Film Firsts, Part 2 (1963)

[Music] a character in The Flintstones is Gertie one of the movie's first an this hero is Elmo Lincoln the screen's first Tarzan Fatima weaving Target of the movies first sensors the screen's first Santa Claus underwater photography half a century before Sea Hunt the first movie Hangover and War in the air prophesied on the screen Generations before it happened in real life these are some of the remarkable firsts we'll see in this excursion back to the earliest years of movies silence [Music] [Applause] please the great Stars the excitement the Thrills the laughter and the heartbreak of Hollywood's Golden Era like history the movies have a way of repeating themselves in a previous half hour we saw a number of scenes stories and techniques familiar today as they actually were first introduced by screen Pioneers half a century ago and here are more of these ahead of their time movie triumphs this is Gertie the dinosaur vintage 199 and a double first first animated cartoon and first dinosaur over half a century before The Flintstones the animation by Windsor McKay is what today's artists call limited that is the drawings change the position of the characters only intermittently [Music] in the 1930s Walt Disney set a faster and more expensive standard with many characters on screen and all moving practically every frame ironically because of high production costs today many cartoons have cut back to the more limited animation style of 199's Gertie and many critics hailed it as a step [Music] forward here's another kind of first movie dinosaur a life-size model built by DW Griffith in 1912 for his film series on the evolution of man it established the movie myth that men existed in the age of [Music] dinosaurs in the 1920s a third kind of dinosaur got into the movies the miniature model photographed on scaled down toy sets [Music] meet the Allosaurus and brosaurus created by special effects wizard Willis O'Brien for the first screen version of The Lost [Music] [Applause] [Music] World the little models were pliable and movement was created by photographing a frame or two and then slightly adjusting the model's position and shooting again a laborious but effective technique in these sequences actually not part of siron and Doyle's original story but added for the movie O'Brien and Company brought the Brontosaurus to London and contrived to have it Escape in the streets another screen first repeated in the 30s by Mr O'Brien himself in his Masterpiece King [Music] Kong but this early version of the LA world had one idea that was not repeated the production code that came in shortly afterward decreed that crime must not pay even for prehistoric animals so all the subsequent Apes lizards giant flies ants and wolf men came croppers but here the brosaurus after falling through London [Music] Bridge swam away down the temps presumably to live happily ever after or ever before another movie monster often shown loose in the big city is the ruthless business tycoon he was first presented on the screen in 199 also by DW Griffith the boss's scheme is to send his minions out to place orders to Corner the wheat Market accounting for the title of this famous film a corner in wheat Panic takes place in the pit the story is based on the Frank Norris novel The Pit price is rocket and soon 5cent loaves are 10 [Music] cents as Griffith intercuts between poverty and luxury we next see the Tycoon celebrating his shrewd maneuver then Griffith experiments further freezing his picture to symbolize the life of the common men coming to a standstill it was the first time the screen had indulged itself in Social criticism except for Edwin s Porter's 195 story The kleptomaniac about Justice tipped in favor of the rich seen on another one of our programs devoted in part to Mr Porter the poor wheat farmer is wiped out by capitalist greed and it is easy to understand why this more than any other American Film served as a model for the message Laden Russian films of the 20s the finer does get his comeuppance he brings his Society friends on a tour of one of his Mills word comes of a further rise in price and the tycoon in his Jubilation forgets the open wheat [Music] bin hunger and resentment finally explode into violence while the Tycoon hoist as it were by his own rard is drowned in his own grain and the life cycle hopelessly perhaps starts all over again ending this remarkable Forerunner of The Grapes of Wrath and the dozens of other social protest films which were to [Music] follow a much less greedy Tycoon was the first cinema Santa Claus and in showing him on his sleigh and reindeer Journey the Thomas Edison Studio was making film history in another way too tabletop photography with the camera rotating in the center of a circular Panorama of cutouts made in 195 this subject the Night Before Christmas employed some of the techniques we just saw used 20 years later in the lost world including the interweaving of live actors with miniature sequences [Music] but the Edison Studio didn't go much further in the novelty field than simple camera trickery like [Applause] this much more elaborate trick stuff was being turned out by the vividly imaginative Frenchman George melas here melas portrays the legendary liar Baron munen experiencing the the world's greatest hangover actually meles made the film before the term hangover was generally used and he called it the hallucinations of Baron munen his companions of the Rebels the night before appear in the large mirror by his bed Mel's device for the mirror of The Baron's mind and actually of course a stage they turn into tempting Egyptians sirens and naturally he wants to have more fun with [Music] [Applause] them but again they reject him and again he sees nothing but his own throbbing head the trick of the double in a pretend mirror was to become a favorite of Vaudeville [Music] teams to assist him in turning out over 300 films in his prolific years between 1896 and 1913 meles employed a large staff to build magic props and grotesque models like these creatures such as inhabited the Fantastic triptic of herous Bosch or such as might today turn up in Macy's Thanksgiving Parade [Music] [Applause] [Music] for the last scene M put a simulated sheet of glass where there had been none the end of a dream that would have baffled or more likely delighted Freud himself and perhaps did since this film was shown widely in Europe during Freud's time [Applause] not all M's films were nightmarish he also made the most Charming fantasies of the movie's early years here his hero is exploring the wonders of the deep all of course with dry props and double exposures melas was a master magician showman technician and film Creator recognized