March 16, 1919. Returns and the the Sunday movies.

Post Armistice Training, November 11,1918 to March 11, 1919, 93rd Division

March 9, 1919. Work and films.

Laborers were found working on the rail footage for the Boston Navy Pear on this Sunday, March 9, 1919.

Elsewhere, in a nation that at that time largely had Sunday off, a slat of newly released films were in the offering.

Carolyn of the Corners was a typical movie drama of the time.  Young Carolyn's parents were lost at sea (or were they?) and she must now go to Main to live with her bachelor uncle.

For those in a lighter mood, "Poor Boob" was a comedy involving a man who was a poor fool, with the name obviously making use of a term whose name has changed.  According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the use of the term in this fashion may predate, maybe, the other use and dates back to around 1909 and is of American origin, although the similar term "booby" dates back to a Spanish word and has a 16th Century origin.  The other term descends likewise from a similar term, according to that source, that goes back to Latin.

E. L. Mencken, the great American satirist, was to spread, but probably not invent, the use found here into the word booboisie, combining boob with bourgeoisie, to mean  the vapid class.  That use is still kicked around by the literatie, who usually attribute it to Mencken (even though he seems to have simply picked it up and spread it) and founds use as recently as 1980 when the Washington Post used it to slam the GOP members of Congress who were in control at that time.  A book about Mencken published in the early 2000s was entitled Scourge of the Boobosie.

I can recall the singular root of that word being used by my mother fairly frequently to describe a fool, but even in my early youth I recall wincing when hearing that as the other usage prevailed.  Having said that, a lawyer a little younger than me used the term to describe fools as late as the 1990s, so I guess it may still be around.  With the general gutter direction of common language and entertainment, I'd be surprised if younger people would make the fool association at all at this time.

For those looking for drama combined with improbable plots and war, When Men Desire involved a plot featuring Americans stranded in Germany, German officers asserting libertine license, pilot boyfriends, female German spies and fortuitous bomb dropping accuracy.

March 2, 1919. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in Berlin and Lila Lee in Puppy Love.

On this day in 1919, the German survivors of Germany's commitment to East Africa marched under the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin under their commander, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.  Berlineres put aside their internecine strife to turn out in huge numbers to welcome them as returning heroes.

War time poster featuring Von Lettow-Vorbeck.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck, who had entered the German army in 1890, had commended German forces, which contained 3,000 German troops and 11,000 African troops, highly successfully against British and Portuguese forces in Africa.  He is regarded as largely undefeated in a wide ranging war that had guerrilla aspects.  His success caused him to be widely admired by the Germans and the Allies at the time, ignoring the fact that his troops lived off the land and were responsible for stripping the countryside where they were to the detriment of Africans, who had little real stake in the outcome of the war.  This resulted in famine in some instances which produced predictable results when the Spanish flu struck Africa.  In his defense, his forces were grossly outnumbered the entire time, facing 300,000 combined Allied troops (including colonial troops) which left his options somewhat impaired.  365,000 civilians are estimated to have died by famine and disease in areas in which his troops operated due to the stripping operations of his troops.  He surrendered under orders following the war.  His surviving German troops were ultimately repatriated by the British shortly before this date.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck thereafter took command of a unit in the Reichswehr and subsequently put down a Sparticist uprising in Hamburg without bloodshed, an impressive feat.  He also married for the first time at age 49, and started a family.

He was associated, at least by his right wing sympathies, with the Kapp Putsch, however, and thereafter lost his commission in the German republican army.  He thereafter took up a civilian occupation as an import export businessman.  He served in the Reichtag as a conservative politician in 1928 through 1930 and was offered the ambassadorship to the UK by the Hitler in in 1935 but he rudely declined as he was adamantly anti Nazi.  He was rendered destitute by World War Two but his finances recovered after the war.  His two sons were killed in the war, but his two daughters survived.  He died in 1964, having out lived his wife who was ten years his junior, by a decade, the same year the Bundestag authorized the back back of his former African troops to be paid, by which time there were less than 400 living.

The romance that's been attached to the war in Africa, which was no doubt not very romantic for those who endured it, and his subsequent rejection of the Nazis at a great personal cost to himself, has lead Von Lettow-Vorbeck to have a lingering positive reputation both in Germany and outside of it. 

Paramount released the film Puppy Love on this day in 1919, featuring Lila Lee in one of her first roles.  Lee would go on to be a major film star.  She was just 14 at the time that this movie premiered.  Lee made the transition to sound pictures, but her star did fade a bit during that time, in part because of alcoholism, and in part because she had a long diagnosed condition of tuberculous.  She stopped making  movies in 1938, only to return to film for one final time in 1967.

