Will Vinton's The Adventures of Mark Twain

Because of the media savvy of most citizens in the West, thanks to growing up, as we have, with a constant glut of cinematic cliches, it is often easy to accurately assume what a film is going to be like. If we are told, for example, that it is a children's film, then we will often rightly figure on something happy and trite and sugary in its sweetness, and just about as filling as candy. If we can see that it is done in a medium such as Claymation, we may jump to that assumption right away. Now and then, however, we may find our assumption to be altogether mistaken. Indeed, we may find what is ostensibly considered a children's movie that shocks us, not from any snide cynicism or brutality that has come to pass for kids' entertainment, but rather by its profound intelligence and sensitivity. Such is the case with the Claymation animated feature The Adventures of Mark Twain.

A Florida Enchantment

Released in 1914 and based on an 1891 novel, A Florida Enchantment begins like any other high society silent film. The most notable thing about it for the first while, and a fondness throughout, is its on-location shooting in St. Augustine, Florida. For scholars of film, A Florida Enchantment is more notable as the first movie to ostensibly feature lesbianism and transgenderism.

First, the historical interest. As the oldest city in the United States, St. Augustine was originally founded by the Spanish in 1565 to secure shipping between Spain and the Caribbean as well as lay claim to the region dubbed La Florida by Ponce de León. The famed Spanish explorer was reputed to have set foot on St. Augustine's shores himself in 1513, in his supposed search for the Fountain of Youth. The mighty Castillo de San Marcos was eventually built from local coquina stone (prehistoric clamshell and other fragments cemented together over time), which helped repel repeated attacks from the privateers employed by enemy nations. The fort and St. Augustine passed from the Spanish to the English in one treaty, then back to Spain in another treaty, and then to the United States.

With ownership of the city definitively settled, tourists could begin to arrive en masse. The most influential character in the city's late 19th century "Golden Age" was Henry Flagler. John D. Rockefeller's partner in the Standard Oil Company, Flagler visited the sleepy town on his second honeymoon and was taken with both its charm and its potential for tourism. He envisioned a winter retreat for New England socialites and poured money into three grand hotels: the Ponce de León, Alcazar, and Casa Monica (which Flagler purchased and renamed the Cordova). Today, the Casa Monica still serves as an hotel, but the Alcazar is now the Lightner Museum and the Ponce de León is part of Flagler College. The latter was completed in 1887 in luxurious Spanish Revival style, with electric lights supplied by Flagler's personal friend Thomas Edison (though legend has it that the staff had to flip the switches since guests were too afraid to). Places like the Castillo de San Marcos and the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park were major attractions, as they remain today. One of the highlights of A Florida Enchantment is catching those glimpses of those attractions, if you know what to look for.

Paintings of Paris by Jean Béraud

Jeune femme traversant le boulevard

Born in Saint Petersburg in 1846 to an artistic family, Jean Béraud originally set about to study law when the occupation of Paris in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War forced him onto a different track. Discovering his love of painting, he first exhibited in the famed Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1872. Over the following decades, Béraud became known for detailed, glamorous, often humorous, scenes of Parisian life during the Belle Époque. His works remain today as a feast for the eyes of anyone fascinated with the turn of the previous century.

Jules Verne's The Hunt for the Meteor

Written in 1901 but published in 1908, The Hunt for the Meteor is one of Jules Verne's last, great, posthumous novels. Like many of those novels, the original French publication (and most subsequent English translations) was altered by Verne's son Michel, but nevertheless, what peeks through is a final novel reiterating the elder Verne's status as a first-class satirist.

Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon

It is often said that Jules Verne wrote about technology while H.G. Wells wrote about people. Between the two originators of the Scientific Romance, the Briton is regarded as writing social, political and religious tracts veiled in thin scientific premises of Martian invasions, cruel vivisection, and crueler eugenic fantasies. Verne's domain was that of technology and discovery, writing carefully researched stories about the phenomena of science and industry.

Wherever this assessment stands in relation to Wells (he may have been the one to propagate it), it is not entirely accurate in regards to the elder Frenchman. He certainly did write about technology and industry, science and discovery, and did so excellently. That was not the limit of his genius, however. Verne's eye pierced not only into the future of technology, but also how technology affects and is affected by society.

