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Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” captures 1920s Hollywood in all its decadence, debauchery and excess. Filming on dusty backlots and in sumptuous mansions, Chazelle creates a fever dream of vintage filmmaking through a contemporary lens. But before looking at history through his own lens, Chazelle started out by doing months of intensive research, finding inspiration in real-life Hollywood stars, powerbrokers and events. And in many cases, the early days of moviemaking were pretty scandalous.

“The reality is that these people were operating in a no-holds-barred kind of world where an entire industry and city were being built from the ground up, and that takes a certain kind of madness,” Chazelle has said.

The 1920s in particular were a freer time, says “Tinseltown” author William J. Mann. “There was an incredible freedom before the production code was established, and so people had a much freer sense of how they could live their lives.

Gabriel Over the White House

DVD-r

The Warner Archive Collection

1933 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 86, 102 min. / Street Date October 20, 2009 / available through the Warner Archive Collection / 17.99

Starring: Walter Huston, Karen Morley, Franchot Tone, Arthur Byron, Dickie Moore, C. Henry Gordon, David Landau, Samuel S. Hinds, Jean Parker, Mischa Auer.

Cinematography: Bert Glennon

Film Editor: Basil Wrangell

Original Music: Dr. William Axt

Written by: Carey Wilson, from a book by T. F. Tweed

Produced by: William Randolph Hearst, Walter Wanger

Directed by Gregory La Cava

A Review Revisit.

The unique political fantasy Gabriel Over the White House has become painfully topical lately. This is an update of a 2009 review. To my knowledge nothing has changed with the product — I saw a re-promotion of Twilight Time’s 1984 disc and thought, Gabriel is twice as relevant and at least as scary.

Unstable times in America have produced some pretty strange political-religious message pictures.

Film's golden era was tarnished by appeasement

Nazi Germany loved movies, and their leader was, as in so much else, fanatical about them. In his private cinema at the Reich Chancellery Hitler watched a movie every night, then gave his invited guests the benefit of his opinion on it. He loved Laurel and Hardy, for instance, noting how their comedy Block-Heads contained "a lot of very nice ideas and clever jokes". Yet he regarded movies as something more than entertainment; he saw in their power to seduce and bewitch a vital instrument of persuasion. His propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, saw it, too. After watching It Happened One Night, he wrote in his diary: "A funny, lively American film from which we can learn a lot. The Americans are so natural. Far superior to us."

If this eye-opening study of Hollywood and the Nazi elite is to be believed, that superiority was purely a technical one.

The St. Louis Globe-Democrat is a monthly newspaper run by Steve DeBellis, a well know St. Louis historian, and it’s the largest one-man newspaper in the world. The concept of The Globe is that there is an old historic headline, then all the articles in that issue are written as though it’s the year that the headline is from. It’s an unusual concept but the paper is now in its 25th successful year! Steve and I collaborated last year on an all-Vincent Price issue of The Globe and I’ve been writing a regular movie-related column since. Since there is no on-line version of The Globe, I post all of my articles here at We Are Movie Geeks as well. When Steve informed me that this month’s St. Louis Globe-Democrat is written as if it’s 1934, I jumped at the chance to write about the...

The St. Louis Globe-Democrat is a monthly newspaper run by Steve DeBellis, a well know St. Louis historian, and it’s the largest one-man newspaper in the world. The concept of The Globe is that there is an old historic headline, then all the articles in that issue are written as though it’s the year that the headline is from. It’s an unusual concept but the paper is now in its 25th successful year! Steve and I collaborated last year on an all-Vincent Price issue of The Globe and I’ve been writing a regular movie-related column since. Since there is no on-line version of The Globe, I post all of my articles here at We Are Movie Geeks as well. When Steve informed me that this month’s St. Louis Globe-Democrat is written as if it’s 1934, I jumped at the oppurtunity to write about the...

