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MY FAVORITE FILMS OF 1910 by Glenn Andreiev

What a year for movies 1910 was! For a twenty cents adult movie theatre ticket, (a dime for children’s admission) you can get quite the magic lantern show. 1910 was becoming an important year in movies. One of the major changes in the film industry concerned the current movie stars. Production Companies like Biograph only referred to their leading stars with purposely uninteresting names such as “The Biograph Girl”. Movie moguls of 1910 feared if audiences got to know the names of these under-paid stars, there would be a fan-base for said stars, who could then demand higher salaries. That is why the Biograph Girl left Biograph, joined up with Carl Laemmle at Universal, where she could be properly billed as Florence Lawrence.

Anyway, Roy, my editor, asked us all to choose our favorite film releases of 1910 – so here we go!

1) IN OLD CALIFORNIA – Why is this film important? Many film-books erroneously credited DeMille’s 1913 western THE SQUAW MAN as the first Hollywood film, but IN OLD CALIFORNIA, which was about Latinos settling on America’s West Coast is the first Hollywood production. Directed by actor-turned director D.W Griffith, IN OLD CALIFORNIA, featured actors form the real Los Angeles Latino community. This 17-minute film was presumed lost, but, in 2004, Hollywood Forever Cemetery screened the film, and had a near three-ton monument erected to the memory of this landmark motion picture placed along Vine Street, where the film was produced. One night, the monument was stolen. The thieves were never caught, but the monument was found in a garbage bin a year later. Obviously, certain people felt the film was a slur against Latinos. Today the monument is safe inside an office lobby.

2) THE HASHER’S DELIRIUM is one of the first animated films. This is a wild and weird one-minute anti-drug-and-booze piece created by pioneering French animator Emile Cohl (1858-1939). The film shows a happy-faced man sitting in front of a circle where words like “alcohol” and “absinthe” magically appear. At first the words morph into pleasant things, such as a young woman, a wine bottle, and a lighthouse. But, then, as in all good anti-drug PSA’s, the pretty images turn into demons (One demon looks like a screaming turkey leg. Another image appears to be an ugly politician, probably much hated at the time but now forgotten). It’s worth the Youtube search.

3) FRANKENSTEIN – Did you know that Thomas Edison, along with inventing the light bulb, and the phonograph, may also be credited with inventing monster movies? His company, the Edison Manufacturing Company produced hundreds of short films in the first decade of the 20th Century. This first ever film version of Mary Shelley’s fabled monster yarn is their most famous film. At a mere 16 minutes long, using no title cards, this is a must see for anybody who relishes cinema horror and monsters. For the most part, this film, like almost all films of 1910 is played in long shot, as if a stage play is being merely recorded. But, THE EDISON FRANKENSTEIN has some highly imaginative moments. The Monster is created in a large vat, starting out with a skeleton. Flesh and goo collects from the sides of the vat and sticks to the bones, much like how cotton candy adheres to a paper cone. In another scene, the monster enters and exits a room through a full-sized mirror. The Monster, as played by Charles Ogle (who also appeared in THE COVERED WAGON and DeMille’s MANSLAUGHTER) uses wild arm-and-hand gestures that would put any movie mobster to shame.

For years, all that remained of THE EDISON FRANKENSTEIN were some intriguing still photographs of Ogle’s monster make-up. Then, in 1986, I came upon a badly re-duped VHS of 6 minutes of the film in a Manhattan video store that specialized in ultra rare bootlegs (It wasn’t long before the feds shut down this joint!) I felt I was holding onto a piece of missing-cinema lore. But then, a film collector surfaced in the late 1990’s with an entire print. Supposedly, this collector would not share this film with the world unless he got an honorary Oscar for finding THE EDISON FRANKENSTEIN. Well, you can now find this film on Youtube. It’s the birth of the monster movie, and many conventions of the monster and horror film.

Oh, I just found out Roy wanted the best of 2010. Oops, my mistake.

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