One of Verne's earliest novels was of this sort... In fact, the largely accurate vision of metropolitan alienation presented by Paris in the Twentieth Century was so drear that publisher Jules Hetzel refused to release the book. It would not occupy store shelves until 1994. While Verne was dissuaded from further depressing and pessimistic work (at least until Hetzel died and Verne became a much older, more embittered man), he continued to inject insightful commentary into his stories of adventure. From the Earth to the Moon, written only two years after Paris in the Twentieth Century, is a perfect example of Verne's approach to the subject. What we find within its pages is not so much the story of a lunar expedition as a hysterical and biting satire of the American military-industrial complex.

All Aboard for the Moon on Simpson's Electric Gun

The following article appeared in the July 12, 1908 edition of the San Francisco Call newspaper. Not unlike modern science journalism, a relatively modest discovery - W.S. Simpson's electric gun, capable of launching a projectile 300 miles - is inflated to world-shattering proportions.

"Men could abide on the moon for a time," says Professor Dodge. "In thick walled, airtight houses, and could walk out of doors in airtight divers’ suits. Scientists would find in the wastes a fresh field for exploration. Astronomers could plant their telescopes there, free from their most serious hindrance, the earth’s atmosphere. Tourists of the wealthy and adventurous class would not fail to visit the satellite, and it is probable there are veins of precious metals, beds of diamonds and an abundance of sulphur in a world of so highly volcanic a character."

The scanned image may be clicked on for a closer look.

The Air Ship, a Musical Farce Comedy

Much like modern cinematic blockbusters, the theatrical stage of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras saw the same competition for bigger, grander, and more effects-laden productions to draw audiences. J.M. Gaites rose to the challenge, penning The Air Ship in 1899.

Señor Zorro, the Masked Avenger

The archetype of the avenging swashbuckler is a very old one. Ballads of Robin Hood go back to the 15th century, and there were certainly others before him... Characters of great daring and great romance who rob from the rich and give to the poor, and otherwise seek to right wrongs and fight injustice against which others are cowardly or impotent. The legacy of the swashbuckler has distilled into the modern superhero, the Captain Americas and Batmans who fight the fight that properly constituted authority cannot. Though the swashbuckler archetype is an old one, some of its most popular and well-known manifestations are not as old as some might think. The lineage of Batman - the dilettante whose secret identity is the mask - goes back at least to Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel, the 1905 novel set in Revolutionary France. His more direct ancestor is Johnston McCulley's black-clad avenger of Alta California, Señor Zorro, who was created in 1919. 

Walter R. Booth's "Airship" Trilogy

By 1909, Scientific Romances were well established in film. The "Romance" part often overshadowed the "Scientific" part, however. Georges Méliès, one of the most innovative minds in movies in the first decade of the 20th century, was most interested fantasies with a Vernian gloss rather than a straight attempt at serious speculative storytelling. In many cases, science was merely a just-so explanation for phenomena that would otherwise be attributed to magic or ghosts. For example, The Electric Hotel (1905) by Segundo de Chomón is an otherwise typical haunted house trick film, only this time it's electric conveniences gone awry.

Walter R. Booth was a magician turned trick filmmaker, like Georges Méliès in many respects. with the same preoccupations. 1901's The Magic Sword, for instance, is a straightforward fantasy story. An Over-Incubated Baby from the same year is more of a trick film with a mad science premise. But come 1909, Booth was interested in a much different project. Rather than a humourous trick film, The Airship Destroyer is a remarkably serious and prescient attempt at Scientific Romances in the vein of H.G. Wells' War in the Air, published the preceding year.        

This film is a remarkably prophetic one-reel opening chapter to a trio of conceptually similar films that includes The Aerial Submarine and The Aerial Anarchists. In it, a thinly-veiled Germany descends on the British coast with a fleet of invincible dirigibles which can only be brought down by the genius of an inventor and his guided aerial torpedo. More authentically like Verne and Wells, Booth's prognostications were based on solid projections of existing technology, as both Zeppelin's and the Wright Brothers' crafts had debuted and entered into commuter and military service by 1909. A scant few years thereafter, Europe would descend into violent mechanized warfare and The Airship Destroyer would become horrifying reality. It was even re-released in 1915 to boost morale. 

