2008
We have an excellent article from Empire’s features page … pasted in full below…
Harking back over a century to the early days of cinema, the Smoking Cabinet is a celebration of the burlesques, féeries and actualités that delighted the first moviegoers. In addition to an opening night screening of E.A. Dupont’s masterly melodrama, Piccadilly (1929), the programme also includes live music, lectures, debates and numerous short films that haven’t been seen in the capital for decades. Following the success of Varieté (1925) and Moulin Rouge (1928), German director Ewald André Dupont came to London to team with Anna May Wong, whose career had been frustrated in Hollywood by the racism that persisited within the studio system. She excels as the scullery menial, whose talents as a sensual dancer are discovered by nightclub owner Jameson Thomas after Charles Laughton kicks up such a fuss about the dirty crockery that he comes below stairs to investigate. Despite firing her, Thomas lusts after Wong and gives her a chance to revive his venue’s fortunes by putting her on the bill with mistress Gilda Gray, who is still smarting because Thomas dismissed her Broadway-bound dance partner, Cyril Richard, for making undue advances. Wong is an overnight sensation. But her success alienates her from King Ho Chang, the restaurateur who has been doubling as her accompanist, and infuriates Gray, who comes to Limehouse packing a pistol because she’s sure her rival is trying to come between her and her roving-eyed meal ticket.
One of the best silents made in this country, this is much more than an exotic exercise in Orientalism. Indeed, some have claimed it as a prototype film noir, with Wong creating a template for the kind of femme fatale who ruins the lives of those around her in the ruthless pursuit of her own ambition. The debuting Laughton makes an indelible impression as the gluttonous continental reveller, while Gray impresses as the ageing icon prepared to go to desperate lengths to cling on to pampered lifestyle. But this is very much Wong’s film, with her transformation from drudge to vamp putting her on a par with such sultry silent sirens as Louise Brooks. It didn’t cut much mustard with the either the US censor or the Tinseltown moguls, however, as her kiss with Thomas was cut and her ethnicity continued to preclude her from the superstardom her talent merited.
The On With the Dance selection includes routines by Couchee dancer Fatima and Spanish dancer Carmencita, as well as two 1927 films by the forgotten Lancastrian film-maker, Harry B. Parkinson. Divine and Charles in An Apache Dance features the well-known music-hall act in an excerpt from the On With the Dance shorts series, while The Whirl of the Charleston showcases Madge Aubrey and Leslie Hatton (with the latter at one point dancing on a table), as well as such renowned West End artistes as Sonnie and Binnie Hale, Bessie Hay and Sid Tracey. Sadly, the footage involving Cyril Ritchard and Bobby Howes does not appear to have survived.
The focus shifts to Coney Island for the second lucky dip of curios, with the King of Coins sharing the bill with some boxing cats and Eugen Sandow, the muscle man who was one of the first people in America to have their reputation enhanced by the moving image. Born Frederick Muller in Konigsberg, Germany in 1867, `the Modern Hercules’ was already a celebrity when he posed for William Kennedy Laurie Dickson’s camera in Edison’s Black Maria studio on 6 March 1894. But his rippling physique and acts of raw strength made him a Kinetoscope favourite and his Muscular Exhibition was recorded by the the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1896. The following year, Sandow settled in the UK, having married the daughter of a London photographer, and he opened the `Institute of Health’ on St James Street. Sadly, he did not live to see himself portrayed by Nat Pendleton in the Oscar-winning biopic, The Great Ziegfeld (1936), as he died of a stroke in 1925, after single-handedly lifting a motor car out of a ditch.
Also part of this package is Edwin S. Porter’s Coney Island at Night (1905), for which the Pennsylvanian pioneer devised a special camera to record the twinkling lights in nocturnal vistas that include views of Dreamland and Luna Park. New York’s playground also provides the setting for Coney Island (1917), a slapstick two-reeler starring Roscoe `Fatty’ Arbuckle.
Tired of being nagged by wife Agnes Neilson, Fatty buries himself in the sand to throw her off the scent and heads to the amusement park, where he attempts to steal Alice Lake from Al St John, who has just enticed her away from Buster Keaton because he didn’t have the money to show her a good time. With Buster now a lifeguard, Fatty dons drag to continue his pursuit of Lake and his evasion of Neilson. But he ends up on the wrong side before this derivative, but highly amusing tale of bathing beauties and incompetent cops is over.
Winding up the shorts programme is That’s All Folks, which includes Georges Méliès’s La Boîte à malice (1903) and Segundo de Chomón’s Le Théâtre de Bob (1906). The first is a typical Mélièsian féerie, which shows a conjuring juggler and his sevant set up a trick cabinet that enables him make a female assistant vanish and reappear before it rolls of stage with all three of them inside, while the second is a diversion scripted by Ferdinand Zecca that centres on three young children, who place a miniature stage on a table top and then sit back to watch two puppets (who appear by magic inside a rolled-up carpet) enact a series of routines that inevitably culminate in socko violence.
David Parkinson
We were also in Time Out (though not online), The Guardian Guide, Le Cool and an evocative article on Piccadilly in Vertigo magazine can be found here
Other mentions…
Smoking Cabinet press for 2007…
Resonance 104.4 FM: Tight Pudding – Exploring The Smoking Cabinet
The Guardian: See Films Differently December Diary
The Bioscope: Reporting on the World of Early Cinema
Empire Magazine Online: Festivals and Seasons
and even though it’s not online there is a piece on us in December 2007’s Dazed and Confused
