NEXT at The REVUE:
Charles Chaplin in
"City Lights" (1931)

Charles Chaplin directs and stars in "City Lights"! Piano music supplied by host Nate Butler. Cartoons at 7 PM, feature film at 8 PM.

City Lights is a 1931 American romantic comedy film written by, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin. The story follows the misadventures of Chaplin's Tramp as he falls in love with a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) and develops a friendship with a millionaire (Harry Myers). Although sound films were on the rise when Chaplin started developing the script in 1928, the director decided to continue working with silent productions. Filming started on December 1928, and ended in 1930. City Lights was immediately popular upon release, with positive reviews and box office receipts of $5 million. Today, it is thought of as not only one of the highest accomplishments of Chaplin's prolific career, but as one of the greatest films ever made. Although classified as a comedy, City Lights has an ending widely regarded as one of the greatest, and most moving in cinema history.

NEXT at Full Circle Brewing Co.: Rudolph Valentino in
"The Eagle" (1924)

Rudolph Valentino stars in "The Eagle"! Piano music supplied by host Nate Butler. Cartoons at 7 PM, feature film at 8 PM.

The Eagle is a 1925 American silent film directed by Clarence Brown and starring Rudolph Valentino, Vilma Bánky, and Louise Dresser. Based on the novel 'Dubrovsky' by Alexander Pushkin, the film is about a lieutenant in the Russian army who catches the eye of Czarina Catherine II. After he rejects her advances and flees, she puts out a warrant for his arrest, dead or alive. When he learns that his father has been persecuted and killed, he dons a black mask and becomes an outlaw.

Valentino's previous few films had not been particularly well received, but The Eagle proved a strong comeback for him, getting good reviews from the critics, doing well at the box office and proving popular with both male and female fans. The Eagle is also notable in cinematic history for its famous extended tracking shot of the food laden table in the banquet scene.

Conrad Veidt in
"The Hands of Orlac" (1924)

Conrad Veidt stars in "The Hands of Orlac"! Piano music supplied by host Nate Butler. Cartoons at 7 PM, feature film at 8 PM.

The Hands of Orlac (German: Orlacs Hände) is a 1924 Austrian silent horror film directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt, Alexandra Sorina and Fritz Kortner. The film's plot is based on the story Les Mains d'Orlac by Maurice Renard. Wiene had made his name as a director of Expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and in The Hands of Orlac combined expressionist motifs with more naturalistic visuals. The film has been remade twice.

Concert pianist Paul Orlac (Conrad Veidt) loses his hands in a horrible railway accident. His wife Yvonne (Alexandra Sorina) pleads with a surgeon to try and save Orlac’s hands. The surgeon decides to try and transplant new hands onto Orlac, but the hands he uses are those of a recently-executed murderer named Vasseur. From that point forward, the pianist is tortured by the presence of a knife he finds at his house, just like that used by Vassuer, and the desire to kill.

Shown May 18, 2013 at Full Circle Brewing Co.

Douglas Fairbanks in
"The Black Pirate" (1926)

"The Black Pirate" is a 1926 silent adventure film shot entirely in two-strip Technicolor about an adventurer and a "company" of pirates. "The Black Pirate" was the third feature to be filmed in an early two-tone Technicolor process that had been first introduced in the 1922 feature "Toll of the Sea". This reproduces a limited but pleasing range of colors. "Ben-Hur"— filmed around the same time — contains two-tone sequences but is shot primarily in black-and-white with tinting and toning in many scenes.

Shown May 4, 2013 at Revue Cafe

"The Blot" (1921)

The Blot was directed by Lois Weber with her husband Phillips Smalley in 1921.The film tackles the social problem of genteel poverty, focusing on a struggling family.

The Professor dispenses the wisdom of the ages and does not make a living wage. The sons of the rich and powerful are students lacking any motivation. The next door neighbor of the Professor, businessman Olsen, has money and lots of food, while the Griggs have hardly any. Both Peter Olsen and Reverend Gates are taken by the beauty of young Amelia Griggs. When rich son Phil West falls for Amelia Griggs and befriends the poor Reverend Gates, he finally sees the difference in his life and theirs and tries to do something to change that.

