The Nitrate Picture Show was on my radar for a number of years before it finally dawned on me that I lived close enough to actually go to it. Despite being more than a decade older and located almost exactly the same distance from my home in Ithaca, Capitolfest somehow flew under it until just a few months ago when someone I met at NPS recommended that I attend. The festival focuses on “rarely-seen silent and early talking movies,” and when I realized that well over 90% of the films that played there the past few years would have been completely new to me, I immediately secured lodging and registered for the 23rd edition. And so it was that I came to spend last weekend in The Capitol Theatre, a nearly hundred-year-old movie palace in Rome, New York, switching back and forth between these two front-row views of the red velvet curtains behind its original Möller theater organ, which was kept busy by some of the world’s best silent film accompanists:
Capitol Arts Complex Director Art Pierce joked that the lineup consisted of “too many films” in his introduction. While it definitely did look overwhelming on paper, the generally short runtimes associated with movies from this era (Captain Blood, the longest one in the program, was still less than two hours), intermissions built into the sessions, and ample breaks between them all combined to create an atmosphere that, as Capitolfest’s slogan says, was more akin to “a vacation, not a marathon.” Another relevant factor for me as someone trying to “cover” the event was that because these titles screen so infrequently, very little has been written about them, so the cursory research I typically do before logging something on Letterboxd never took very long, making it gratifyingly easy to keep up with everything.
Such was the case with two British features from the 1930s given their belated U.S. premieres on the second day, Raise the Roof and Mr. Satan, which were both shown on 35mm prints from the BFI National Archive that looked pristine. This perhaps shouldn’t be surprising considering that the program notes for Roof quote BFI’s Hannah Prouse as saying that it “has screened a couple of times in the UK, but otherwise has only been accessed for research purposes.” That film, the first foray into talkies by Betty Balfour (who per Pierce “is generally considered to be Britain’s most popular star of the 1920s”), doesn’t really come to life until the final reel when the down-and-out theater troupe she’s part of pulls a whole new show together in one day by turning their missing costumes and sets into a delightfully risqué theme, but Mr. Satan is a blast right from the start. It stars James Stephenson and festival tribute star “Skeets” Gallagher as the suavely unflappable journalist Tim Garnett and his American photographer, who are basically 007 and Felix avant la lettre. It also features Chili Bouchier as a woman far too intelligent and resourceful to simply fall into Garnett’s arms, but who of course proceeds to do just that, and Franklin Dyall as a character with the perfect Bond villain name “Zubova” and a plan for world domination that he naturally reveals to our hero in a monologue. Which: his goal is essentially to start World War II! Satan lacks the globe-trotting locations that are, admittedly, a big part of what makes the superspy genre so fun, and the action sequences are rudimentary aside from an impressive plane crash, but it’s remarkable how much of the now-familiar template was already in place as early as 1938.
The two aptly named Rob’s Rarities programs curated and introduced by film historian Rob Stone were even more obscure. The first consisted of comedies from the 1910s accompanied on organ by Ben Model, including Babe’s School Days, Oliver Hardy’s last surviving appearance for the East Coast-based Lubin Manufacturing Company; Gravy, which looks like something the sketch comedy troupe The State might have come up with had they worked for Metro Pictures in 1915 instead of MTV in 1995; and the Larry Semon vehicle Plans and Pajamas, during which I unfortunately spaced out. Such are the perils of the film festival firehose! The second was a tribute to Jerry Lewis in honor of his centenary highlighted by a hilarious “screen test” for Milton Berle and footage of Dean Martin MC-ing the “premiere” of one of Lewis’s Gar-Ron Productions. My only complaint is that I wish we could have seen the movie itself to provide a point of comparison for the Gallagher two-reeler The Finishing Touch that screened the following day because, as I said on Letterboxd, it “feels like a more polished version of what I imagine they might look like.” Other shorts shown throughout the weekend included the fourth reel of The Majesty of the Law, an otherwise lost silent (which was accompanied on organ by David Peckham) that contains a nifty portrayal of a sophisticated holdout device (although in classic cinematic fashion the cheater inefficiently uses it to save a seven of all cards until he can make four of a kind and defeat aces full); a très bizarre Terrytoon called French Fried; and informative documentaries about Gallagher and his fellow tribute star Charles Ruggles directed by the Capitol’s AJ Parker.
