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As people around the country are about to celebrate Thanksgiving away from their loved ones, I suppose that many of us are contemplating the meaning of the holiday in the abstract, formed from memories of Thanksgivings past. The cultural trappings are one thing, but the understanding of what sets this day apart from Christmas or Passover or Eid is something entirely different. I suppose that Thanksgiving is notable for being an entirely secular national holiday that is observed as reverently as a religious holiday. When I was young, it embodied a spirit of generosity. I wonder if that’s still the case. What it has come to mean is family with a capital F, with all its contradictions and heartbreaks and glories.

There are a couple of movies that The Film Foundation has helped to restore that bring the spirits of past and present to mind. When I was young, Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, restored by the Library of Congress, was written off as a lesser film by many people, including Hitchcock himself. It was a dry run for North by Northwest, it had too many ideas in it, the lead and the villain were miscast, and so on. At this point I’ve seen the film many times, and it seems to grow with each viewing. Robert Cummings’ defense plant worker, wrongfully accused of committing sabotage and killing his best friend, goes on a cross-country journey much like Cary Grant’s in NBNW, but along the way he is met by good Samaritans who discard all doubt as they recognize the goodness he emanates—a long haul trucker, the members of a circus troupe and, most movingly and magically, a blind man who lives alone in the wilderness played by a wonderful old theatre actor named Vaughan Glaser.

In the matter of family, I’m thinking of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, restored by UCLA, in which family is the bedrock and the stumbling block, the crucible and the sustaining power. It’s family that drives Gena Rowlands’ Myrtle to madness, and it’s family that grounds her and lights her from within. The miracle of Cassavetes’ film is that it embodies these opposing forces and states all at once. Myrtle waiting anxiously for her kids to come home from school…Peter Falk as her helpless touching husband trying to decree that everything be normal again, Falk’s mother (played by Cassavetes’ own mother) casting a cold eye on her daughter-in-law one minute and later urging her son to go easy on her, the entire extended family rendered speechless as they watch Myrtle fly off into the stratosphere once again…it’s all the chaos and swirling and criss-crossing impulses and emotions of family in one movie, joyous and unkempt and terrifying, and you just want to dive right into it because that’s where life begins.

Happy Thanksgiving…and happy belated 106^th birthday to Norman Lloyd.

- Kent Jones

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SABOTEUR (1942, d. Alfred Hitchcock)
Preserved by the Library of Congress with funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Foundation and The Film Foundation. 

A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974, d. John Cassavetes)
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.

In 1923, William Carlos Williams wrote an untitled poem that he included in his remarkable Spring and All. When his first volume of collected poems was published 15 years later, he had given what is now his best-known poem a title. “To Elsie” is named after Elsie Borden, a disabled woman who grew up in an orphanage and who worked for the Williams family in New Jersey. The poem famously begins: “The pure products of America / go crazy…” And it ends, less famously but so hauntingly: “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” Dr. Williams’ great work was a beacon for the young Allen Ginsberg when he wrote his longer clarion call “Howl” in 1955: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical / naked…” And, a few lines from the end, “O starry-spangled / shock of mercy the eternal war is here…” Ginsberg was read closely and later befriended by Bob Dylan, who sounded the call in a rougher and rowdier register in “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and, later, in a more plangent tone in “All Along the Watchtower.” And roughly concurrent with Dylan, from another side of America, came Sam Fuller’s bargain-budget Shock Corridor, restored by UCLA with the help of The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. In Fuller’s independently made tabloid vision of America-as-madhouse, the pure products have all gone crazy, as Robert Polito observes in his Criterion essay on the film. The best minds have all been destroyed by madness, the hard rain is already falling and there is no way out of here. A reporter pretends to be a madman in order to gain admittance to an insane asylum to investigate a murder. In the asylum, he encounters a nuclear physicist who thinks he’s a little boy, a traitorous Korean War vet who thinks he’s a Confederate General, and a black man who has integrated a Southern university who thinks he’s the founder of the KKK. In the end, the reporter himself actually does go mad…and wins the Pulitzer Prize. Shock Corridor was not greeted warmly when it was released in September 1963. Two months later, the President was assassinated, and the endless high-profile convulsions of the decade began.

