#Lionel Belmore

[makeitquietly]

Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and Lionel Belmore in a deleted scene from Bonnie Scotland (1935)

[byneddiedingo]

John Gilbert, Eleanor Boardman, and Roy D'Arcy in Bardelys the Magnificent (King Vidor, 1926)

Cast: John Gilbert, Eleanor Boardman, Roy D'Arcy, Lionel Belmore, Emily Fitzroy, George K. Arthur, Arthur Lubin, Theodore von Eltz. Screenplay: Dorothy Farnum, Marian Ainslee (titles), based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: James Basevi, Richard Day, Cedric Gibbons.

This entertaining swashbuckler was long thought to be lost, apparently because of a contractual agreement between MGM and Rafael Sabatini, author of the novel on which it was based. When the studio failed to renew the rights to the novel in 1936, it destroyed the negative and all the prints it could get its hands on. Fortunately, 70 years later a print surfaced in France, missing only one reel that the restorers pieced together with production stills and footage from the original trailer. It was a good save, especially for the legacy of its director, King Vidor, and its star, John Gilbert. Vidor stages several lively swordfights and a memorable love scene in which Bardelys (Gilbert) woos Roxalanne de Lavedan (Eleanor Boardman) in a boat as it passes through the overhanging branches of a willow tree. But the film's highlight is a spectacular escape from the gallows, in which Gilbert (almost certainly with the help of his stunt double) outdoes Douglas Fairbanks in swinging from ropes and curtains, climbing walls, and fencing with pursuers. The story is romantic nonsense in which Bardelys, a womanizing marquis at the court of Louis XIII (Arthur Lubin) makes a wager that he can win the hand of Roxalanne, who has spurned the advances of the very hissable villain, Châtellerault (Roy D'Arcy). To win the bet, Bardelys finds himself assuming the identity of a man he finds dead, Lesperon (played by Theodore von Eltz in the missing reel), an enemy of the king. Sure enough, he and Roxalanne fall in love under the willows, but his imposture not only turns her against him when she finds proof that Lesperon is engaged to someone else, but also puts him in danger of being hanged for treason, especially after Châtellerault turns up and refuses to disclose that Lesperon is really Bardelys. Dorothy Farnum adapted the novel, and the cinematography is by William H. Daniels. The cast supposedly includes the 19-year-old John Wayne as a guard, in only his second film appearance, but good luck spotting him. 

[agendaculturaldelima]

 #ProyeccionDeVida

🎥🎼 La Música en el Cine, presenta:

🎬 “EL DESFILE DEL AMOR” [The Love Parade]

🔎 Género: Comedia / Romance / Musical

⌛️ Duración: 107 minutos

✍️ Guión: Guy Bolton y Ernest Vajda

📘 Obra: Jules Chancel y Leon Xanrof

🎶 Música: W. Franke Harling, John Leipold, Oscar Potoker y Max Terr

📷 Fotografía: Victor Milner (B&W)

🗯 Argumento: Por sus deshonrosas aventuras en París, el agregado militar, conde Alfred Renard, es devuelto a su país de origen Sylvania, justo en los días en que los miembros del Consejo de Estado andan preocupados porque la reina Louise I no consigue casarse con ninguno de sus pretendientes... pero al ser llevado ante su presencia a la espera de recibir su castigo, Renard conseguirá seducirla y Sylvania va a tener a un príncipe consorte que ha jurado ante la iglesia ser dócil y obediente.

👥 Reparto: Maurice Chevalier (Alfred Renard), Jeanette MacDonald (Queen Louise), Lillian Roth (Lulu), Eugene Pallette (Minister of War), Virginia Bruce, Jean Harlow (Woman in Opera Box), Ben Turpin (Valletto Strabico), Lionel Belmore (Prime Minister), E. H. Calvert (Sylvanian Ambassador) y Edgar Norton (Master of Ceremonies) y Winter Hall.

📢 Dirección: Ernst Lubitsch

© Productora: Paramount Pictures

🌏 País: Estados Unidos

📅 Año: 1929

📽 Proyección:

📆 Sábado 23 de Marzo

🕚 11:00am.

🏪 Sala Azul del Centro Cultural PUCP (av. Camino Real 1075 San Isidro)

⭐ Organiza: Sociedad Filarmonica de Lima

🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️ Ingreso libre

[from1837to1945]

The Circus Kid (1928)

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Run, Girl, Run (1928) Alfred J. Goulding

September 28th 2022

[glennk56]

Lionel Belmore in the 1920s

Actors of the 1920s. The 1920s was the last decade before talkies arrived in 1929. Many theater actors were not impressed with silent movies and waited until sound to start their careers in movies. 

Lionel Belmore is one of those actor to take advantage of the opportunities that silent movies provided. Many of the feature films have been lost. Some in a fire, other through deterioration. Photos #5 and #6 are from an early talkie 1929s  “TheLove Parade” featuring Maurice Chevalier in a singing role. And that is svelte Eugene Pallette in pic #5.

