THE VAGABOND KING

The first thing one notices about him is his flaming red hair. He is five feet three and weighs 163 pounds. His skin is sun drunk. His hands are small and pudgy. He has the thighs of a burlesque queen. Standing, his body like a question mark, he appears ready to leap.

SAY IT WITH SONGS

She enjoys a good cry.

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Well, it’s New Year’s Eve Eve. Just two more days, and we’ll all be cursing ourselves for writing 2011 on our checks.

With just a few hours remaining till the ball drops in Times Square, toasts are raised, and midnight smooches are shared, we thought we’d make a present to the Cladrite community of All Star New Years Dancing Party, an hour-long radio program that originally aired on the Armed Forces Radio Service on December 31st, 1945.

The program, which is hosted by Harry James, features performances from across the country and around the world by such legendary big bands as the Count Basie Orchestra in New York City, Freddy Martin‘s outfit performing from Los Angeles’ Cocoanut Grove night club, Woody Herman and His Orchestra in New Jersey, Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars from Club Zanzibar in Manhattan, and many more.

It’s a fine way to welcome in a brand new year.

All-Star New Year’s Eve Dancing Party—12/31/1945 (1 hr., 4 sec.)

Some years ago, we had the pleasure of viewing Lonesome, a silent-talkie hybrid that was released in 1928. It’s not an easy movie to catch; as far as we know, the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, has one of the few extant prints. (Someone seems to have loaded Lonesome up on YouTube, and we suppose that’s better than not seeing it at all, but just barely.)

Lonesome could not be more charming. Its appeal is based in large part on the fact that much of it was filmed on Coney Island, and any glimpse of that magical setting as it was in the 1920s is to be treasured.

But the plot of the picture is engaging, too. It tells the tale of two lonely Manhattanites who experience a chance meeting at Coney Island and go on to spend a magical day together before getting separated that evening, with neither having learned the other’s last name. In a city of millions, will they ever manage to find each other? (If you think we’re going to tell you how it turns out, you can think again. No blabbermouths, we.)

Lonesome was originally released as a silent picture, but with all the fuss over the new sound technology, it was decided to bring back all involved parties to film three scenes with synchronized music and dialogue. So it’s not quite a silent and not quite a talkie.

But it’s certainly delightful, in our opinion, and we encourage you, if you ever have the opportunity, to see it (in a theatre and not streaming online, if at all possible).

But you might well be wondering why we’re mentioning what is today a rather obscure picture now? Well, we’re sad to report that it’s because the movie’s leading lady, Barbara Kent, one of Universal Studios’ original contract stars and the final surviving WAMPAS Baby Star of 1927, died a week ago yesterday at the age of 103.

The Canadian-born Kent (her birthname was Barbara Cloutman) was not, admittedly, the biggest of names, even at the height of her career, but she made her mark, making eight or nine silents before successfully navigating the switch to talking pictures. She made 25 sound movies following her appearance in Lonesome, but retired from acting in 1935.

Among Kent’s most notable films were her screen debut in Flesh and the Devil (1926), with John Gilbert and Greta Garbo; a pair of starring roles opposite Harold Lloyd, in 1929′s Welcome Danger and Feet First a year later; a supporting role in Indiscreet (1931), which starred Gloria Swanson; and Emma, which featured Myrna Loy and Marie Dressler.

In the course of her nine-year career, Kent also worked alongside Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Richard Barthelmess, Edward G. Robinson, Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Andy Devine, James Gleason, Ben Lyon, Gilbert Roland, Noah Beery, Victor Jory, Dickie Moore, Monte Blue, Wallace Ford, Ward Bond, Arthur Lake, and Rex the Wonder Horse. That may not qualify as a Hall of Fame roster of co-stars, but many an actress has done worse.

After retiring, Kent refused virtually all interviews about her years in Hollywood—one notable exception was the time she afforded author Michael G. Ankerich, who profiled Kent in The Sound of Silence: Conversations with 16 Film and Stage Personalities Who Bridged the Gap Between Silents and Talkies—as she settled into a successive pair of happy marriages—first to Harry Edington, a Hollywood agent, whom she wed in 1932, and then, some years after Edington’s death in 1949, she married Jack Monroe, a Lockheed engineer. Aside from evading would-be interviewers, Kent reportedly spent her free time in her golden years as a golfer and a pilot.

For more on Kent’s life and career, give this New York Times obit a look.

Today marks the 116th anniversary of the birth of the great Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton.

Keaton’s by far our favorite silent comic filmmaker (though we’re fond of Harold Lloyd, too), and we do believe Ms. Cladrite feels the same way.

While enjoying a sojourn in Southern California some years ago, we picked up a book called Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton by John Bengston, which is filled with then-and-now shots of the filming locations used in Buster’s pictures.

Sadly, we didn’t have much time left in LA by the time we tracked down the book, but we did manage to make one pilgrimage, and I was tickled pink to do so.

Perhaps my favorite single moment in any Keaton movie occurs in Cops, a silent short from 1922. In it, Buster’s being chased by dozens, if not hundreds, of policemen, and at one point, he pauses in the middle of the street, seemingly trapped with no way of escape, and, as a car motors by, he calmly reaches out, grab the back end of the car, and, extended horizontally, is whisked away.

It’s a magic moment, like something from a cartoon, but Keaton performed the stunt in real life, not in an animated alternate reality. (To view a short clip of the sequence, click on the image on the right.)

And Bengtson’s exhaustively researched book pinpoints the exact spot—on Cahuenga south of Hollywood Boulevard—where that sequence was filmed. And the missus, bless her heart, snapped this shot of your humble correspondent standing where Buster once stood—all the while keeping an eye out for traffic so that blissful moment was not our last one.

We ask you again, are we not a lucky so-and-so?