But when did the convulsions begin? And did they ever really end?

- Kent Jones

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SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963, d. Samuel Fuller)
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

On October 21, 1916, the La Crosse Tribune carried a full-page advertisement for the next day’s release of Thomas Ince’s epic silent movie Civilization. Under a black and white picture of a listing ship going down in a storm as a lifeboat full of people foundered nearby, the breathless headline proclaimed:

Thos. H. Ince’s $1,000,000.00 SPECTACLE

Vividly Pictures the Modern Menace of SUBMARINE WARFARE

A Masterpiece that throws a glaring light on the world’s flaunting boast of a higher progress.

Below that are the following details:

Actual Sinking of an Ocean Liner.Two Battleships Sunk by United States Navy.$18,000 Used for Ammunition in One Battle.40,000 People Employed.10,000 Horses in Thrilling Cavalry Charges.40 Aeroplanes in Great Air Battle.Every Death-dealing Device Known to Modern War in Operation.One Year in the Making.Cost $1,000,000.00.Entire Cities Built and Destroyed.An Awe-inspiring Spectacle that one minute makes your blood run cold and another thrills you with its touches of human gentleness.The Story of the Greatest Love of the Ages – the Love of Humanity.

Promising a “Prologue by Flesh and Blood Actors,” the shows were priced at 50¢, 75¢ and $1; 25¢ for bargain matinees.

The film actually only cost $100,000 according to film archivist Brian Taves in his book Thomas Ince: Hollywood's Independent Pioneer, and earned $800,000 at the box office. It opened in Los Angeles in April 1916, then was recut with additional scenes for its New York premiere later that year.

Ince, the producer of about 800 films, who was the first to build his own studio, Inceville, with an assembly line system of filmmaking, is best known nowadays as the man who met a mysterious death at age 44 aboard the Oneida, William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, on which Ince was a guest. Rumors circulated about how he was shot in the head by Hearst, though officially he was reported to have died of a heart attack. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons who had been on the yacht was supposedly paid off by Hearst with a lifetime contract to syndicate her column in his newspapers in exchange for her silence.

Ince was also a director on Civilization, along with Reginald Barker and Raymond B. West, a film which is considered one of the first anti-war films. In 1916, the US had not yet joined WWI. The Democratic National Committee claimed that this was the film that helped Woodrow Wilson regain the presidency in 1916; his slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” inspired Ince to make the film. Wilson was shown the film before its release and a print was even sent to the Pope. Nevertheless, the US did eventually join the war in 1917, whereupon the film was yanked out of theaters.

Originally titled He Who Returned, the film is a Christian allegory written by C. Gardner Sullivan and was the first one in which an actor (George Fisher) portrays Christ, billed as “the Christus” in the opening credits. The film is set in a peaceful European country whose king Wredpryd (Herschell Mayall in full army regalia) decides to start a war to increase his power. The male populace is conscripted by force, the women start a movement called Mothers of Men, and one of the king’s courtiers, Count Ferdinand (Howard Hickman) is ordered to combat because he invented a submarine that could torpedo enemy ships. But when faced with sinking a ship carrying not only ammunition but innocent passengers, he refuses and sinks his own ship instead. His change of heart is because of the influence of the pacifist fiancée (Enid Markey) he left behind.

Gravely injured, Ferdinand is rescued but descends into some sort of purgatory where the spirit of Christ inhabits him. Once back in Wredpryd, the king – “a modern Pontius Pilate” according to the supertitle – orders his execution, but Christ emerges from the Count’s body and takes the king to the battlefields to show him the havoc he has wreaked. The king repents and peace returns to the land.

The battle scenes are quite spectacular, with three cameramen credited. Considering that cameras were immovable back then, what Ince has achieved is impressive, wrangling the ships and seas as well as the hundreds of extras in the land battle scenes. Like most silent movies, the acting is declamatory and overly theatrical, and the supertitles veer into the banal. Variety’s reviewer was moved to say, “In his effort to project pathos, he slops over into bathos.” The religious messages are unrelenting as well, but given the time and circumstances of the film’s release, it was a great success and received very good notices, some reviewers comparing it favorably to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. It was re-released several times, the last time in 1931.