[frankenpagie]

6.27.19

[mariocki]

Frankenstein (1931)

"And you really believe that you can bring life to the dead?"

"That body is not dead; it has never lived. I created it - I made it with my own hands, from the bodies I took from graves, from the gallows, anywhere!"

[travsd]

The Epic Eye-Brows of Lionel Belmore

The Epic Eye-Brows of Lionel Belmore

The visage of Lionel Belmore (1867-1953) is one you have surely seen in supporting roles in dozens of classic Hollywood films. Today we are apt to associate him with horror, although that was far from the only genre in which the theatrical veteran toiled. For quick reference, he was the pettifogging Burgomaster in Frankenstein (1931), and the similarly titled Burgermeister in The Vampire Bat…

[oldhollywoodholla]

Movies I saw in 2017

↳ Frankenstein (1931)

[makeitquietly]

Motion Picture News, 1 February 1930

First things first: I’ve got nothing against Tibbett nor anyone who finds him hot/handsome/whatever. Reviewer too is of course free to say what they like. But trying to judge as objectively as possible, I just can’t understand this “for women” approach. He’s not all that conventionally attractive, is he? Or maybe I’m only saying so because he didn’t become women’s favourite. Hindsight. Or maybe it’s the angry eyebrows. Anyways, less praise would’ve been more realistic, I think.

The comment about Laurel and Hardy sounds reasonable, especially since their involvement was an afterthought. As for those character names, all I can discern on the soundtrack is that one time during their final scene when Murza-Bek calls himself Oliver. 😁

One of the more interesting names on the cast list is Kate Price, flanked by Tibbett and Belmore in the photo above. She’d been in movies since 1910 and made ten or so (depending on what source you believe) one-reelers with Oliver Hardy in 1916. At least one of them survives, though I can’t find A Warm Reception anywhere. Their paths crossed again when they played mother and son in Larry Semon’s feature The Perfect Clown (1925), which is on YouTube.

[byneddiedingo]

Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch, 1929) Cast: Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Lupino Lane, Lillian Roth, Eugene Pallette, E.H. Calvert, Edgar Norton, Lionel Belmore. Screenplay: Ernest Vajda, Guy Bolton, based on a play by Leon Xanrof and Jules Chancel. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Film editing: Merrill G. White. Costume design: Travis Banton. Music: Victor Schertzinger. It irritates me a little to think that MGM, thanks largely to those That's Entertainment clip shows in the 1970s, is celebrated for its movie musicals, when in fact the genre was pioneered and perfected at other studios: Warner Bros. with its Busby Berkeley dance spectacles, RKO with its Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers cycle, and Paramount, where Ernst Lubitsch virtually invented the story musical with The Love Parade and subsequent re-teamings of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. (Oddly, today MacDonald is better known for her inferior and unsexy MGM teaming with Nelson Eddy.) MGM didn't achieve musical greatness until the end of the 1930s, when after the success of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), the studio put its associate producer, Arthur Freed, in charge of the film musicals unit. True, MGM had won a best-picture Oscar with The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929), but that was a standard backstage musical, not one in which the songs and dances are fully integrated into the plot. Besides, it's almost unwatchable today, whereas thanks to the charm of Chevalier and the sexiness of MacDonald in her revealing pre-Code frippery, but most of all to what is known as "the Lubitsch touch," The Love Parade is still enjoyable. Lubitsch's "touch" as a director was based on a sly conviction that the audience would get the joke, usually a naughty one, and it was perfected during the silent era, when things had to be shown, not told. So the film opens with a mostly silent demonstration of why Count Alfred Renard (Chevalier) has caused such a scandal with his dalliances in Paris that he has to be recalled to Sylvania and rebuked by Queen Louise (MacDonald). But this is also a film that wittily integrates sound into its sight gags, as the entire Sylvanian court eavesdrops on the burgeoning love of Alfred and Louise. The plot, derived by screenwriters Guy Bolton and Ernest Vajda from a French play, is standard, slightly sexist stuff about the prince consort, Alfred, feeling miffed by the fact that his marriage to the queen leaves him with nothing to do, but it's carried off well by the leads, as well as the saucy servants, Jacques (Lupino Lane) and Lulu (Lillian Roth), and a court full of skilled character actors like Eugene Pallette, Edgar Norton, and Lionel Belmore. It's too bad that the song score by lyricist Clifford Grey and composer Victor Schertzinger isn't better -- there are too many reprises of "Dream Lover," for example -- but Lubitsch's staging compensates for its weakness.

[silent-era-of-cinema]

Grace Darmond (born Grace Marie Glionna; November 20, 1893 – October 8, 1963) was a Canadian-American actress.

Grace Marie Glionna was born in Toronto on November 20, 1893. Her parents were Vincent Glionna, an American-born violinist who had lived in Canada since 1877, and Alice Louise Sparks Glionna (1873–1963), an Ontario native.[4] She was of Italian descent on her father's side.

When Glionna was 16, Vincent Glionna died, and she and her mother immigrated to the United States, settling in Chicago.