(Note: This review pertains to the UK Region 2 Pal format release available on www.amazon.co.uk)

By Adrian Smith

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Cecil B. DeMille will always be remembered for his lavish historical epics like The Ten Commandments (1923 and again in 1956), Sign of the Cross (1932) and Samson and Delilah (1949). However, with over one hundred and sixty credits as either director or producer, he also worked in plenty of other genres. Following two flops, This Day and Age (1933) and Four Frightened People (1934), Paramount head Adolph Zukor insisted he try to replicate the success of Sign of the Cross with another visual spectacle. DeMille agreed and cast Claudette Colbert in the lead role of Cleopatra (she had already starred in both Sign of the Cross and Four Frightened People and was about to win the Oscar for It Happened one Night (1934)).

The plot focuses on Cleopatra's...

There are two stories I want to tell with this glorious 1922 poster: one is about the film itself—a forgotten silent melodrama—and the sad fates of its main protagonists, and the other is about the artist Henry Clive.

The Green Temptation, a film which I’m not even sure is extant (the silent film database silentera.com says “survival status: unknown”), starred Betty Compson as Genelle, a member of the Parisian underworld who, along with her partner Gaspard, runs a travelling theatre as a ruse to pickpocket their patrons and burgle their homes while they’re watching the show. When the First World War starts, Genelle joins the Red Cross as a nurse to evade the police and after the War emigrates to America to start a new life. But her attempt to turn over a new leaf is foiled by the reappearance of Gaspard who forces her to...

This editorial features spoilers for Arthur, so go watch it first or consider yourself warned. Leave it to Drew McWeeny to make me think way deeper about Arthur than I ever really wanted to while sober. His piece on the drunken, bumbling movie called into question the reason why none of the advertising featured Arthur with a drink in hand, and, more interestingly, why the character has to learn a lesson directly related to his alcoholic behavior. The question is whether excess is still funny. The answer is yes, but it can’t be all funny, and that’s a shame. There was once a time when a character could be over the top without the audience having the spoon of morality shoved down their throats. If there are any teenagers out there, I can assure you that metaphorical spoon was never used for cooking symbolic crack cocaine. Only allegorical soup. Promise...

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling have been mentioned as potential Oscar contenders for their performances as carefree lovers-turned-unhappily-married couple in Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine, which The Weinstein Company will be releasing in the United States on Dec. 31. But members of the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings (i.e., censorship) board, whose job is to perpetuate the ludicrousness of the Hays Office and the Breen Office (named after infamous censors Will Hays and Joseph Breen) don't care about performances. They care about how many times the word "fuck" is used in a film. They care even more if the act of fucking is used in a film. The act is present to some degree or other in Blue Valentine; hence the MPAA's decision to punch the film with the dreaded Nc-17 rating, reports Mike Fleming at Deadline.com. Those who have seen the movie at Sundance, Cannes, and/or Toronto are flabbergasted,...

First it was the piranhas. Now it's the sharks' turn to make the water unsafe.David Ellis, who directed "Snakes on a Plane" and two installments of the "Final Destination" movies, and producer Mike Fleiss are assembling their cast for the horror pic "Shark Night 3-D." Sinqua Walls, Chris Carmack, Alyssa Diaz and Joel David Moore are coming aboard for some fun fin action.Written by Jesse Studenberg and Will Hayes, the story revolves around seven men and women who spend a weekend at a lake house in Louisiana's Gulf area. When their vacation quickly becomes a nightmare of hellish shark attacks, unheard of in freshwater lakes, they soon discover that the sharks are part of a sick, greedy plan on the part of several locals.Walls is playing a Tulane University linebacker with plans on marrying his college sweetheart (Diaz).Carmack is the ex-boyfriend of the female lead, still uncast,...

Next month marks the centenary of In Old California, a 17-minute adventure yarn directed by Dw Griffith and the first Hollywood production. Philip French records the changes in film and Us society in the past century, and names the films that defined each decade

1910-1919: The birth of Hollywood

According to Hollywood myth, the first film made there was Cecil B DeMille's The Squaw Man in 1914, after the director decided not to alight in a snowbound Flagstaff, Arizona, but to proceed to Los Angeles. In fact, four years earlier the prolific Dw Griffith had come west to take advantage of the California sunshine, and the 17-minute In Old California, an adventure set in Spanish colonial days, was the first to be filmed in its entirety in the village of Hollywood. Now commemorated by a monument at 1713 Vine Street, it was released on 10 March 1910, one of Griffith's 98 films of that year.