Coney Island (1917)

Coney Island (1917)

Also Known As: Fatty at Coney Island
USA/Silent/B&W

Directed by Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle

Filming Locations: 
Luna Park, Coney Island, Brooklyn, & New York City, New York, USA

Production Co: Comique Film Company


Cast: 

Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle...Fatty 

Joe Bordeaux...Sledgehammer Man/Cop
  
Jimmy Bryant 

Luke the Dog

Buster Keaton...Rival/Cop with Moustache 

Alice Lake...Girl at Vanity Table 

Alice Mann...Pretty Girl 

Agnes Neilson...Fatty's Wife

Al St. John...Old Friend of Fatty's Wife


Fatty tries to dump his wife so he can enjoy the beach attractions. Buster arrives with Alice who is taken away from him by Al who loses her to Fatty. Bathing beauties and Keystone Kops abound.

The film was shot on location at Coney Island, and prominently features many contemporary rides and attractions as venues for the slapstick action. These include The Witching Waves and Shoot-the-Chutes. 

The two-reel comedy known as "Coney Island" is a prime example of the sort of rough-housing that made Roscoe Arbuckle one of the top comedians of his era, second only to Chaplin in popularity. It's also a good example of the kind of comedy Arbuckle would soon outgrow, thanks at least in part to his newfound colleague Buster Keaton, who influenced Roscoe to employ more low-key and sophisticated comedic elements in his work. But that would come later.

The comic trio of Keaton, Arbuckle, and Al St. John work well together as usual, and together they pull off some creative gags, making even the implausible ones work all right because of their timing and teamwork. Their romantic rivalries can get pretty silly, but are still funny. 

Coney Island itself looks pretty spiffy here and boasts some really cool looking rides, and that's another plus. This film serves as a historical record of the legendary amusement park in its prime, and it features several great shots that have turned up in various documentaries about the place.

Coney Island was filmed before Keaton had fully established his screen persona. Because of this, he employs a wide range of facial expressions, including mugging and laughing, differing drastically from his subsequent unsmiling, but still eloquent, expression. This is the only film in which you can see Buster Keaton laughing. 

Arbuckle breaks the fourth wall in one scene where, about to change his clothes, he directly looks at the camera and gestures for it to raise its view above his waist; the camera obligingly does so.

Like many American films of the time, Coney Island was subject to cuts by city and state film censorship boards. The Chicago Board of Censors required a cut of a scene with a girl raising her dress above her knee.

Suggested Soundtrack

August Blom - Verdens Undergang [The End of the World] (1916)

Verdens Undergang (1916)

English title: The End of the World

Danish/Silent/Black & White
Released in Denmark, 1916

Directed by August Blom.

Written by Otto Rung. 
Based on the novel La Fin du Monde by Camille Flammarion.

Cast:

Olaf Fønss...Frank Stoll - Mine Owner

Carl Lauritzen...Mineformand/Mine Forman West

Ebba Thomsen...Dina West

Johanne Fritz-Petersen...Edith West

Thorleif Lund...Minearbejder/Worker Flint

Alf Blütecher...Styrmand/Ship's Mate Reymers

Frederik Jacobsen...Den vandrende Prædikant/The Wandering Preacher

K. Zimmerman...Professor Wissmann

Moritz Bielawski...(uncredited)

Erik Holberg...(uncredited) 

 

A comet, passing by the earth, causes rioting, social unrest, and major disasters that destroy the world in this World War I-era film.

Scifist at Wordpress writes: 

"Danish August Blom is unfortunately one of those early film pioneers that don’t get much recognition these days. If remembered, it is chiefly for Atlantis, his ambitious film about the sinking of a large passenger ship – released in 1913, just a year after Titanic had gone down. Among film buffs he has a reputation for developing the genre of the erotic melodrama, and for being an early pioneer for cross-cutting of scenes for dramatic effect. Among fans of sci-fi, though, he is remembered for making the first post-apocalyptic science fiction film, Verdens Undergang, or The End of the World, made in 1916.

If Atlantis can be faulted for something, it’s that we never get a shot of the actual sinking of the ship, or even decks filling with water. One moment she is floating perfectly straight while people climb into life boats, in the next shot only the stern protrudes above the water line. Blom did not make the same mistake in The End of the World, depicting a comet brushing the Earth. Here we get superbly exciting scenes of burning meteorites scorching the landscape, houses on fire, explosions and water flooding buildings with people inside. With this film, Blom has captured an apocalyptic event on a truly epic scale, and the films deserves at least as good a reputation as Atlantis.

But this is no simple crash boom bang film, on the contrary. The director’s trademark was inhabiting his films with a multitude of characters, all involved in intricate plots. 

 Nevertheless, apart from a bit lackluster direction in the beginning of the film, it is as a whole quite beautifully filmed and the special effects of the apocalypse are simply stunning. Somehow Blom manages to rain burning bits of meteorite over a whole village (they used burning ”sparks”, presumably magnesium or some other highly flammable material) and creates large scale explosions and fires. In one scene he completely floods the set, with a woman sitting on top of a table. Andafter the disaster we get some absurdly haunting pictures of an actual flooded village, and a whole row of actually burned down buildings – those are not sets, that is clear. The post apocalyptic scenes on the southern sand dunes of Denmark are also quite beautiful.