Speaking of Gallagher, the film he shined brightest in was The Perfect Clue: even though Pierce’s program notes explain that he was brought in only two days before shooting started, his performance as a blotto playboy besotted with female lead Dorothy Libaire’s Mona Stewart really is the best thing about it. Meanwhile, my favorite Ruggles performance was his star turn as a callow socialite in The Girl Habit, which starts out like a feature-length version of the shopping scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and ends up like a comedic version of The Shawshank Redemption. Both halves work better than you might think because Ruggles and the supporting cast featuring some of the best character actors in Hollywood history (including Margaret Dumont, Allen Jenkins, and Donald Meek) are terrific. My personal applause-o-meter seemed to indicate that my fellow attendees preferred him as a contentedly middle-class older gentleman happily–and realistically!–married to Mary Boland’s Jessie Todd in Mama Loves Papa, though. Regardless of which one you like better, as my fellow NPS vet Joshua said on Letterboxd, this duo and Mind Your Own Business (all of which were presented on 35mm, as was Perfect Clue) were “arguably the most enjoyable films of the festival.”
These movies all benefitted from being shown at an event organized around one of their best elements. The flip side of this coin is trying to decide what to say about an elegant masterpiece like Trouble in Paradise and getting hung up on the fact that it might not even represent one of Ruggles’ three best performances in the festival! The literature on director Ernst Lubitsch and his “touch” is vast, so suffice to say that the only film I had already seen going into Capitolfest 23 made for a perfect nightcap, and I can’t think of a better place to have finally experienced it on the big screen than a theater where, according to Pierce’s program notes, it played in January 1933 during its original theatrical run.
Another highlight was the 35mm print of Vitagraph’s 1924 adaptation of Captain Blood that screened on Saturday. It was preceded by an equally epic tale of film preservation by Library of Congress Nitrate Vault Leader George Willeman, who described starting with a nitrate print that Warner Bros. (which bought Vitagraph in 1925) struck from the original negative in 1935. As quoted in William Remmers’ excellent program notes:
We believe it was made to see if the action/battle scenes could be reused for the remake. Most of the model shots and big explosions are missing from the nitrate we hold; removed and slugged with blank film. Long story short, none of the shots save one was used in the remake.
To replace the missing footage, we acquired three elements: A partial-tinted show print from UCLA and two 9.5mm prints: one from the EYE Institute and the other from Kevin Brownlow. It took several months, but we were able to place all the missing shots back in. Our lab created a 2K digital master from our work from which the new print was struck. Now, it is obvious where the 9.5 shots were interpolated, and we were a bit concerned about how that would be accepted, but they are all short and happen at the height of action. Hopefully the audience is fully invested in the picture and won’t dwell on that.
He need not have worried: when the boat blew up, the crowd went wild! Willeman was also responsible for bringing Brett Miller to Rome to accompany the film with the knockout score he reconstructed from the original cue sheets. But while this was perhaps its most extraordinary screening, the biggest revelation of the weekend was The Home Maker, which David Peckham accompanied on organ the previous evening. This handsome tale of an unhappy bread-winner (Clive Brook) married to a miserable housewife (Alice Joyce) who change places in the aftermath of an accident proved to be a fascinating companion to the Mikio Naruse late silents I’ve been enjoying on the Criterion Channel recently, particularly the similarly flip-flopped gender roles in Every-Night Dreams. But while the families in both movies are clearly better off with mom working and dad taking care of the kids, here everyone is unequivocally happier as well. This is enough to render the outrageous “double ending” (to use Matt Strohl’s term) absurd to the point of being legible as parody, which is a testament to how much more progressive audiences of the time were than we sometimes give them credit for.
Believe it or not, the titles mentioned above constitute barely half the total number I watched and omit three more 35mm presentations and four movies accompanied on organ, including a soufflé starring Constance Talmadge called Breakfast at Sunrise that was given even more lift by the great Dr. Philip C. Carli. While these screenings weren’t quite as memorable, the experience as a whole is one I won’t soon forget. Next year’s tribute stars Marian Nixon and Jack Oakie are nearly completely unknown to me, which carries with it the tantalizing prospect of additional discoveries; I’d also like to explore the town more and maybe try some local delicacies like chicken riggies and Utica greens, which I failed to do this time around in part because I proceeded straight from the final movie of session #7 (Paris Green accompanied on organ by Ben Model) to pick My Loving Wife and our dog up from a week at the family cottage in Ontario. Last but not least, it occurs to me that Capitolfest represents a better opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to film culture than NPS since it covers less-well-trodden ground. So I’ll be back, in other words, and probably sooner rather than later!
Previous film festival dispatches can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 
