Library of Congress Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Forget the Oscars, the new list is up of the 25 films inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Board for 2007. Since 1992, the Library has been taking up 25 worthwhile films a year for preservation. Early reports focus on the more well-known, deserving films: Back to the Future (above), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Oklahoma!, and Grand Hotel. Also on the list is 12 Angry Men, an early one by Before the Devil Knows Your Dead's Sidney Lumet, and the George Stevens/Laurence Olivier Wuthering Heights. Dances With Wolves and Days of Heaven, two American-as-all-get-out films, will now be safe in the vaults down in Culpeper, Virginia.

Let's have a look at some of the more obscure names on the list, though. One of my all time favorites is going in: the ultra-low-budget noir In A Lonely Place, with Humphrey Bogart in his best performance -- and yes, I saw Casablanca --- as the rageball screenwriter Dixon Steele, whose drinking problem may have led to murder. Peege (1972) is Randall Kleiser's thesis film at USC film school. John Waters' favorite director (according to the book Shock Value) is better known for The Blue Lagoon, Grease and Big Top Pee Wee. His short about a blind grandmother taken to the old folk's home, is supposed to be in a different class from his subsequent work.

From Lebanon, Kentucky, Our Day is only 12 minutes long; it's amateur filmmaker Wallace Kelly's account of his family between the 1930s and the 1950s. The 1926 Harry Langdon/Frank Capra The Strong Man is terrific. The once popular Langdon is a very odd moon-man comedian who anticipates everyone from Bill Murray to Bugs Bunny. And there's two experimental films being honored: 1969's Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son by Ken Jacobs. "An autopsy of the cinematic experience," raves Scott MacDonald in his new book Canyon Cinema); here, the avant-garde filmmaker revises a primitive 1905 film. He does to a movie what later samplers and rappers would do to old ballads. Glimpse of the Garden (1957) by Marie Menken is just that: a view of her garden and of the bird life therein. It's a fleeting moment preserved for 50 years..and now, we hope, for much longer than that.

Every year the Library of Congress announces that it will shelter 25 films for posterity and here's the list for this year, from Variety. Joining the 450 films currently in the vaults are a range of pictures from features to documentaries. This year's pack includes the 1913 protest film Traffic in Souls, a very early American feature film with a then-stunning budget of $25,000. A film "so fast-moving and so packed with direct and veiled references to the vice trade that it's a wonder audiences could keep pace with it," comments ace silent film historian Kevin Brownlow.

More familiar inductees include recent hits like Blazing Saddles, sex, lies and videotape, Rocky and Halloween. Then you have classics like Notorious, and key works like The Big Trail by Raoul Walsh, The Last Command by Josef von Sternberg, the debut of Rouben Mamoulian, and the first Garbo-Gilbert picture Flesh and the Devil. The rarities are perhaps even more interesting: the early Chinese-American film The Curse of Quon Gwon and long-time experimental filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas' Reminiscence of a Journey to Lithuania. A couple of the entries are performance films: St. Louis Blues (1929), a two-reeler that is the only existing film of Bessie Smith, seen singling the W. C. Handy song. And for more current relevance, the documentary The T.A.M.I. Show. with the late lamented James Brown performing "Night Train" and the Supremes doing "Where Did Our Love Go?" for purpose of comparison with The Dreams in Dreamgirls.

Historians may have found a thirty-second scrap of film that belongs to a 1923 "lost" silent film ... or not. A PBS show called History Detectives submitted some film found in an attic to the Library of Congress Conservation Center to find out its true origins. The film was in a canister labeled "Dangerous Hour -- Eddie Polo." As I read about this find, I wondered who Eddie Polo was, and what he looked like. The articles I read didn't include any photos, but I found the above image on Picturegoer Online along with another of Polo.

Eddie Polo was a stuntman who became an action-film star during the late 1910s/early 1920s (kind of like Gene Kelly's character in Singin' in the Rain). He starred in serials, notably the Cyclone Smith series. In the 1923 film Dangerous Hour, he played himself, an actor shooting a film who is called to perform a daring rescue. (Now he's starting to sound like Bruce Campbell.) He was one of the many silent-film actors who could not make the transition to sound, and ended up working as a makeup artist on a few sound films. It doesn't appear that any of his movies are available on DVD. In fact, many of them are no longer available at all.

Is Eddie Polo in the film that the Library of Congress analyzed? No one's saying yet. Because the History Detectives episode about the film won't air until later this year, the Library of Congress won't give out the results of their investigation. Blame PBS for the prolonged suspense.