Extract from The Airship Destroyer.

A year later, Booth released The Aerial Submarine, in which a pair of children are kidnapped by high-tech pirates inspired loosely by Jules Verne's Robur. From beneath the waves they strike out at passing cruise ships, looting their cargoes. When the submarines of the Royal Navy catch their scent, the pirates take to the air and drop shells on their hapless pursuers. It is only when a careless engineer causes disaster that the world has a hope of salvation from the aero-pirates. It is much less serious than The Airship Destroyer, returning to the cinematic genre's more fanciful trends.

Extract from The Aerial Submarine.

Unfortunately, the third film in the series, The Aerial Anarchists (1911), is a lost film. No footage is known to exist, and all that is known is a vague synopsis that mentions a bombing of St. Paul's Cathedral and the destruction of a railway over a chasm.

Both The Airship Destroyer and The Aerial Submarine can be viewed from British ISPs on the BFI Player website.

Rose Marie, Renfrew, and the Canadian Mountie on Film

Today's special feature is part of the O Canada! Blogathon hosted by Speakeasy and Silver Screenings. Click on the banner above to read more about the legacy of motion pictures in the True North Strong and Free!

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Hollywood's "golden age" of the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties never wanted for stories of adventure set in the rugged wilderness of the mighty Northwoods. Between An Acadian Elopement in 1907 and the 1975 publication of Canadian historian Pierre Burton's damning Hollywood's Canada: The Americanization of Our National Image, 575 films were produced featuring mountainous and snowy locales populated by trappers, loggers and the women of disrepute who loved them. More than half of these, over 250, focused on that most iconic figure of Canadian history, the Mountie.

CANADA!

Harry Grant Dart's The Explorigator

When he began the amazing story of The Explorigator on Sunday, May 3rd, 1908, Harry Grant Dart was already well on his way to becoming an established and respected illustrator. After serving as a sketch artist in Cuba for the New York World paper, he assumed responsibility as its art director. It was for them that he developed the idea of The Explorigator as a response to Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, running in the rival New York Herald.  

Harry Grant Dart's Futuristic Air Travel

One of the great, famous images of retro-futurism uncovered by the Internet's digital archaeologists in the last decade, Harry Grant Dart's painting of an Edwardian lady piloting an airship has become something of an icon. Originally published as the cover to the October 1908 edition of All-Story Monthly, it builds on some of the themes of Scientific Romance that Dart had already been exploring in his comic strip The Explorigator earlier that year. Nor was he alien to making social commentary, as in the case of an illustration for Puck that critiqued the movement to allow women to smoke in public. That illustration made the rounds again in 2014, where it was (erroneously) lampooned as an example of anti-suffrage histrionics. This particular issue of All-Story included the Scientific Romance The Master of the World by Charles Francis Bourke (not Jules Verne).

Dart's cover in published form.

Carousel Guest Blog - Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

As some may have noticed, I messed up the new schedule and posted two weeks in a row, the last time being last week. In lieu of what should have been today's post, I humbly present a guest post I wrote for Carousel, the official blog of Skyhorse Publishing. They were kind enough to invite me to write a piece on their recent republication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Follow this link to read the article!

The Victorian Invention of Christmas

On the odd occasion when I am asked what the greatest invention of the Victorian Era was, I tend to step sideways on it. Yes, various industrial, scientific, entertainment, and transportation technologies are interesting, but I think the best invention of the Victorian Era is the middle class. The idea of the bulk of persons in a society standing between obscene wealth and dire poverty, being able to enjoy opportunity and the fruits of their education and labour, to experience personal freedom as a birthright rather than a class privilege, is a remarkable idea virtually unprecedented in human history. For my second favourite Victorian invention, I may have to say Christmas.

Victorian card of Father Christmas
in his traditional green coat.