However, the Los Angeles Times reviewer ignored the pacifist message, dismissed the poster’s breathless dedication to “that vast army whose tears have girdled the universe – the Mothers of the Dead,” and wrote that the depiction of Christ was “…not daring, it is only poor taste.” He went on to damn the film further: “Realizing the vast sum of money and the huge investment of talent and good faith that have been expended in this pretentious film, it is with deep regret that I am compelled to report it as a disappointment.” He was unmoved by the interview that Fisher, the actor playing Christ, had given to his paper, explaining that he lived the life of a recluse, spending his time in study and meditation in preparation for the role. “I can say in truth that the playing of this part has affected my whole life and the impressions will never leave me,” he told the Times.

Civilization was restored by The Museum of Modern Art with funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation. The source material was a shortened version that was used as the basis from a 1931 re-issue; it was all that survived of the film.

In May 1923, Adolph Zukor, head of Paramount Pictures, sent director Cecil B. deMille a telegram: “You have lost your mind. Stop filming and return to Los Angeles at once.”

The director was in the middle of shooting his epic The Ten Commandments at the Guadalupe Nipomo Dunes in Central California. A gigantic set had been erected as Ramses’ city by 500 carpenters and 600 painters and decorators. It included a 120 foot-tall temple, five enormous sphinxes, a 100-foot Great Gate, statues of the Pharaoh, and a 750-foot long city wall which deMille insisted on as he wouldn’t work with painted backgrounds. Also constructed was the ‘City of deMille,’ the 24 square-mile tent city which held the cast, extras and crew of 2,500, along with 3,000 animals.

The director responded to Zukor: “I cannot and will not make pictures with a yardstick.” According to author Sumiko Higashi in her book “Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era,” he said, “What do they want me to do? Stop now and release it as The Five Commandments?” There was, in fact, no stopping. Filming in this location took a breakneck three weeks. A Los Angeles Times article quoted deMille as telling his actors, “Your skin will be cooked raw. You will miss the comforts of home. You will be asked to endure perhaps the most unpleasant location in cinema history. I expect of you your supreme efforts.”

After the shoot wrapped, deMille was required to strike his set before departing. But the expense was too great. Rather than abandon it, and fearing rival filmmakers might use it to make cheap knockoffs, he dynamited the structures and bulldozed sand over them. (The set was discovered in 2004 and excavated piece by remaining piece in a number of attempts over several years.)

The Ten Commandments cost $1,475,836.93 and grossed $4,169,798.38 in unadjusted dollars in its initial release. It was Paramount’s highest-grossing film for 25 years until deMille himself broke that record. In his 1959 autobiography, deMille wrote, “The really important question to ask about a motion picture is not ‘What did it cost?’ but ‘What is it worth?’ The real worth of a picture cannot be measured in money alone. As soon as The Ten Commandments was completed, I screened it for Jesse Lasky and Sid Kent [Paramount sales department head]. The next day Kent wired Mr. Zukor: ‘The Ten Commandments is not a motion picture. It is bigger than all the motion pictures that have been made. It plays on the emotion in a manner that I have never felt or witnessed before and will do more good than all the combined pulpits of the country.’”

The reaction must have been a relief to deMille who was trying to salvage his reputation after a string of flops, the latest being Adam’s Rib, one of a series of light comedic films which underperformed at the Famous Players-Lasky studio where he was contracted before it became Paramount Pictures.

To find subject matter that directly appealed to the audience, deMille had sponsored a contest in the LA Times on October 9, 1922, soliciting suggestions from the public. The article was titled ‘Cecil de Mille Offer of $1,000 Can be Captured by Originator of Best Film Idea.’ Thousands responded. He chose the one submitted by F.C. Nelson, a Michigan man, that said, ‘You cannot break the Ten Commandments – they will break you.’

The film, written by Jeanie MacPherson, is devised in two parts. The Biblical Prologue is preceded by this intertitle to set up the film: “Our modern world defined God as a ‘religious complex’ and laughed at the Ten Commandments as OLD FASHIONED. Then, through the laughter, came the shattering thunder of the World War. And now a blood-drenched, bitter world – no longer laughing – cries for a way out.” Most of the intertitles in the prologue are Biblical quotes.