Shown March 16, 2013 at Full Circle Brewing Co.

"The Golem" (1920)

The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920), directed by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, and starred Wegener as the golem. The script was adapted from the 1915 novel “The Golem” by Gustav Meyrink. The film was the third of three films that Wegener made featuring the golem, but the other two are considered lost.

In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated anthropomorphic being, created entirely from inanimate matter. The word was used to mean an amorphous, unformed material in Psalms and medieval writing. The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late-16th-century chief rabbi of Prague.

The film is set in Jewish ghetto of medieval Prague. In an elaborate magical procedure, a rabbi summons the demon Astaroth who is then enclosed in an amulet. The amulet is inserted into the Golem's chest and the creature comes to life. Famulus tames the Golem, and the Rabbi uses it as a household servant.

Wegener had been unhappy with his previous attempt to tell the Golem story (Der Golem, 1915) due to compromises he had to make during its production. This second attempt is meant to more directly mimic the legend as he heard it told in Prague. The cinematography of Karl Freund, in collaboration with Poelzig and Wegener, is cited as one of the most outstanding examples of German Expressionism.

Shown February 23, 2013 at Full Circle Brewing Co.

"The Eyes of the Mummy" (1918)

Die Augen der Mumie Ma (English language The Eyes of the Mummy) is a 1918 German silent film directed by Ernst Lubistch. The film stars Pola Negri, Emil Jannings, and Harry Liedtke. It is the first collaboration between Lubitsch and Negri, a pairing that would go on to make worldwide successes such as Carmen (1918), Madame DuBarry (1919), and Sumurun (1920).

A young, wealthy painter named Wendland travels to Egypt, where he hears about the tomb of Queen Ma, a site far out into the desert that has reportedly driven everyone who has visited it mad. Intrigued, the painter arranges to be taken to the tomb.

Shown January 19, 2013 at Full Circle Brewing Co.

Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927)

Metropolis is a German Expressionist science fiction film set in a futuristic urban dystopia, and examines a common science fiction theme of the day: the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism.

The most expensive film of its time, Metropolis cost approximately 7 million Reichsmark to make. The film was cut substantially after its German premiere, and there have been several efforts to restore it, as well as rediscoveries of previously lost footage. Due to recent discoveries, we now have the definitive ‘final cut’!

Shown July 1, 2010 (Vangelis 80's Version) at Revue Cafe, and the Fully Restored Version in Two Parts on July 21 and August 18, 2012 at Full Circle Brewery

Buster Keaton in "Sherlock Jr." (1924)

Sherlock, Jr. (1924) stars and was directed by Buster Keaton. While showing a film about the theft of a pearl necklace, a movie theater projectionist falls asleep and dreams that he enters the movie as a detective. Keaton spent more time shooting this film than most of his others, due to the elaborate stunts and effects.

Recently, Time magazine named Sherlock, Jr. as one of the All-Time 100 Movies. They wrote, "The impeccable comedian directs himself in an impeccable silent comedy...Is this, as some critics have argued, an example of primitive American surrealism? Sure. But let's not get fancy about it. It is more significantly, a great example of American minimalism—simple objects and movement manipulated in casually complex ways to generate a steadily rising gale of laughter ... In an age when most comedies are all windup and no punch, this is the most treasurable of virtues."

Shown July 7, 2012 at Revue Cafe

Buster Keaton in "College" (1927)

Set in Southern California, College opens with Ronald (Buster Keaton) graduating high school as the school’s “most brilliant scholar”. At his graduation, Ronald speaks on “the Curse of the Athlete”, arguing that books are more important than athletics.

Ronald decides to follow Mary, who rejected him because she loves athletes more than book worms, to Clayton which the dean describes as an “athlete-infested college”. Hoping to impress Mary, Ronald tries out for the baseball and track and field teams but proves to be totally inept at them.

Shown June 23, 2012 at Revue Cafe

Film critic Roger Ebert stated "The Man Who Laughs is a melodrama, at times even a swashbuckler, but so steeped in Expressionist gloom that it plays like a horror film." Oh, and it’s kinda dark.