Monday, February 24, 1919. Wyoming National Guardsmen in Berlin? Woodrow on the Commons, Wobblies in detention. Working Children result in taxation, temporarily, Wimpy in alcohol. Women in film.

Woodrow Wilson on the Boston Commons.

President Wilson was back in the US and took in some adulation on the Boston Commons. He was about to step into the fight for the League of Nations and the Versailles Treaty that would ultimately kill him.

Spanish anarchists arrested by the  New York police under suspicion of harboring a plot to assassinate President Wilson.

At the same time, a group of IWW anarchists were oddly plotting to assassinate Wilson.  Exactly why a century later, is unclear, as he was certainly less unsympathetic to labor and the rights of at least small nations than others in U.S. politics, although he certainly wasn't sympathetic with anarchists or communists as a group.

Child laborers in a furniture factory in 1908.  These boys would have all been of military age in World War One, which may explain the stoicism that seems to have been so common with American soldiers of that conflict.

Speaking of work, Congress passed the Child Labor Tax of 1919 which imposed a 10% income tax on those companies using child labor.  The Supreme Court would strike the law down as unconstitutional in 1922, something that isn't surprising as this was in the pre Lochner era.

The papers were reporting on those events.  And on a rumor that the 148th Field Artillery, which contained Wyoming National Guardsmen, was in Berlin.

It wasn't.

Meanwhile the Federal Prohibition bill was down to .05% being the top allowable level, less than Wyoming's 1% which had just Quixotically passed.

Releasing movies on Monday had become a thing.

Female heroins, both comedic and dramatic, were in vogue.

Monday, February 10, 1919: Theodore Roosevelt Mourned, IWW Men Deported, Butte Broke, Allies to Depart Russia but Japanese Not So Much, and Bad News for Houx

Readers of newspapers across the nation were reading of recent tributes to the late Theodore Roosevelt.  In Casper, locals read about just that occurring locally in the Methodist Church by Judge Charles Winter. 

First United Methodist Church today.

First United Methodist Church, the one referred to in the article, is still there and is one of Casper's oldest churches.  It didn't look quite the same, however, as it was added to in 1927, twenty years after its initial construction, and again in 1951.

Charles Winter had a son, Warren, who served as a very long time Casper lawyer and lived to be nearly 100, keeping his office open the entire time.  He had also been a Federal Magistrate for a time, so he reprised a judicial role in his family.  His entry into the law, however, was delayed by the Great Depression, as there were no jobs at the time he passed the bar.  A great track athlete in his youth, his funeral service was in this same church.

Big news was present in the form of the story that the Allies would be withdrawing from Russia.  The various allied nations were engaged in Russia in various degrees, with the British being particularly active in combating the Red Army.  A person could be somewhat skeptical that the withdrawal was going to go really well as the paper also related that the Japanese were becoming more involved.

The strike in Seattle wound down and a selection of IWW men were being sent backing back to their native lands.  In Butte Montana, lack of funds were causing public employment layoffs.

And the bad news just kept coming for former Democratic Governor Frank Houx, who had lead the state during the Great War but who had lost his seat to Governor Robert Carey.  Oil leases he had gained were reportedly being recaptured due to accusations of impropriety.  Democrats in general were also in the local news as they were being blamed for the failure of a bill to amend the Constitution to require suffrage for women.

The Laramie newspaper was reporting snow for the week. . . in a week where we also expect snow.

And both papers reported the Germans were threatening to surrender Germany to the communists if better terms weren't worked out in regarding war indemnity.

Exciting Western themed movies were opening that week for those who might wish to escape the news for awhile.

Poster Saturday. A look at newly released movies for December 29, 1918.

Make the Christmas Movie Madness Stop

Originally when I thought of this post I was just going to say that any Christmas movie made after It's a Wonderful Life (1946) should be destroyed.

But then I got to thinking that there are some that post date that, although darned few, that are worth saving.  The Peanuts A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), for example, is a definite exception.  A Christmas Story (1983) is an absolute classic.

So obviously that would have been grossly over broad.

But only barely so.

And yes, I know that by saying that I'm including such time worn smelly classics like How the Grinch Who Stole Christmas (the originally 1966 cartoon one. . . not the Jim Carrey (Ron Howard directing film version that should end his career).  Indeed, there are a lot of really bad cartoon Christmas efforts that are dragged out every year without fail but which fail simply because they are.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (1964) is one such example.  It may have been cute the first year it was out, if you are under four years old, but it was long in the tooth by 1974.  Frosty the Snowman (1969) is just as bad, except that it's afflicted with the bad 1950s style cheap animation that afflicted television animation throughout the 1960s and 1970s.  It can go.  Now that Tom Hank's The Polar Express has been in circulation for 18 years, can go too.  It was a much better effort than the every single cartoon and animation offering after A Charlie Brown Christmas, but it isn't passing the test of time and isn't novel anymore.