by film historians as a true [Music] genius the reason his name has not been passed down popularly as one of the Pioneers like Edison Griffith in or deil is that so few of his films have survived physically especially in United States collections it wasn't until about 10 years later that movie audiences were treated to actual underwater Photography in the first feature version of Jules Verns 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Melia himself had done a one real version with dry models the story of Captain Nemo the Vengeance craze genius whose submarine cruised half a century before navies had [Music] them one of the witnessed by Captain Nemo and his crew during their Voyage was an island boy diving for pearls and encoun ing the first of many movie octopi it isn't as menacing as Dill's giant squid in reap the wild wind but it provided quite a thrill in its day partly because the celebrated Williamson Brothers used cameras inside a submerged waterproof Bell instead of doing what had been done up until then shooting through the sides of glass tanks or on dry sets with models [Music] w today there's a rescue something like this almost every night on one of the television underwater shows and though audiences demand a little more technical accuracy in the speed of ascent the bends and so on the pattern was set by this 1917 Thriller 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea it's been done several times since the last time of course in cinemascope [Music] sometimes movie fantasy turns out to be an astonishing prediction of actuality this incredible British film of 1910 envisions the war of the future as waged by bombing raids from a hostile Fleet of Zeppelins the bombadiers Take Aim and the city is set a flame in history it was to be 30 years before bombing raids gutted civilian areas of big cities as the blitz cre carries on we see a second film prophecy the armored vehicle history tells us the tank was actually introduced a half a dozen Years Later by the British in World War [Music] I even tanks are helpless against against the aerial bombardment and planes go up to attack the [Music] [Applause] Zeppelin but guns aboard the Zeppelin keep the planes [Music] off inevitably scientists rush to develop a counter weapon and we see the film's third prediction of things to come a robot missile flying bombs weren't actually used until 30 Years Later by the Germans and of course later still in the form of the much more refined guided missiles that are still one of the most upto-date items of defense today [Applause] [Music] [Applause] no sooner had films caught on than censorship reared its ugly head the first head sensor was a chap named Anthony comto and this was one of the first films to feel the cut of his scissors it may not seem too shocking today accustomed as we are to racy dialogue prolonged bedroom scenes and nudity yet even so it's spicy enough and the girl quite a teaser so it's easy to see why sensor comto got hot under the collar back in 1900 but you ain't seen nothing this is Fatima the Sally Rand of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair naturally her bump and grind routine raised havoc and eyebrows and just as naturally it got censored not cut out just censored with a white fence painted on the negative the bwir the hoochi cooch and now one of the first films on a theme of sex tragedy the 199 adaptation of tolstoy's Resurrection to avoid censorship director Griffith omitted some of the lurid details that producers today would make the most of as here where the peasant girl girl is seduced by the callous officer [Music] Demitri but there was little understatement of the basic story in which the girl Natasha abandoned by Demitri her illegitimate baby dead is forced to work in a brothel near the end which of course was only about 8 minutes along as this was a one reer she has gone mad when Demetri's path again crosses hers deluded she flirts with him as with a [Music] stranger until recognition still not entirely contrite He suggests that she seeks salvation in God [Music] the desecration of the Bible was one of the most startling of the outspoken elements of the picture there were to be many later screen versions of Resurrection this was not only the first but also the first film treatment of any classic novel although Natasha does find redemption in the final scene it was the daringness of the theme that registered most strongly with the 19 9 AUD just as is the case with many of the sex and sensation oriented films of today as the movies grew longer audience taste veered for a while from the classics to popular authors tuloy was replaced by Rex Beach this is the spoilers one of the first featurelength Western pictures and certainly the first to run as long as 90 minutes the spoilers offered the screen's first mansiz fist fight William faram and Tom sanche neither using a double go at it in the battle that made movie history [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] there were to be no less than four remakes of the spoilers and doubtless more are still to come John Wayne Gary Cooper Jeff Chandler and Randolph Scott were among the Husky he men who l stepped into these roles created by faram and sanhi in 1930 farum and sanche coached Gary Cooper and William Boyd for the fight in that remake and although they were then on in years they themselves did another big fight scene together for 10 nights in a barroom another first and one kids today would probably call a weirdo H Ryder Haggard's classic adventure she the strange tale of a love goddess convinced of her own immortality Betty ble brought this colorful character to the screen twice [Music] the film was remade in the 1930s with Helen gagen and in a color and widescreen version in the [Music] 1960s but this Betty blle version of the 20s chilled audiences with one of the most bizarre effects of early movies [Music] in a minute one of the most famous firsts of all the first Tarzan Elmo Lincoln and the first Jane Enid Mary photographed in the jungles of Florida in 1918 Lincoln was the first of a parade of some 14 mus Skiller actors to play the [Music] role Miss Mary a popular star of the period was still to be active on television and on the stage until the 1960s [Music] Jane teaches him his first lesson in gentlemanliness and Tarzan acquires the Romantic restraint that he was to practice in the dozens of films to follow [Music] but whether it's Tarzan gentle or Tarzan bold dinosaurs life siiz or models Fatima censored or uncensored stories with a message or without a message looking back as we have just done seems to prove once again that while pictures today may be bigger and longer and louder there's nothing really new in the movies [Music] I