Shown January 15, 2011 and again on May 18, 2012, both at Full Circle Brewery

"20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" (1916)

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was directed by Stuart Paton. The film's storyline is (very loosely) based on the novel of the same name by Jules Verne, along with other elements used from Verne's The Mysterious Island.

This version is notable for its groundbreaking work in underwater photography by the brothers George M. Williamson and J. Ernest Williamson. Actual underwater cameras were not used, but a system of watertight tubes and mirrors allowed the camera to shoot reflected images of underwater scenes staged in shallow sunlit waters.

Shown March 17, 2012 at Full Circle Brewery

Rudolph Valentino in "The Sheik" (1921)

When The Sheik premiered in Los Angeles in October 1921, critical reception was mixed. However it was a major success with audiences, smashing attendance records where it debuted. The New York Telegraph estimated that in the first few weeks 125,000 people had seen the film.

Male moviegoers instantly loathed The Sheik, most refusing to see it or laughing out loud at the love scenes. Many men would walk out during film and/or felt threatened by Valentino's style of lovemaking, and many called him effeminate for the long flowing robes of the character. But female moviegoers could not get enough of Valentino. The Sheik became the movie that defined Valentino's career, much to his annoyance.

Shown February 18, 2012 at Full Circle Brewery

Charles Chaplin in "Modern Times" (1936)

Modern Times was written and directed by Charles Chaplin, and has his iconic Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization. The movie also stars a radiant Paulette Goddard.

Shown January 28, 2012 at Revue Cafe

Lon Chaney in "Flesh And Blood" (1922)

Silent movie legend Lon Chaney plays an escaped convict who disguises himself as a cripple to elude the police so he can see his daughter (Edith Roberts). But she is engaged to the son of the crook who framed him, complicating his plan of revenge. Although he was already an up-and-coming actor of note, it would be another year before Chaney became a major star (and future Hollywood legend) in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera.

Shown January 20, 2012 at Full Circle Brewery

Nate At The Movies Goes Christmas 2011
(at Full Circle Brewery)

Starting at 7:00 PM, we will screen cartoons and shorts with a Christmas theme. Then, at 8:00 PM, we’ll view an early silent film adaptation of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, featuring your host Nate Butler on the piano. Following that we will watch Santa Claus Conquers the Martians in MST3K mode!

Shown December 3, 2011 at Full Circle Brewery

Nate At The Movies Goes Christmas 2011
(at Revue Cafe)

Starting at 7:00 PM, we will screen cartoons and shorts with a Christmas theme. Then, at 8:00 PM, we’ll view an early silent film adaptation of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, featuring your host Nate Butler on the piano. Following that we will continue to watch rare cartoons and shorts about Santa Claus, including the moving MGM classic “Peace On Earth.”

Shown December 17, 2011 at Revue Cafe

Georges Melies' "A Trip to the Moon” (1902)

Georges Méliès’ classic A Trip to the Moon! Plus other short subjects by Méliès, who is arguably the father of film special effects.

Georges Méliès was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He was one of the earliest filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his films. Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality through cinematography, Méliès is sometimes referred to as the first "cinemagician." Before making films, he was a stage magician at the theatre Robert-Houdin.

He directed 531 films between 1896 and 1914, ranging in length from one to forty minutes. In subject matter, these films are often similar to the magic theater shows that Méliès had been doing, containing "tricks" and impossible events, such as objects disappearing or changing size.

His most famous film is A Trip to the Moon, made in 1902, which includes the celebrated scene in which a spaceship hits the eye of the man in the moon. Also famous is The Impossible Voyage from 1904. Both of these films are about strange voyages, somewhat in the style of Jules Verne. These are considered to be some of the most important early science fiction films, although their approach is closer to fantasy.

Shown November 26, 2011 and August 3, 2012 at Revue Cafe

Douglas Fairbanks in
"The Three Musketeers” (1921)

The Three Musketeers (1921) is an American silent film based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas, starring Douglas Fairbanks as d'Artagnan.

