Asides - Woof! Woof!

W.C. Fields once said, “Never work with children or animals." I guess it's fine to pose with them though, as these cards attest. Not sure if these were actual pets or merely props.

Marion Davies and friend

The dog for lounging around.

The dog for taking a walk and feeling safe.

Brigitte and friend leaving the florist.

A quiet day in the park.

This card is the only one I have seen from a series entitled Film Stars and Their Pets. Therefore there must be more and I guess this is actually her pet.

This is the back of the Miriam's card and it provides a short bio.

The August 20, 1934 text on the card is:
Miss J. Stapley, Butts Villa, Wisborough Green, Billingshurst, Sussex
Chatham, Monday - We have had a nice time here, hope you are having as nice weather as we are. Our dear love to the three of you and Auntie. Try to be good. Love, Missy.

Minus the address it's short enough to be a Twitter message.

Not everyone had dogs.

1927 Blog-a-Thon

Visit 1927 Blog-a-Thon to get to all the great 1927 Blog-A-Thon links.

What a year. Wings, Sunrise, The Jazz Singer, Hula, It, Cat and the Canary, College, Underworld, Flesh and the Devil, The General, King of Kings, Berlin: Symphony of a City, The Love of Jeanne Ney, Napolean, And...METROPOLIS! I've seen them all with the exception of Underworld, but my money is on Fritz Lang's Metropolis as the watershed moment in 1927 cinema. Now admittedly, I'm a Metropolis fanboy, but I suspect I am not alone in my love of this film. I will leave it to others to engage in scholarly film criticism, but if one gives kudos for imagery and imagination, ambitious scope and the fact that it was to become a film to be emulated and measured against since its release, Metropolis comes out a winner. I first saw it at the old Bleeker Street Cinema at a time when "Bird Lives", was still scrawled on the walls of the West 4th Street station in Greenwich Village. Fifteen or so years later I got a copy in Beta (opps - who knew that VHS would wipe Beta off the map). Then of course came the 1984 Morodor mash-up, which I admit to liking, followed by releases of several sub-par editions. Now we have the "to date" definitive edition available on DVD. It was issued in February 2003 after a limited theatrical release. BTW, if for some reason you are not well acquainted with film, check the link in the "You Can Get There From Here" list on this blog. There is a good Wikipedia entry as well. And, if you can find it, there is a great book titled "Metropolis, A Cinematic Laboratory for Modern Architecture", that is in German and English and was published in 2000 by Menges.

What follows is the series of twelve postcards that the German company Ross issued to coincide with the film. However, I have a feeling the the Ross folks didn't see the film before issuing the cards, because although they are sequentially numbered they have no relation to the film in terms of flow. That being said the images are great. I only wish Ross had made some of the stills of the amazing city of Metropolis as part of the set.















Now that you have seen the postcards, here is a selection of Metropolis Images that can be found around the web, assembled here for this 1927 Blog-a-Thon.

Brigitte Helm - Third of three postings

From another Obit. See first and second Brigette posting for bio.

Though her fame rests almost entirely with one film, and her name is hardly a familiar one even to many avid moviegoers, images of Brigitte Helm are among the most haunting and famous of any in the first century of film history. Even those who have never seen Metropolis are familiar with the pale lovely face as it is seen imprisoned in a glass coffin, eyes closed, like some science-fiction Snow White, or Brunnhilde in a silver helmet, or virgin saint. Or perhaps they recall the nearly nude shimmy dancer rising from an Art Deco clamshell bed, a robot turned Babylonian love goddess.

Brigitte Helm - What do you think? Allure?

Brigitte Helm - Second of three postings

The following is a paragraph taken from the NYT obituary, June 14th 1996.

Yet for all the acclaim she received for such roles as her portrayal of a blind girl in Georg Wilhelm Pabst's "Love of Jeanne Ney," or as a bored aristocratic wanton in his "Crisis," Ms. Helm could never eclipse the role, or rather rules, in which the good Maria, an oppressed working girl, is transformed into an evil robotic doppelganger of herself in Lang's "Metropolis."

Brigitte Helm - What do you think? Allure?

Brigitte Helm - First of three postings

What can I say - We have over 90 different postcards of Brigitte Helm, mostly due to our exposure to her from her performance in Metropolis, director Fritz Lang's Sci-Fi classic, and one of the most influential films of all time.

Brigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm was born in Berlin in 1908, and at age 18 is encouraged by her mother to do a screen test for Lang, who promptly hired her for the dual role of the idealistic Maria and the evil robot woman. Only a novice, she became a star overnight among young German movie actresses. Reportedly, her first film role almost became her last due to Lang's insistence upon "realism" during a burning-at-the-stake scene. However, she survived to become one of Germany's top screen attractions, extending her popularity to British and French productions.

One of the few offers she was obliged to turn down was the part of Lola-Lola in von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1929), which went instead to Marlene Dietrich. Brigitte retired from films upon her marriage in 1935 and moved to Switzerland to get out from under the Nazi regime. She rarely talked about her film career and died out of the limelight in 1996.

Brigitte in her role as the evil Maria.

The softer side.

Somewhere in between.

Brigitte Helm - What do you think? Allure?