Scientific Romances in the Atomic Age

The resolution to the War in the Pacific in 1945 threw a wholly new anxiety onto the shoulders of the world: the heretofore impossible spectre of actual global annihilation. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki culminated a trend begun with The Great War. In that first conflict, the "Christian Century" of infinite moral progress was crushed beneath the violence of technological warfare predicted by the likes of H.G. Wells, George Tomkyns Chesney, and the other 19th century writers of doomsday invasion stories. Often they predicted an apocalyptic outcome to the oncoming war, but humanity's execution was blessedly stayed in 1919. Even with advances in tank, aeroplane and explosive technologies, truly obliterating humanity was beyond humanity's power.

Then along came The Bomb.

To make the situation that much more dire, the end of the War in Europe also furnished a new and powerful opponent. No sooner were Germany and Japan brought to heel than the Soviet Union filled the vacuum, being a more expansive and more horrific regime than the two villains of World War II combined. Furthermore, Stalin also possessed The Bomb and, under Khrushchev (with help from Castro), the animosity between the USSR and the USA nearly led to Armageddon. While both sides built up their capacity for mutually assured destruction, proxy wars were held in Southeast Asia and in the ideological realm of outer space.

Our ability to smash atoms and potential to harness them for a new technological age, as well as the Space Race and its naive utopian promises, formed the perfect backdrop for what would later be recognized as the Golden Age of Science Fiction in film. The Great War that closed out the Victorian-Edwardian Era also closed out the genre of Scientific Romances; stories of adventure in far-flung places that shared the thrill of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and colonial exploration to a pre-film society, written by the likes of Jules Verne, Garrett P. Serviss, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Camille Flammarion, Edward Everett Hale, and Edward Ellis. Between the wars, the only books of Verne's that were adapted to film were his spy adventures like Michael Strogoff, with a solitary exception in 1929's The Mysterious Island that had more in common with its own time period than Verne's original novel. Science Fiction, properly speaking, took over during the interwar period, in everything from serious meditations on how science and technology may affect society in such works as Metropolis (1927) and Things to Come (1936) down to the Pulpy action-adventure of Flash Gordon (1936) and The Phantom Empire (1935). This nascent realm of Art Deco and radium transformed into the world of Googie and the atom after the Second World War.

Nevertheless, people old enough to beget the Baby Boom were themselves old enough to remember those years before the First World War, or remember the stories told by their own parents. The Gay Nineties re-surged as a reassuring nostalgia in film and places like Disneyland. One user of the Tiki Central forum referred to Tiki lounge culture as the "emotional bomb shelters of the Atomic Age," and the same could be said of retreat into bygone days of bustled ladies in feathered hats and suffragette sashes, men in seersucker and handlebar moustaches, horseless carriages, pennyfarthing bicycles, Queen Anne revival architecture, barbershop quartets, and marching bands playing in town square. The authors of the Victorian-Edwardian Era came along with it. In particular, those writers of Scientific Romances became suitable for reinterpretation as modern Science Fiction.

Walt Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

After several years of production, design and location shooting, Walt Disney released his first Hollywood produced live-action motion picture in 1954. If the advertising was to be believed, it was in fact the mightiest motion picture of them all. Considering that the film was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, this is a credible claim. 

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, starring James Mason as Nemo and Kirk Douglas as Ned Land alongside Peter Lorre as Conseil and Paul Lukas as Prof. Arronax, is perhaps the single most important modern film in the genre of Scientific Romance. 20,000 Leagues came to the silver screen in a post-Hiroshima, pre-Sputnik era when Atomic Age Science Fiction was the darling of young and old imaginations alike (not to mention drive-in theatre patrons). Between voyaging to forbidden planets and fighting off prehistoric monsters, filmmakers turned their attention back to the Scientific Romances of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. The first of these was George Pal's War of the Worlds, which updated Wells' tale by placing it squarely in the modern day.

Following Treasure Island and a series of three Mediaeval historical dramas shot in England with money tied up during the Second World War, Disney sought another live-action project for production in his studios in Burbank. In doing so, he revived his childhood love for Jules Verne. His concerns, in making the film, were very much the stuff of adulthood, however.