The young Gascon D'Artagnan arrives in Paris , his heart set on joining the king's Musketeers. He is taken under the wings of three of the most respected and feared Musketeers: Porthos, Aramis, and Athos. Together they fight to save France and the honor of a lady from the machinations of the powerful Cardinal Richelieu.

Shown November 19, 2011 at Full Circle Brewery

Buster Keaton in "The Haunted House” (1921)

The Haunted House is a 1921 short comedy film starring comedian Buster Keaton. Buster Keaton is a bank teller who becomes involved in a hold-up, counterfeiters, and a theatrical troupe posing as spooks in a haunted house. The film ends with a famous sequence of Keaton ascending to heaven, and then descending to Hades. Another memorable sequence of the film involves bank teller Buster spilling glue all over his counter, reminiscent of a scene in his first film The Butcher Boy.

Shown October 28, 2011 and October 13, 2012 at Revue Cafe

"Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages” (1922)

Häxan (English title: The Witches or Witchcraft Through The Ages) is a 1922 Swedish/Danish silent film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Based partly on Christensen's study of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors, Häxan is a study of how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts.

Shown October 15, 2011 at Full Circle Brewery

Buster Keaton in "Steamboat Bill Jr.” (1923)

The finest moments in Steamboat Bill Jr. come during its cyclone sequence, which was shot in Sacramento, California. The production built $135,000 worth of breakaway street sets on a riverbank and filmed their systematic destruction with six powerful Liberty-motor wind machines and a 120-foot crane. Keaton himself, who calculated and performed his own stunts, was suspended on a cable from the crane which hurled him from place to place, as if airborne. The resulting sequence on film is astonishing.

The sequence is punctuated by Keaton's single most famous stunt. Keaton stands in the street, making his way through the destruction, when an entire building facade collapses onto him. The attic window fits neatly around Keaton's body as it falls, coming within inches of flattening him. (Keaton performed a similar, though smaller scale stunt, eight years earlier, in the short film One Week). Keaton did the stunt himself with a real building section and no trickery. It has been claimed that if he had stood just inches off the correct spot Keaton would have been seriously injured or killed.

Shown September 30, 2011 at Revue Cafe

"The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1923)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame stars Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and Patsy Ruth Miller as Esmeralda, and was directed by Wallace Worsley.

The film is most notable for the grand sets that recall 15th century Paris as well as Lon Chaney's performance and spectacular make-up as the tortured bell-ringer of Notre Dame. The film elevated Chaney, already a well-known character actor, to full star status in Hollywood . It also helped set a standard for many later horror films, including Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera in 1925.

Shown September 17, 2011 at Full Circle Brewery

Douglas Fairbanks in
"Don Q - Son of Zorro” (1925)

Douglas Fairbanks returns as the great Spanish swashbuckler in this sequel to The Mark of Zorro (1920). Don Cesar de Vega (Douglas Fairbanks) is the son of the famous masked avanger, Zorro; he's been sent to Spain to continue his education and learn the ways of his homeland. He soon becomes a favorite of the local dignitaries, but this does him little good when he's falsely accused of murder. Faking his own suicide, Don Cesar goes underground, and posing as Zorro, begins his own investigation of the killing.

Shown August 27, 2011 at Revue Cafe

Tod Browning's "The Unholy Three”
starring Lon Chaney (1925)

The Unholy Three was one of the major hits of 1925. Starring Lon Chaney and directed by Tod Browning (Dracula, Freaks), it was based on a 1917 thriller novel by Clarence Aaron (“Tod”) Robbins about a trio of sideshow performers – a ventriloquist, a midget and a strongman – who, when their sideshow is shut down, form an alliance to commit robberies. Using a bird store as their front, the ventriloquist (Lon Chaney) masquerades as an old woman, Mrs. O’Grady, selling parrots to rich customers who later find themselves the trio’s victims. The midget masquerades as O’Grady’s granchild.

Shown August 20, 2011 at Full Circle Brewery

Douglas Fairbanks in
"The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1922)

This swashbuckling adventure was based on the legendary tale of the Medieval hero, Robin Hood, and was the first production to present many of the elements of the legend that became familiar to movie audiences in later versions.

