Week that Was

Focus on Film History

December 23 to December 29, 2007

23 December 1942

A Girl and a Gun

Following his divorce from Modern Times co-star Paulette Goddard in 1941, Charlie Chaplin became involved with Joan Barry, a Hollywood starlet in her early twenties. The pair were not seen out and about together, and according to gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, they had almost a business relationship: 52-year Chaplin, who had a penchant for very young girls, rewarded Barry's favors by paying for Barry's dental work and drama classes, and even dangle the prospect of a part in his next film. However, as legend has it, when Chaplin canceled Barry's movie contract, Barry stormed into Chaplin's home on December 23, 1942, pointed a gun at him and threatened to kill him. Though at the time their relationship was understandably strained, legend has it that Barry's violent actions so excited the star-crossed pair that they were soon passionately entangled in Chaplin's bedroom. The following year, after they were no longer a couple, Barry went public about the affair after becoming pregnant (allegedly by Chaplin). Hopper, who hated Chaplin because of his supposed Communist sympathies, ran the Barry's sensationalist story, sparking a legal battle between Chaplin and Barry (who had filed a paternity suit) and various other parties. These lawsuits dragged on until 1946 and were a major contributing factor in Chaplin's radically waning popularity.

23 December 1987

Street of Stone

"Greed is good," proclaimed Michael Douglas on December 23, 1987. Playing corporate raider Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's financial services industry morality tale Wall Street, Douglas uttered words that perhaps meant to satirize but, unfortunately, came to be seen as accurate representations of the mindset of the stock-market obsessed era. "Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit," he went on to say. "Greed, in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA." Wall Street was Stone's follow-up to his Academy Award-winning Platoon, and he took great pains to depict the world of stock traders accurately. Investment banker Ken Lipper was an advisor to the film and played a small part in it, and dialogue was based on speeches given by maverick investors like Carl Icahn. Stone's film ends with an SEC investigation and the film's young hotshot trader hero, played by Charlie Sheen, helping to bust his mentor, Gekko, signifying the end of an era. But if Stone ever wants to revisit these themes, the circumstances of this story seem to recur ever ten years or so, whether it's with the energy-traders of Enron or today's sub-prime mortgage marketers.

26 December 1906

The World First Feature

In Melborne on December 26, 1906 Australian director Charles Tait premiered his feature The Story of the Kelly Gang, a 60-minute silent action story chronicling the exploits of Australia's most famous criminal. Shot at the Tait family's estate, with many parts played by the Tait's family, the film cost about £ 1,000, money it quickly made up in its first week. Rather than intertitles, each film showing had a narrator tell the story on stage, as well as providing such sound effects as horse hoofs and gunfire. While Tait never made another film, Kelly Gang went on to success in Britain and New Zealand, as Australia. The film not only became the world's first feature film, but was the first of some ten movies dramatizing the life of Australia most infamous outlaw, including most recently Gregor Jordan's Ned Kelly with Heath Ledger as the title character. Tait's success in portraying the Kelly gang however soon caught the eye of local authorities who felt the film turned Ned Kelly into a hero, and thus banned it in parts of Australia.

26 December 1973

Friedkin's Horror of Horrors

Two weeks before the release of The Exorcist, Elvis Presley paid for a special screening of the film as he, like the rest of the nation, had been caught up in excited anticipation of William Friedkin's already infamous occult horror movie. During filming, stories had circulated about the film being cursed: nine people connected with the film died, and a studio fire destroyed one of the sets. When the film was released on December 16, there were lines around the block of people anxiously intrigued to see whether they could stomach what was being talked about as the scariest, most shocking movie in recent memory. More frenzy was created around the film when scenes in which possessed teen Linda Blair projectile vomits or masturbates with a crucifix prompted patrons to faint, and theaters began having paramedics on hand for screenings and also distributing "Exorcist barf bags." With the exception of the (infinitely more wholesome) The Sting, The Exorcist was the most successful film of 1973, and was the highest earning movie internationally in 1974, and following a number of re-releases has now taken over $400m worldwide. Coming after The French Connection, the film made Friedkin one of the most powerful directors in Hollywood, made Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" soundtrack a massive hit, and spawned four sequels, including one directed by Paul Schrader in 2005.

28 December 1895

Ten Films That Changed The World

Just a few days after Christmas, more than 20 spectators have paid good money to enter the basement of the Grand Café, boulevard des Capucines and witness an evening of entertainment arranged by brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. The brothers, already well established photographers and inventors of photography equipement, had seen Thomas Edison's remarkable device, the Kinetoscope the year before and knew how to improve it. Moving beyond novelty of Edison's peep show, the Lumière brothers developed a combination camera and projector, which they dubbed the Cinématographe. On 28 December, the brothers showed to a public audience ten films they had shot on their new invention. Each film was shot as a single shot with no cuts and lasting no longer than a minute. Among the ten films shown that night were a simply documentary [La Sortie des usines Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory)], a domestic scene [Repas de bébé (Feeding the Baby)], and the first effects thriller [(L'Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station)] Legend has it that during the during the Train film, audience members close to the screen, dove for safety fearful of the approaching locomotive. For all, it was spectacle was without precedent, a mind-boggling, confusing flickering miracle. As Louis Lumière would later say "The cinema is an invention without a future."

29 December 1986

Future Imperfect

On December 29, 1986, one of the twentieth century's greatest filmmakers passed away. Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian director of seven films, including Andrei Rublev, Solaris, and The Mirror, died in a Paris hospital where he was receiving treatment for lung cancer. A towering figure in Russian cinema, Tarkvosky had departed his homeland for good in 1982 when he traveled to Italy to make his first film outside of Russia, Nostalghia. The film won a Special Grand Jury Prize at Cannes but, unsupported by Russian authorities and Mosfilm, the country's film bureau, Tarkovsky vowed never to work in Russia again. Unable to see his wife and son, who were not permitted to leave the country to visit him, Tarkovsky made his final film, The Sacrifice, in Sweden. A meditation on mortality and the end of the world, the film is also a tremendously moving poem from a father to a son he may never see again. (Finally, when Tarkovsky entered a Paris hospital his family was allowed to see him.) Formal, rigorous and uncompromising, Tarkovsky's long-take films were both deeply religious stories about man's search for grace as well as immersive evocations of environments ranging from post-apocalyptic landscapes to space stations to the rural Russia of the director's youth. Tarkovsky's treatise on cinema, Sculpting in Time, is a powerful statement of his ideals and argues that the mark of a director's singularity is his cinematic relationship with and ability to depict the experience of passing time.

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Publish Date: December 28, 2007

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