The film itself was partly inspired by the passing of Halley’s comet six years earlier, and the onset of WWI created a need to tackle the war traumas in an abstract way. The war also plays as a background (though never mentioned in the film) for the moral tale, albeit a generic moral tale: greed is bad, power corrupts, and the humble and pious ones will prevail. Another significant theme is the class struggle, inspired by the rise of socialism and worker’s unions in Europe. Although August Blom clearly throws the bourgeois in a very bad light, he isn’t very kind on the raving hordes of revolutionaries, either. The betrayed fiancée is a grudge-holding, revenge-seeking and aggressive man who channels his own anger into a destructive and futile war against the rich, ultimately leading only to death and sorrow. Be content with your place in life, seems to be the moral punchline."

Mario Roncoroni - Filibus (1915)

Filibus (1915)

Italy/Silent/Black & White

Directed by Mario Roncoroni

Written by Giovanni Bertinetti

Cinematography by Luigi Fiorio

Cast:

Mario Mariani

Cristina Ruspoli

Giovanni Spano

Filippo Vallino

Baroness by day, sky pirate by night, Filibus is a daring, masked anti-heroine criminal mastermind who flies around in a zeppelin, perpetrating intrepid schemes for the spoils of victory and the thrill of it all.

The film features Cristina Ruspoli as the title character, a mysterious sky pirate who makes daring heists with her technologically advanced airship. When an esteemed detective sets out on her trail, she begins an elaborate game of cat and mouse with him, slipping between various male and female identities to romance the detective's sister and stage a midnight theft of a pair of valuable diamonds.

Another significant aspect of the character of Filibus is the extent to which she exists in a mechanical world, and her ease with different technological devices. Filibus peers through binoculars and calls her airship down using a heliograph (“a device to telegraph by sunlight”, an intertitle helpfully informs us); she is as at ease driving a car as her aircraft; she ascends and descends from her airship in its can-like shuttle; she uses forensic techniques (faked fingerprints, a staged photograph) to beat the detective at his own game. Part of her subversiveness is how Filibus is able to traverse the new, stereotypically masculine world of mechanics in order to outwit the male characters.

Filibus was released by Corona Film, a short-lived Turin-based studio operating on relatively low budgets and obscure casts. Though Italian reviews at the time of its release were negative, Filibus has been well received by later writers and film historians, who have highlighted the film's pioneering use of lesbian attraction, gender fluidity, and science fiction motifs, as well as its creative adaptation of stylistic elements from contemporary popular fiction. The film has been screened at numerous film festivals, and prints of it survive in archives in the Netherlands and in Italy.

In his autobiographical work Balão cativo (1973), the Brazilian writer Pedro Nava describes Filibus as a film "of major importance" (da maior importância), praising the gender fluidity and mythic aspects of the title character, as well as the film's innovative use of science fiction themes.

Suggested soundtrack

Mabel Normand [Charles Chaplin] - Mabel's Strange Predicament (1914)

Mabel's Strange Predicament (1914)

USA/Silent/Black & White

Directed by Mabel Normand

Produced by Mack Sennett

Written by Henry Lehrman

Cast: 

Charles Chaplin as The Tramp

Mabel Normand as Mabel

Chester Conklin as Husband

Alice Davenport as Wife

Harry McCoy as Lover

Hank Mann as Hotel Guest

Al St. John as Bellboy

In a hotel lobby, an inebriated tramp runs into an elegant lady (Mabel), where he promptly gets tangled in her dog's leash. Later they meet again in the hotel corridor, with Mabel having been locked out of her room, and following a subsequent adventure in and out of several hotel rooms,  Mabel ends up in the room one of a man where she hides under the bed. Enter the man's jealous wife and Mabel's lover.

Mabel's Strange Predicament is a 1914 American film starring Mabel Normand and Charles Chaplin, notable for being the first appearance of Charlie Chaplin in his Tramp costume.

The Tramp was first presented to the public in Chaplin's second film Kid Auto Races at Venice (released February 7, 1914) though Mabel's Strange Predicament, his third film in order of release, (released February 9, 1914) was produced a few days before. It was for this film that Chaplin first conceived of and played the Tramp. As Chaplin recalled in his autobiography:

"I had no idea what makeup to put on. I did not like my get-up as the press reporter [in Making a Living]. However on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small mustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born."

— Chaplin, My Autobiography, p. 154

Mabel's Strange Predicament is one of more than a dozen early films that writer/director/comedian Mabel Normand made with Chaplin; Normand, who had written and starred in films before Chaplin, mentored the young comedian. Chaplin's Tramp is shown swigging from a flask toward the beginning of the film and subsequently becoming so drunk that he staggers when he walks and falls down repeatedly near the end. His portrayal of drunkenness remains convincingly realistic. The Tramp also keeps his derby cocked throughout the proceedings, a touch that Chaplin abandoned later in his career.