MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: THE CIRCLE (1925)

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Like just about everyone with an interest in the movies, I'm watching more films on DVD and going out to movie houses a lot less. Convenience trumps the better experience.
Of course, you lose audience interaction and the poor film now has to compete with all the comforts of home.
It's a bit like seeing Rembrandts & Titians in a book reproduction, or from posters with iffy color values, no texture or weight to the surface and the wrong dimensions . . . all while snacking on chips & soda. (Oops! You get that at your local cinema,too.)
The ease of instant movie gratification risks turning an art form (well, sometimes) into little more than low-grade eye-candy & mindfodder. So, maybe it's worthwhile to write a bit down on what we're all viewing, just to keep fully engaged.

DVDs: the latest opiate of the people meets the internet, where everyone's a critic.
God help us.

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Friday, September 28, 2018

THE CIRCLE (1925)

W. Somerset Maugham’s near-perfect play has been adapted multiple times for television, but just once as a film, ironically as a silent. Bye-bye witty dialogue; hello explanatory prologue and a conventional resolution that completely reverses Maugham’s main point. Dire as it sounds, this Frank Borzage project is still a treat; and not so far off the spirit of the play as you might assume. Our Story: Thirty years ago Lady Cheney ran off with love-of-her-life Lord Porteous, the best decision she ever made and the greatest mistake of her life. Now, the scandalous pair have come home at long last for a visit only to find Lady Cheney’s daughter-in-law hellbent on repeating the pattern, running away from a dreary husband (Lady Cheney’s own deserted son) to live in exiled sin with the love of her life. But before the die is cast, this young lady wants to see if the old pair lived up to her happily-ever-after fantasies. To say they don’t hardly begins to cover it. A ghastly couple; crass, bickering, painted up like gargoyle parodies of their romantic youth. A lesson learned? Not bloody likely. Beautiful Eleanor Boardman & Malcolm McGregor are the handsome young lovers, nerdy Creighton Hale the cuckold husband, George Fawcett & Eugenie Besserer the dilapidated returnees. Great fun; with a well-preserved print, a superb new score by Garth Neustadler, and a very early appearance by Joan Crawford as the young Lady Cheney in the prologue.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: 1925 brought an even more unlikely silent film triumph in somewhat similar vein when Oscar Wilde’s epigrammatic LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN became a silent film masterpiece from Ernst Lubitsch. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/lady-windermeres-fan-1925.html

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Friday, September 28, 2018

THE CIRCLE (1925)

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