As a teenager, Grace Glionna began to appear on the stage, changing her name to Grace Darmond. She signed with Selig Polyscope Company in 1914, and made her film debut in the comedy short The Clock Went Wrong.

Darmond was active onscreen from 1914 to 1927. She starred in the first Technicolor film, The Gulf Between (1917), with actor Niles Welch. The film premiered September 13 in Boston and September 21 at the Aeolian Hall in New York City. However, when the film went into limited release in early 1918 on a tour of Eastern U. S. cities, it was a critical and commercial failure. The early Technicolor process ("System 1") was an additive color process that required a special projector, and it suffered from "fringing" and "haloing" of colors.

Darmond was pretty, slender, and starred in many notable films of the period, but she never was able to break through as a leading actress in big budget films. Most of her roles were in support of bigger names of the time, and most of her starring roles were smaller, lesser known films. She appeared in Below the Surface (1920), in which she starred with Hobart Bosworth and Lloyd Hughes, and that same year she played in A Dangerous Adventure, produced and directed by Warner Brothers.[8] This led to her being cast alongside Boris Karloff in the mystery thriller The Hope Diamond Mystery (1921). In the July edition of Motion Picture Magazine, she was featured in an article by Joan Tully entitled "Mantled With Shyness (A Word Portrait of Grace Darmond)".

Her last most notable film was Wide Open (1927), starring Lionel Belmore and Dick Grace. When the advent of talkies came about, Darmond, like so many actresses and actors from the silent film era, was not able to make a successful transition. She ended her acting career, and for the most part disappeared from the public eye until her death in 1963.

Darmond was a lesbian. Although performing in a substantial number of films over roughly 13 years, she was known in Hollywood's inner circle as the lover of actress Jean Acker, the first wife of actor Rudolph Valentino. She was also associated, as many struggling actresses of the day were, with the actress Alla Nazimova, a former lover of Acker, although it has never been verified that Nazimova and Darmond were ever linked romantically. She and Acker attended parties at Nazimova's Garden of Allah, an imposing house on Sunset Boulevard named punningly after a Robert Smythe Hichens play Nazimova had appeared in.

She and Jean Acker met in 1918, and the two became lovers shortly thereafter. Acker met relatively unknown actor Valentino only a few months later at a party at Nazimova's home. She and Valentino began dating, but reportedly never had sexual relations. They married in 1919, but on their wedding night, Acker fled the house and ran to Darmond's home, stating that it was her that she loved. The marriage is alleged to have never been consummated, and Acker filed for a legal separation in 1921; she later filed charges of bigamy against Valentino when he married designer Natacha Rambova in Mexico before his divorce from Acker was finalized.

Darmond married Randolph P. Jennings, an oil man, on January 22, 1928. The marriage was solemnized in Hollywood by a minister called James H. Lash, and witnessed by Lillian Willat (legal married name of actress Billie Dove) and Robert Fairbanks (possibly Robert Payne Ullman, who was known professionally as Robert Fairbanks, brother of the actor Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman, aka Douglas Fairbanks).[16] This probable venue of the wedding was 7065 Hollywood Boulevard, which was the site of the Hollywood Congregational Church in the 1920s.

Darmond evidently lied about her age to her fiancé as well as the county clerk, as she would have been at least 29 at the time the marriage license was issued. There is an issue about whether she was born November 20, 1893, or November 20, 1898, but she could not possibly have been born as late as 1901.[18] She clearly continued this subterfuge with her husband into their marriage, as she is listed as his wife, Grace D. Jennings, 28, on the 1930 census, which also reveals that the couple resided at 712 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, California, and that they had a butler called Chris W. Tandoc. The pair divorced in 1935.

Darmond died at the age of 69 in her apartment at 7850 W. Sunset Blvd. (formerly the San Ramon Apartments; currently known as The Villa Rosa) in Hollywood. At the time, she had been being treated for lung pain at the Motion Picture & Television Country Hospital in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles.

[raynbowclown]

The Vampire Bat

The Vampire Bat (1933) starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Melvyn Douglas, Dwight Frye, Robert Frazer

The Vampire Bat (1933) starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Melvyn Douglas, Dwight Frye, Robert Frazer Synopsis of The Vampire Bat Fay Wray, Melvyn Douglas, and Lionel Atwill in The Vampire Bat

In The Vampire Bat, people are dying in the small German town of Kleinschloss. They are found dead in bed and drained of blood. So, Burgermeister Gustave Schoen (Lionel Belmore) and Dr Otto von…

[letterboxd-loggd]

Frankenstein (1931) James Whale

July 3rd 2020

[glennk56]

Lionel Belmore in the 1930s

Hollywood in 1929 and 1930s was deluged with new talent looking to take advantage of the new technology, sound. Talkies, as well as the Great Depression brought an influx of hopefuls with backgrounds of Theatre, Vaudeville, Song and Dance. The current silent movie actors were hard pressed to compete.

Lionel Belmore made the transition but couldn’t get the types of roles he had during the silent era.

Photos #4 and #5 with Laurel & Hardy are from The Rogue Song and Bonnie Scotland