Walt Disney and the Gay Nineties

In a 1997 exhibition of the same name, scholar Karal Ann Marling aptly described Walt Disney's theme park ventures as "The Architecture of Reassurance." Through gingerbread houses, Western stockades, futuristic rocketships, and fairy tale villages, visitors to the newly christened Disneyland in the Fifties and Sixties could find nostalgia, comfort, and hope for the future through the uncertainties of America's changing culture and global position in the post-war milieu. Complimenting Walt Disney's Disneyland, the theme park, was Walt Disney's Disneyland the television series. Each week, Walt's comforting public persona would introduce updates on the theme park, behind-the-scenes programs for newly arriving films, and reruns of past cinematic successes, each themed to a different section of the park, be it Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, or Tomorrowland. When first unveiled to the world, "Disneyland" was not merely a theme park or a TV show or motion pictures, but a state of mind. The gateway to this mentality was Main Street U.S.A. and the reassuring myth of the Gay Nineties.

BBC's The Secret Agent

Produced by the BBC and making its home video debut in North America on Acorn TV, The Secret Agent is a three-episode adaptation of Joseph Conrad's tale about The Great Game and its human cost. Toby Jones (Captain America's Armin Zola) stars as Anton Verloc, the owner of a pornography shoppe in London's Soho who moonlights as an anarchist agitator who moonlights as a Russian spy. His chief, the Russian ambassador (David Dawson) is tired of paying their hapless agent for inaction. The international anarcho-communist movement is threatening the stability of governments across Europe, and thus the ambassador wishes to provoke Scotland Yard into bringing its full weight against England's would-be revolutionaries. Verloc is assigned to frame his anarchist cell with a heinous crime: the bombing of the Greenwich Observatory.

What follows is a descent into an utterly bleak moral landscape of madness and ideology manipulated by damnable political forces. The anarcho-communists are a futile lot of bickering "old men" who talk of revolution while wasting their lives on petty seductions. Only one offers any help to Verloc, known only as "The Professor" (Ian Hart), a nihilistic maniac frustrated with the cell's unwillingness to actually get its hands dirty. The cell is under the watch of Chief Inspector Heat (Stephen Grahame), who has nothing but disdain for their foolish hobby... Until he discovers that The Professor's wired up overcoat has turned him into a walking bomb. That is his first clue that there is more going on than impotent political bloviating.

Essential to Verloc's plot is his brother-in-law Stevie (Charlie Hamblett). Believing Verloc to be a decent and simple man, Winnie (Vicky McClure) married him for security rather than love. The security he provided allowed her, her mother, and her brother to get away from the abusive hand of her father. This was especially important for Stevie, who suffers from a developmental disability. The cowardly Verloc, who cannot bear to commit an actual act of terrorism, sees in Stevie an easy dupe to commit the terrible act. Yet the plan goes awry, and the lives of everyone spiral downwards to the abyss.

Charles Golightly and his Steam Rocket

Man in Space, the classic 1954 episode of the Walt Disney's Disneyland television series that helped launch the American space program, begins with a brief history of rocket science that veers from Newtonian physics and Chinese fireworks to the various silly and ill-conceived adventures of the Victorian Era to the successes of the German V-2 program. Nestled into it is a mention of "Charles Golightly," a British inventor who took out a patent on steam-powered rockets in 1841.

But who was Charles Golightly? Did he exist? And did he ever build his rocket?

Universal Studios' Dracula

It practically goes without saying that the landscape of cinema history would be radically different had the classic, 1931 version of Dracula never been produced, or been as successful as it was. The film catapulted Bela Lugosi to fame and precipitated Boris Karloff's Frankenstein later that same year, beginning a 30-year legacy of Horror, Thriller and Science Fiction began at Universal Studios. It also cemented the image of the undead lord as a darkly seductive Hungarian in a dinner suit.

Given its seminal status, Dracula provides a clinic in what makes those creaky old Universal films so wonderful. What is it hiding in those shadows on monochrome celluloid that resonates so deeply with viewers, now almost 80 years on? In the North American horror tradition pre-1960, the horror and blood isn't necessarily the point of the horror film. The exploits of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr., and Vincent Price are not merely a parade of "mixed up faces", as Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher Forrest J. Ackerman summed up the mainstream view of horror. Instead, through these films, we but up against the wonder and mysticism of the sublime in all its overwhelming, humbling, astonishing, horrifying glory.