Shown July 22, 2011 at Revue Cafe

Buster Keaton in "The General" (1926)

The General was based upon the Great Locomotive Chase from 1862. Buster Keaton starred in the film and co-directed it with Clyde Bruckman. The film was a box-office disaster at its original release, but is now considered by critics as one of the greatest films ever made.

Keaton performed many dangerous physical stunts on and around the moving train, including jumping from the engine to a tender to a boxcar, sitting on the cow-catcher of the slow moving train while holding a railroad tie, and running along the roof.

Shown June 25, 2011 and March 9, 2012 at Revue Cafe

D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance” (1916)

Director D.W. Griffith's expensive, most ambitious silent film masterpiece Intolerance (1916) is one of the milestones and landmarks in cinematic history. Many reviewers and film historians consider it the greatest film of the silent era. The mammoth film was also subtitled "A Sun-Play of the Ages" and "Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages." Griffith was inspired to make this film after watching the revolutionary Italian silent film epic Cabiria (1914) by director Giovanni Pastrone.

After the widespread controversy surrounding his racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), Griffith attempted to defensively answer his critics with this work. He took a smaller feature film that he was working on about the contemporary Progressive Era struggle between capital and labor [titled "The Mother and the Law"] and its theme of social injustice and combined it with three new stories to create a more spectacular, monumental, dramatic epic. All of the stories, spanning several hundreds of years and cultures, are held together by themes of intolerance, man's inhumanity to man, hypocrisy, bigotry, religious hatred, persecution, discrimination and injustice achieved in all eras by entrenched political, social and religious systems.

The film and its unorthodox editing were enormously influential, particularly among European and Soviet filmmakers. Many of the numerous assistant directors Griffith employed in making the film went on to become important and noted Hollywood directors in the subsequent years.

Shown in Two Parts on May 14 & June 8, 2011 at Full Circle Brewery

The film made young Jackie Coogan, then a vaudeville performer, into the first major child star of the movies. Many Chaplin biographers have attributed the relationship portrayed in the film to have resulted from the death of Chaplin's firstborn infant son just before production began. The portrayal of poverty and the cruelty of welfare workers are also directly reminiscent of Chaplin's own childhood in London.

Lita Grey, who portrays a tempting angel in the film, became Chaplin's second wife (from 1924 to 1927).

Shown June 19, 2010 & May 2011 at Revue Cafe

The evening begins at 7:00 PM with a few classic Betty Boop cartoons from 1934, including Betty Boop’s Rise To Fame and Betty In Blunderland. Then, we’ll watch a ten-minute excerpt from another 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll, this one starring Sheldon Lewis, followed by the 1925 Stan Laurel comedy Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride! Shortly after 8:00 PM we’ll begin the main feature, John Barrymore’s 1920 take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The main feature will be followed by a Keystone Kops comedy.

Shown March 19, 2011 at Full Circle Brewery

“Broken Blossoms” (1919)

Broken Blossoms, or The Yellow Man and the Girl (directed by D. W. Griffith, 1919) stars Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess and Donald Crisp, and tells the story of young girl who is abused by her alcoholic prizefighting father but meets a kind-hearted Chinese man who falls in love with her. The difference in the lovers’ ages and ethnicity could be considered controversial even today.

Shown February 19, 2011 at Full Circle Brewery

“Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” (1922)

This night we explore the history of early horror cinema by featuring the earliest film adaptations of two of our most beloved and enduring ‘monsters’ from literature, Frankenstein’s creature and Dracula.

The feature film is Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, a German Expressionist vampire horror film, directed by F.W. Murnau and released in 1922. It is the world’s first (unauthorized) adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with names and other details changed because the German studio could not obtain the rights to Stoker’s novel. (The legal battle between Bram Stoker’s aggressive widow and the German filmmakers is an epic that will be gleefully related to you by Mr. Butler.) Nosferatu eventually found its way to America , and went on to become one of the world’s seminal horror classics.

Shown April 8, 2010 at Full Circle Brewery and again on June 19, 2010 at Revue Cafe