffrey Macnab, Screen Epiphanies: Film-makers on the Films that Inspired Them (London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 127-128

Text: In Islington, there was an old fleapit cinema, the Blue Hall on Upper Street, just a bit further on from Angel, just past what is now called Screen on the Green, but which was called the Rex when I grew up. The Blue Hall was a classic fleapit. It ran anything they could get their hands on that was cheap to run – second run, third run, fourth run. I remember I was aged ten and I went to see this film, Little Fugitive, which was a black-and-white film shot in Brooklyn, about a little kid who ends up in Coney Island. It was so different to anything I had ever seen before. What I had seen before was either the very mediocre British movies or Hollywood movies. It was the very first film that was neither of those. It was a complete mistake, really, that I wandered in to see it. This fleapit running it wasn’t an arthouse theatre or anything like that. They didn’t exist in those days. I remember going to see this little film. It was the first film shot in a very naturalistic documentary style. It was the first film I had ever see that wasn’t manufactured to be a movie. I’ve looked it up since and I have seen quotes from Jean Luc Godard and Truffaut saying it influenced that whole era of film-making, which at the time I had no knowledge of whatsoever.

The film was made in 1953. I would have seen it a good year or so later. I remember being completely and utterly mesmerised by it. It was a classic moment of going back to school and telling everybody about it. I always remember I had to stand up in class and talk about it. In my ignorance, I couldn’t even pronounce the word fugitive because it is never said in the film. I remember standing up and I got a lot of laughs because I said I went to see this film, ‘Little Fuggitive’. ‘Fugg-itive’ sounded very rude. I was then put right by the teacher that it was actually pronounced ‘fugitive’. It’s an odd word, not a word that at ten I would have used in Islington.

The film was hugely influential. From then on, I went to see everything I could possibly see. Up to that point, cinema was just somewhere you went when you were bored.

Comment: Alan Parker (born 1944) is a film director and former chairman of the UK Film Council. Little Fugitive (USA 1953) was made by Ray Ashley, Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin. Screen Epiphanies is a collection of reminiscences by film directors of seeing films which had a transformative effect on them.

Seeing American Films

Source: ‘Seeing American Films’, Yo-shi Bao [The Amusement Paper], September 1897, quoted in Jay Leyda, Dianying / Electric Shadows: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (London/Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1972), p. 2

Text: Last night, in the cool of the evening following a shower of rain, my friends took me to the Chi Gardens to see a show. After the audience gathered, the lights were put out and the performance began. On the screen before us we saw a picture – two occidental girls dancing, with puffed-up yellow hair, looking rather silly. Then another scene, two occidentals boxing. Then a woman bathing in a tub … In another scene a man puts out the light and goes to bed, but he is disturbed by a bedbug. To catch it he throws off all the bedding, and when he finally puts it in the chamber pot he looks very funny …

Comment: The first projected film show in China was on 11 August 1896. The American photographer James Ricalton brought Edison films to Shanghai from June 1897 and according to Jay Leyda this is a review of a Ricalton show, but the films described appear to be Georges Méliès productions (and hence French films): Après le bal le tub (1897), Une nuit terrible (1896), and possibly Match de boxe (1897). The dancers with yellow hair suggests that the films had hand-painted colour.

The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan

Source: Count Harry Kessler (translated and edited by Charles Kessler), The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan 1918-1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). p. 325

Text: Thursday, 11 August 1927 / Berlin
In the evening I saw the American film What Price Glory?, the best war film I have so far seen and the only one that has had the courage to show war as it really is, in the round and from all sides, without concealment. During various scenes the audience broke into stormy applause.

Comment: Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937) was an Anglo-German aristocrat and diplomat. His diaries are an exceptionally vivid and observant account of art and politics in Weimar Germany. What Price Glory? (USA 1926 d. Raoul Walsh) stars Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen and tells of the rivalry between two US marines serving in France during the First World War.