Some of the actual movies afflicted upon the silver screen in recent years are truly horrific.  Tim Allen, for example, should not be making movies.  Any movies.  I don't care if he comes up with something that's as good as anything ever done, there's no atoning for any of the Christmas movies that he made.  That can't be done.  All of copies of any version of The Santa Clause should be rounded up and made to be added to the "lost movie" list on AMC.  Christmas with the Kranks (2004).  Uff.

So why are there so many bad Christmas movies, if we include the small screen as a movie?

They aren't serious.

That may sound really weird, but it occurs to me that the single common feature of really good Christmas movies, and the ones that nearly make the "good" list (of which there are several, is that they have a really serious overtone that the failures don't.

It's a Wonderful Life is obvious. The protagonist, George Bailey, is on the verge of suicide until Divine Intervention steps into show him that the singular achievement of his life on unintentional sacrifice is to the enormous benefit of the lives he touched. . . a really deep point that is very well presented.  It's so well presented, in fact, that the film could be shown and enjoyed any time of the year.



A Charlie Brown Christmas is great because Charles Schultz insisted in including having Linius read the Nativity portion of the Gospel of St. Luke.  The producers hadn't wanted him to do that, but he insisted.  It's what made the cartoon great, taking the presentation out from being a cartoon into something else.



Really good, or at least nearly good, Three Godfathers, is a John Ford Western and occasionally actually outside of the Christmas season.  It's also so blatantly religious that its religious content can't be denied, even though Ford doesn't begin to deliver it until about 1/2 way through the film (the film is, in my view, the most, and oddly, Protestant of John Ford's movies). The movie is good through and through.



An example of the same, in the nearly good list, is the church scene with the old neighbor in Home Alone.  Home Alone was written by John Hughes.  Hughes produced some great films, and some dogs, but the best of his have a deep undertone to them, while the worst have the opposite.  Home Alone was redeemed from being just slapstick nonsense by a deep message of redemption that was delivered in a church and then carried out to the end of the film.

Even A Christmas Story has a surprisingly serious undertone, even though its the single example that I've noted in this list that doesn't have any overt or subtle reference to religion in it.  The protagonist and his family are never shown going to church and don't make reference to one anywhere in the film, which probably closely matches Gene Shepherd's own upbringing.  But it's that reference that makes the film surprisingly serious.  The film is really a homage to seriousness and romance of youth in a way that few films really catch. Offhand, only  Stand By Me, To Kill A Mockingbird and the television series The Wonder Years really compare, which is in a way why watching any of them involves an element of heartache.  When Ralphie proclaims the Daisy Red Rider bb gun to be the best gift he ever received, we know he means it, and we can all think of something just like that which was the same for us.  It's no mistake that the "best gift" is a feature of Citizen Kane as well in nearly the same way.

In contrast, almost every other Christmas movie or television show is at worst a "celebration of the season" or at best the reduction of really deep points to something like the American Civil Religion, which is that its nice to be nice to the nice, and we're all nice.  Which actually isn't the point of Christmas.*

________________________________________________________________________________

Indeed, the Seinfeld Christmas episode which introduces the holiday of "festivus" is legitimately funny because it gets all of this.  It lampoons the superficial nature of much of American Christmas by introducing a "festivus for the rest of us" which is intentionally superficial while also standing apart from Christmas and Hanukkah as they're religious holidays.

They Shall Not Grow Old

You still have time to see this.  It will run again in the United States on December 27.

If you are student of history, or of film, this is a must see.

New Zealander Peter Jackson, famous for his Lord of the Ring films (which I have not seen) was asked by the British Imperial War Museum to take their original movie footage and do something, in terms of a film, with it.  Four years later, this is the spectacular result.

Jackson and his crew took over 100 hours of original IWM film footage, restored it, colorized much of it and then selected six hours of that, and then a little less than two, to produce this movie length tribute to the British fighting man of World War One.  Experts in reading lips were hired to determine what soldiers were saying in the film footage where they can be seen speaking and then matched with actors from appropriate regions of the UK to produce film that sounds like original talking film footage.  Background noises for the sounds of war were added as well (the artillery shocked me in the film as its one of the very, very few instances of artillery sounding actually correct, both in the firing and in the impact. . . it turns out that new recordings of the New Zealand Army's artillery were taken for that effort).