The prologue, which is about 45 minutes, is about Moses (played by Theodore Roberts) and Rameses’ (Charles de Roche) as they clash over the freeing of the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt where they are laboring under the cruel Pharaoh. A series of plagues, including the taking of every family’s first-born son, causes Ramses to allow the Exodus, after which he changes his mind and pursues the Hebrews in a spectacular chariot chase, only to lose them to the parting of the Red Sea. Moses then goes to the Mount to receive the ten commandments for 40 days and nights, only to return to the debaucheries of his people, worshipping a Golden Calf and participating in hedonistic displays. Prominent among them is the fetching Miriam (Estelle Taylor). Moses invokes the Wrath of God upon them, Miriam is afflicted by leprosy, the sinners are struck down by lightning, the film dissolves into the present day (1923) where part two, the Modern Story, begins.

Now the audience meets the MacTavishes – the fundamentalist zealot Martha (Edythe Chapman), and her sons John (Richard Dix) and Dan (Rod LaRoque). Both fall in love with the same woman, Mary (Leatrice Joy), but it’s Dan who wins her and they split from the family, disavowing the mother’s religion. Flash forward three years and now Dan is a successful building contractor, slowly breaking all ten commandments on the road to success, while the pious John has remained at home with the mother and continues his carpenter trade. In the melodrama that ensues, Dan is punished for his sins, but only after he builds a church with adulterated concrete, hires his brother to take the fall, watches his mother die when a wall collapses on her, shoots his mistress (Nita Naldi playing a stereotypical Asian whore), and drowns in a storm when he tries to escape on a speedboat. John and Mary are reunited and live happily ever after reading the Bible.

The Biblical Prologue was the kind of film that made deMille’s reputation as a director of spectacles. The impressive sets, thousands of extras, special effects like the parting of the Red Sea (water poured over Jell-O, then reversed through the camera in a double exposure) and use of occasional Technicolor for the Exodus scenes, provided the sensational displays the audiences craved. These Exodus scenes are pretty spectacular considering there was no CGI, all the extras moving en masse in the distance, the camera cutting to scenes in the foreground to show the scramble of families dragging their cattle and belongings with them.

deMille was the first director to hire an art director for Commandments and used a record six cameramen, one only for the Technicolor scenes. The church construction scenes in part 2 are also remarkable, particularly the one in which Mary uses an elevator to go to John on the rooftop, both their points of view recorded through tracking shots that include the surrounding city.

The film premiered in New York at the George M. Cohan Theatre on December 21, 1923, where the lobby was decorated Egyptian-style. In Hollywood, it premiered at the Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on December 4, preceded by a stage show entitled ‘A Night in Pharaoh’s Palace.’ It got universally good notices from the critics for the Prologue; the Modern Story was not as well-received, Variety calling it “ordinary. . . hoke.”

A touring show with a 28-piece orchestra to play the Hugo Riesenfeld score lasted for months. Eleven companies toured Europe. There were 250 screenings in London alone.

deMille, who had severed ties with Paramount in 1925 over the bitterness of the budget dispute, returned to the studio in 1932. He remade The Ten Commandments as a full-length film in 1956, which is the more famous version, with Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Pharaoh. It was once again Paramount’s most expensive picture to date.

The Ten Commandments was restored by the George Eastman House with funding provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Film Foundation, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and the George Eastman House Preservation Fund. In 2002, The George Eastman House started work on restoring the film from deMille’s personal 35mm nitrate print. deMille kept one print of every one of his features; most of his silent films were given to the George Eastman House following his death in 1959.  This was part of an ongoing initiative to restore the color back to deMille’s silent films, with tinting matched and reproduced by the Desmet process. Reel 8 of deMille’s personal copy was incomplete due to nitrate decomposition. This was replaced with material held at the Library of Congress. Tinting records were used to restore the color tints to this reel from an original screenplay held in the Cecil B. deMille Archives at Brigham Young University in Utah.