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Festival Year |
Festival Section |
2008 |
Hollywood on the Hudson |
Film Title |
ENCHANTMENT |
Alternative Title 1 |
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Alternative Title 2 |
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Alternative Title 3 |
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Country |
USA |
Release Date |
30 October 1921 |
Production Co. |
Cosmopolitan Productions |
Director |
Robert G. Vignola |
Format |
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Speed (fps) |
35mm |
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20 |
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Footage |
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Time |
6737 ft. |
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c. 90' |
Archive Source |
Library of Congress, Washington, DC. |
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Print Notes |
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles |
Cast |
Marion Davies (Ethel Hoyt), Forrest Stanley (Ernest Eddison), Edith Shayne (Mrs. Hoyt), Tom Lewis (Mr. Hoyt), Arthur Rankin (Tommy Corbin), Corinne Barker (Nalia), Maude Turner Gordon (Mrs. Leigh), Edith Lyle (regina/The Queen [nella fiaba/in fairy tale]), Huntley Gordon (re/The King [in fairy tale]) |
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Other Credits |
scen: Luther Reed, dal racconto/from the story “Manhandling Ethel” di/by Frank Ramsay Adams (1921); f./ph: Ira H. Morgan; scg./des: Joseph Urban |
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Other Information |
Distribution: Paramount |
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Program Notes |
With the death of his mother, Phoebe Hearst, in 1919, William Randolph Hearst gained complete control of the family fortune. His spending habits increased dramatically, and one of his first moves was to upgrade the quality of the films he had recently begun producing, bringing in the best writers, directors, and designers money could buy. According to historian David Nasaw, Hearst's approach to the movies was the opposite of his tactic in the newspaper business, where he “extended the audience . . . downward” into the working class. Hearst's films would be directed to the upper end of the audience spectrum, a market he felt was not sufficiently served by existing American producers. When Adolph Zukor complained about the cost of the initial Hearst-Paramount productions, Hearst responded with a statement of principles that made clear just how he intended to approach this motion picture business. “I admit that our pictures are expensive,” he wrote, “but that does not matter to me if I can make them sufficiently good. … Making pictures is fundamentally like making publications. It is in each case an endeavor to entertain, enlighten and uplift the public. In fact, the same material is used more and more in both publication and picture.” Hearst was, in fact, the first to recognize the tremendous possibilities of media synergy, cross-promoting his newspapers, newsreels, animated films, motion picture serials, and general-interest story magazines as far back as The Perils of Pauline (1914). Even more remarkable, in his desire to “enlighten and uplift” the filmgoing public he seems never to have taken financial considerations into account. Cosmopolitan's early features had all been made in a variety of rental studios scattered around New York and New Jersey. But while Frank Borzage was still shooting Humoresque, Hearst acquired an enormous property that could serve as the center of his motion picture empire. Sulzer's Harlem River Park and Casino, a once popular beer garden suffering from the introduction of prohibition, would become the new Cosmopolitan-International studio. For $600,000 Hearst took a multiyear lease on the property, which occupied the entire block between Second Avenue and the Harlem River, from 126th to 127th Street. Hearst's reasons for establishing his studio in New York were much the same as those cited by other local producers. “One of the most important of these is that the city is the center of stage play production,” he later told one industry trade paper. “It is folly to minimize the screen's real need of the best artists on the stage in the casts of its worthiest productions.” For Hearst, even California's sunshine had little practical value. “We prefer to produce our pictures in studios with artificial lighting, rather than to depend on uncertainty and varying degrees of sunlight, a condition for which no part of the country is at all seasons exempt.” In the popular imagination, Cosmopolitan's output in this period has been reduced to a series of overproduced Marion Davies costume spectacles. But Davies appeared in less than a third of the films produced by Cosmopolitan in this period, and only 4 of these could be described as costume pictures: When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), Little Old New York (1923), Yolanda (1924), and Janice Meredith (1924). More typical were modern romantic comedies like Robert G. Vignola's Enchantment. Vignola, who was born in Trivigno, Potenza, in 1882 and came to New York as a child, was one of Hearst's favorite directors. A member of the original Kalem stock company (he played Judas Iscariot in From the Manger to the Cross), he remained very active in East Coast production through the mid-1920s. Cosmopolitan would quickly become one of the most important production companies in New York, making some 35 features before Hearst permanently moved his operation to California in 1924. Lewis Selznick, another local producer, had developed a business model which emphasized the production of a large number of films at relatively low cost. Hearst made fewer films, but they were all first-class productions, sumptuously mounted by one of New York's greatest local talents, the architect and designer Joseph Urban. Trained in Vienna (where he had designed the city's new town hall and the Austrian pavilion for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair), Urban was largely responsible for introducing the Secessionist style of architecture and design to American clients. He began working as a theatrical designer in New York in 1912, and from 1915 designed every edition of the Ziegfeld Follies. He was artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera from 1917 until his death in 1933. According to Léon Barsacq and Elliott Stein, Urban's accomplishments made him “the only designer working in US films in the early 1920s whose name was a household word.” In fact, it was Urban who left the greatest mark on Cosmopolitan's output, not only designing all the films, but also choreographing the stage prologues that graced many of their first-run showings, decorating the interior of the Cosmopolitan Theater, and (in 1923) rebuilding the Cosmopolitan studio itself. While Enchantment can be enjoyed today as a surprising “flapper” version of The Taming of the Shrew, recent histories cite it only for Urban's décor, the first appearance of modernist interior design in an American film. - RICHARD KOSZARSKI
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