All the Movies Podcast

I’d seen this credited as the first gangster movie, so I had to check it out. While it isn’t as complex as later gangster movies would become, it certainly kicked the genre off with a bang. Elmer Booth shines as Snapper, leader of the Musketeers gang. He bears more than a passing resemblance to James Cagney, who would come to define the role of the gangster 20 years later. The similarity goes beyo...

Wladyslaw Starewicz is one of Russia’s earliest filmmakers, and someone I’d never heard of before sitting down to watch this film. I had no real expectations, and knew nothing about the film before pressing play, so I was shocked to find I was watching a puppet animation starring bugs! Had I known anything about Starewicz, I should have expected just that. Meet the beetles! The early part of his d...

This is my first true foray into the phenomenon that was Mary Pickford. I know she showed up briefly in The Country Doctor , but this is the first time I’ve seen her in a major role. Her appeal is immediately obvious. Besides her famous curls, her charm leaps out at you from the screen. Her fame was well-deserved. The film opens with a convict creeping out of some bushes, clad in the staple black...

I’ve seen two American adaptations of Shakespeare so far, and now I’ve seen one from Denmark. August Blom directed this film, which, like the two I watched previously, is not a faithful adaptation of the original play. Unlike the other two, which took only the most basic premise and ran with it in new directions, Desdemona approaches its source, in this case Othello , as the framework in which to...

The Lonedale Operator , released on March 23, 1911, is another of the short films that D.W. Griffith created for the Biograph Company, and the first of his films I’ve watched that doesn’t feature Florence Lawrence. This time the lead actress is Blanche Sweet, and she is the star of the picture. Lawrence was always in some sort of co-starring or secondary role. Sweet plays “The Telegrapher,” daught...

At last, a feature-length film! Released in Italy as L'Inferno on March 2nd, 1911, this adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem is the work of three directors, Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe de Liguoro. This makes sense, given its length. It was three years in the making, in an time where short films were often being cranked out at a pace of one every three days, and though it...

We saw that when D.W. Griffith brought Shakespeare to the big screen, he took great liberties with the plot, and by great liberties I mean he more or less threw it out the window, but his take on The Taming of the Shrew is downright canon compared to what Romeo Bosetti has done with Romeo and Juliet in the 1909 short film Romeo Turns Bandit . Griffith at least kept the basic concept of the story i...

So I exaggerated a bit with this post’s subtitle, but the most interesting thing about this film, and the reason I put it on my list of films to watch, is the presence of Mary Pickford in a small role. She later became the original “America’s Sweetheart,” and, according to Wikipedia at least, is “considered to be one of the most recognizable women in history.” I wanted to see an early example of h...

There isn’t much to this short film. It runs for less than 4 minutes, and is nothing special, save for its final scene. That final scene is why it’s on my list, and why I watched, for it is allegedly the first example of someone taking a pie to the face in a film. There are, of course, rumors that two films preceded this monumental achievement, but I can find neither Family Troubles (1900) nor The...

I wrote last time about how directors were churning out movies at a fantastic pace in the early days of cinema. To put that idea into perspective, the first film D.W. Griffith directed was released on July 14th, 1908. Less than 4 months later, on November 10th, his 35th film hit theaters. And sure, these were all short films, but each was made with its own cast and crew, and shot from its own scri...

I chose this film for a few reasons. I’d been reading about the early days of film, and learned about Florence Lawrence. Hers was not a name I recognized, but she’s known as the first American movie star. Before her, people went to see films primarily for the novelty of seeing a film, or for the story the film promised to tell. If they wanted a western, they went to a western, and so forth. Floren...

I don’t know how much more I have to say about Georges Méliès. I watched the remaining seven films on the blu-ray I shared last time, and while they are uniformly wonderful, they are in the same vein as the first batch I wrote about. This isn’t to say that Méliès is a one-trick pony or anything. Far from it! Each film has its own character, and its own neat special effects. But, when it comes down...

This feels a lot closer to what a modern viewer would call a movie than did any of the Georges Méliès films I wrote about last time. It’s very short, lasting only 10:24, but it tells a complete story, with scenes taking place in varying locations. Where everything in Méliès’ films appeared to be shot on a theater stage, The Great Train Robbery is shot in a telegraph office, inside a saloon, and ev...

I’m back, and ready to talk movies. The first film on my list is actually 7 short films, all from French director Georges Méliès. He was one of the earliest filmmakers, though not the very first, but he seemed like the best place to start. Méliès is considered the originator of special effects in movies, and pioneered techniques like substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography...

I was going to jump right in and start talking about movies, but thought I’d better create an introductory “welcome” post, just in case someone other than me decides to visit my site. Unlike most podcasts, I’m creating mine for an audience of one: me. I’m sharing this in case they are of interest to others, but my primary reason for creating them is so I will better remember the movies I watch. Aw...