ithankyou: Live Cinema lives… It (1927) with Cyrus Gabrysch, Kennington Bioscope 10th Anniversary

Thursday 14 September 2023

Live Cinema lives… It (1927) with Cyrus Gabrysch, Kennington Bioscope 10th Anniversary

This was the Kennington Bioscope’s 10^th Anniversary edition and the package was so sweetly wrapped it even had a Bow on it. Cyrus Gabrysch is, he said, often accused of starting the whole thing but what he and then John Sweeney thought would be a connoisseurs-only cinema club was transformed by a brave dog fighting his way up the stairs of a lighthouse to relight the beacon. Kevin Brownlow’s copy of a Rin Tin Tin film provided the moment when the audience erupted with applause for the heroic hound and Cyrus realised something special was happening.

Michelle Facey quoted Pamela Hutchinson’s famous description of the KB as a silent speakeasy and, Cyrus felt it was also like the Left Bank cinema groups that inspired Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer; maybe the Cinema Museum screenings will also assume an historic position as the place where silent film – film always on film – was resurgent through the Teens and the new Twenties that began not with a bang but with a fever as all cinemas we closed and the Bioscope moved fearlessly online with MC Facey becoming the face and voice of the silent resistance on KB TV.

The Bioscope has always dealt with the material issue of cinema and tonight was no different with a first half dedicated to 28mm films introduced by Chris Bird, projecting 101-111 year old celluloid on 107-year-old equipment: film as history, history as film… moving history, it moves and it flickers even the hand-cranked 28mm projector Chris demonstrated on stage to audience applause. We should all be so functional after so long in the dark.

The Pathé-Frères 28mm KOK Cine Projector and Camera

We began with a couple of Pathé films, demonstrating French ingenuity in animation, Émile Cohl, one of the fathers of animation and then Méliès style trickery with Wonderful Armour?, as a devil and two women knights defied all logic and the evidence of our own eyes, as they detached body parts with a smile. Colin Sell did well to keep his head but, with the elegant Samantha looking on in silent support, he followed the action with all the concentrated control of a man who worked with Barry Cryer for decades.

Then to the USA for Lest We Forget a Mr and Mrs Sidney Drew film, in which the flowers of romance get very tangled and, as Chris stressed, the only copy, in the World, of Episode 30 (of 119) of the Hazards of Helen a very tightly wrought drama in which Helen Holmes appeared to swing off bridges, jump on to moving trains and dive into turbulent waters to retrieve stolen goods. We wondered if she used a stunt double, and John Sweeney too, who accompanied with fast-flowing lines and cliff-hanging drama all with no visible safety net.

Follow that Clara Bow. And, of course, she did.

Clara in a business meeting with Antonio Moreno

This was a 35mm print from Photoplay – company by-line “Live Cinema” - which had the natural warmth of a pre-digital restoration and looked stunning on the big screen. I say stunning and I mean Clara Bow who, despite a cameraman buddy complaining how difficult her kineticism made her to catch on film, featured in close-up after close-up that left the watched hanging on her every smile. The discussion pre-screening with my neighbour was who would be a modern-day equivalent of Clara and we struggled to come up with anyone as naturally powerful and so exuberantly un-mannered on screen.

If ever an actress has transcended the sum of her parts and if ever a star has been completely under-estimated then that must be Clara Bow. In her career from a 17-year-old in Down to the Sea in Ships in 1922 to a wise-cracking, talkie comedienne in Hoop-la in 1932… Clara made only a few classic films, although relatively few were preserved as Michelle pointed out. She never had something like The Crowd, Pandora’s Box or The Wind, to show what she could do dramatically but, in every one of the films she did make, there is ample evidence that she was an actor of considerable ability. And this is true for It made in a period in which she made some 16 films in about a year, Paramount making as much as they could from their asset.

There was indeed something about Clara, more than just acting; something genuine and heartfelt that, coupled with her looks, earned her the respect of a large part of the cinema-going audience through these years. Watching It years later, her eldest son Rex Bell Jnr, remarked that he could see all the expressions and feeling he had seen from “mom” on a daily basis: she wasn’t just acting she was giving part of herself to the watcher. When called on to cry she would call on a childhood memory of one of her friends dying in her arms after being consumed in a house fire: those huge shining eyes would well up with genuine tears of sorrow.

If It is one of the great films it is because it perfectly captures the essence of Clara. Clarence Badger directs well enough and makes the most of his star and story, you can’t take your eyes off her and this is not just the compulsion of trying to find new angles on that prettiness but because she’s radiating so much joy. She is It and she’s supposed to be. It’s a tough role when you think about it, no one ever had to live up to a billing founded on such an uncompromising premise: there’s no “it or miss” you just have to be on target with the casting. Tag, you’re it!!

Based on Elinor Glyn’s story, they paid the English writer some $50,000 to appear in one scene in order to clarify exactly what “it” meant and, needless to say, this was considerably more than the vastly underpaid main star had accumulated from her previous half dozen features.

Events are based in the large family-run Waltham’s department store where the heir to the business, Cyrus Waltham (Antonio Moreno), is about to take over following his father’s departure to spend more time with his gun. Junior’s best friend, Monty (William Austin), is reading an excerpt from “It” in Cosmopolitan and trying to interest his friend in this new conception of humanity although in his case he’s more “what?!” than “It!”. Talking of which there’s a young Gary Cooper flashing by as a journalist… Clara noticed him too.

Sweet Santa…

My second trip to Coney Island this week after The Crowd at the BFI...

Whilst Cyrus focuses on his new responsibilities, his pal scans the store looking for an assistant with “it”. His eyes alight on Clara’s character, Betty Lou, and he knows he’s found his woman but, try as he might, he cannot get Cyrus’ attention even though Betty already has him in her sights. She’s not about to let him out of her grasp though and this begins a game of It! and mouse as confusion and comedy mix with the odd dash of pathos and anything that gives Clara the chance to run through her extraordinary emotional gears.

It’s an absolute blast and Clara is well-supported by William Austin, nostrils flared like a Jazz-Age Kenneth Williams and Antonio Moreno who just about convinces as her love interest even though there’s no way he had the same amount of “it”! But who has?

Cyrus Gabrysch’s anniversary accompaniment was suitably celebratory, running wild with Clara and holding us aloft with the film’s dazzle and comic drama; that rare Wednesday evening atmosphere we’ve all come to treasure. Ten years after Cyrus and John started playing and Rin-Tin-Tin single-doggedly saved that lighthouse, so many others continue to create these magical evenings, I than you all and raise a glass to the next ten years of history being watched and being made!