For the voice over, or narration, as to what is being depicted, Jackson relied up on the BBC's series of interviews of British veterans of World War One that were done in the 1960s and 1970s.  These were recently run as a BBC podcast as well, so some individuals may be familiar with this set.  Using it for the film produced an excellent first person result.

There's nothing really like this to compare it to.  It was a huge effort and that produced a very worthwhile result.  Highly recommended.

As an aside, the title comes from Laurence Binyon's 1914 poem, For the Fallen.

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, 

England mourns for her dead across the sea. 

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit, 

Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal 

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres, 

There is music in the midst of desolation 

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young, 

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. 

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; 

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. 

At the going down of the sun and in the morning 

We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; 

They sit no more at familiar tables of home; 

They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; 

They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound, 

Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, 

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known 

As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, 

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain; 

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, 

To the end, to the end, they remain.

December 15, 1918. Returning Home, Not Making It Over, Wilson In France, Silly Cinema

The Philadelphia Public Ledger printed a poster as a supplement.  The troops were already returning home in appreciable numbers so that celebrations were occurring.

And Sunday movie releases were a thing.  Wives and Other Wives was released on this date in 1918.

The plot synopsis, involving newlyweds, looks absurd, but then it's no more absurd than the piles of slop that television offers now.  Compared to Below Deck, it was likely downright intellectual.

This was a five reel film, fwiw.

The Cheyenne paper features a full slate of recent post war news in its Sunday edition, including the news that Ireland was going for Sinn Fein in the British parliamentary election held the day prior, and Lloyd George had apparently called Labor to be Bolshevik.  France was celebrating Wilson's arrival and the paper was reporting that German efforts to woo African American troops had failed.
 

And at least in Chicago, the Sunday paper had cartoons, including one that was aimed at low grade coal used to heat homes during World War One as the better grades were devoted to other more pressing concerns.

Hardly anyone heats a house with coal now (I know some do, and I've been in at least a couple of structures heated by coal), so the soot and smell of it is something sort of lost on a modern audience.  But it would have done both of those.  I.e, coal smells even if its a good grade, and the lower grades would have been quite smokey and sooty.

If we take cartoons as a reflection back on contemporary life, and really we ought to, there's some other interesting things to glean in these cartoons.  For one thing, cars were obviously still a novelty, given the way that they were treated in Gasoline Alley.  The protagonists are basically a group of car owners in these early issues experimenting on their cars.  Note that steam cars were still a thing, as there's a reference to them in the cartoon.

And it must have already been the case that those who didn't make it "Over There" were a bit embarrassed by it, as that was the subject of one of the cartoons.

Countdown on the Great War, October 21, 1918: Germany calls a halt to the U-boat war, Fatigue and Illness catch up with the Desert Mounted Corps

Maj. General Peter E. Traub, C.O. 35th Division, learning a few points about moving picture camera from 1st. Lieut. E.W. Weigle. Location: Sommedieu, Meuse, France. Date: October 21, 1918. Taken by: Pvt. Price, SC. NARA Ref#: 111-SC-51079

1.  The U-boat war ends as Germany suspends submarine warfare and orders the boats to return to port.  Before it receives the order, the UB-94 sank the British coaster Saint Barchan.  Eight of her crew died in the sinking.

Saint Barchan wasn't the only ship lost that day.  The USS Cero was destroyed by fire in Narragansett Bay, being a casualty to an accident as so many things and people did during the war.  The MMML 561, a British motor launch, was lost at sea. The British cargo ship Moscow was scuttled by the British at Petrograd to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Reds.  The German UB-89 collided with the SMS Frankfurt at Keil, to the loss of seven lives.

2.  Allenby is forced to reorganize the Desert Mounted Corps due to illness and exhaustion in his troops.

Friday Farming: DELCO Farm Lighting Installation & Service 1918 Film

The Green Berets. 1968. Unintentional Irony.

This is an awful movie, but it occurred to me the other day how unintentionally ironic the very end of this film is, and how laden with unknown foreshadowing.

1918 Military Sabre -Target Dummies Course -Cayeux - Western Front. July 30, 1918.

1918 Military Lance - Target Course - Cayeux - Western Front

The Ventures - Walk, Don't Run (1960) HQ

Is it just me, or is there something oddly compelling, and yet oddly disturbing, about this really old video clip of "Walk, Don't Run"?

Mid Week At Work: Filming the American Attack on Château-Thierry (Western Front, 1918)

Slain Russian Tsar, Family Commemorated On 100th Anniversary Of Executions

Theodore Roosevelt on Fifth Avenue, New York, near St. Patricks Cathedral. July 11, 1918

US troops on parade in Paris July 4, 1918 - silent film newsreel