Once thought to be lost for ever, the 1923 rags-to-riches story Love, Life and Laughter has been found and restored, bringing Balfour’s magnetic charm to a new audience
“There was once a happy little chorus girl who lived alone in a garret, and there was a lonely boy in the attic above, who wrote tales nobody wanted, except perhaps the girl.” The chorus girl is called Tip-Toes, and she is destined for great stardom. The young man, not so much.
This is the fairytale scenario for a movie made in 1923 by George Pearson, an ambitious, occasionally self-aggrandising British director. It is a scenario that he reprinted in his florid autobiography, Flashback. The cheery chorine was to be played by Pearson’s protege, and one of the biggest stars in British silent cinema, Betty Balfour. The resulting film, Love, Life and Laughter, combines whimsy with realism to tell a story about optimism and ideals.
“There was once a happy little chorus girl who lived alone in a garret, and there was a lonely boy in the attic above, who wrote tales nobody wanted, except perhaps the girl.” The chorus girl is called Tip-Toes, and she is destined for great stardom. The young man, not so much.
This is the fairytale scenario for a movie made in 1923 by George Pearson, an ambitious, occasionally self-aggrandising British director. It is a scenario that he reprinted in his florid autobiography, Flashback. The cheery chorine was to be played by Pearson’s protege, and one of the biggest stars in British silent cinema, Betty Balfour. The resulting film, Love, Life and Laughter, combines whimsy with realism to tell a story about optimism and ideals.
- 9/26/2019
- by Pamela Hutchinson
- The Guardian - Film News
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. The retrospective Early Hitchcock is showing August 11 - September 12, 2017 in the United States.ChampagneAround the time of his dazzling expressionistic breakthrough The Lodger (1927), and Blackmail (1929), his innovative foray into sound—and England’s first talkie—Alfred Hitchcock was testing the narrative waters of his potential filmic output. It was a terrifically productive period for the promising London-born auteur, with nearly 20 features in ten years, and looking back at these early works, the tendency is often to pinpoint instances of his trademark aesthetic to come (easy to do with something like The Lodger; less so with something like The Ring, also 1927). However, when sampling these titles, and keeping in mind the most popular Hitchcockian characteristics had yet to be regularly implemented, new and uncommon propensities emerge. Such is the case with a trilogy of films to be shown as part...
- 8/11/2017
- MUBI
Constance Cummings in 'Night After Night.' Constance Cummings: Working with Frank Capra and Mae West (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Actress Went from Harold Lloyd to Eugene O'Neill.”) Back at Columbia, Harry Cohn didn't do a very good job at making Constance Cummings feel important. By the end of 1932, Columbia and its sweet ingenue found themselves in court, fighting bitterly over stipulations in her contract. According to the actress and lawyer's daughter, Columbia had failed to notify her that they were picking up her option. Therefore, she was a free agent, able to offer her services wherever she pleased. Harry Cohn felt otherwise, claiming that his contract player had waived such a notice. The battle would spill over into 1933. On the positive side, in addition to Movie Crazy 1932 provided Cummings with three other notable Hollywood movies: Washington Merry-Go-Round, American Madness, and Night After Night. 'Washington Merry-Go-Round...
- 11/5/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Teresa Wright: Later years (See preceding post: "Teresa Wright: From Marlon Brando to Matt Damon.") Teresa Wright and Robert Anderson were divorced in 1978. They would remain friends in the ensuing years.[1] Wright spent most of the last decade of her life in Connecticut, making only sporadic public appearances. In 1998, she could be seen with her grandson, film producer Jonah Smith, at New York's Yankee Stadium, where she threw the ceremonial first pitch.[2] Wright also became involved in the Greater New York chapter of the Als Association. (The Pride of the Yankees subject, Lou Gehrig, died of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in 1941.) The week she turned 82 in October 2000, Wright attended the 20th anniversary celebration of Somewhere in Time, where she posed for pictures with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. In March 2003, she was a guest at the 75th Academy Awards, in the segment showcasing Oscar-winning actors of the past. Two years later,...
- 3/15/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
The 1923 film Love, Life and Laughter stars Betty Balfour.
The BFI is has revealed the discovery by Eye, the Dutch Film Museum, of a lost masterpiece of British silent cinema, George Pearson’s Love, Life and Laughter (1923), starring Betty Balfour.
Balfour, also known as Britain’s “Queen of Happiness”, was the most successful British actress of the 1920s, known also as the country’s answer to Mary Pickford. It is one of the most wanted on the BFI’s list of 75 films published to mark the BFI National Archive’s 75th anniversary in 2010. Only one other complete film by director Geroge Pearson survives.
The film was recently discovered in the archives of Eye, while being catalogued following its arrival at the archive in November 2012. The print is part of a collection of film cans that belonged to a local cinema in the small town of Hattem, near Zwolle.
Cinema Theater De Vries had only been active for three...
The BFI is has revealed the discovery by Eye, the Dutch Film Museum, of a lost masterpiece of British silent cinema, George Pearson’s Love, Life and Laughter (1923), starring Betty Balfour.
Balfour, also known as Britain’s “Queen of Happiness”, was the most successful British actress of the 1920s, known also as the country’s answer to Mary Pickford. It is one of the most wanted on the BFI’s list of 75 films published to mark the BFI National Archive’s 75th anniversary in 2010. Only one other complete film by director Geroge Pearson survives.
The film was recently discovered in the archives of Eye, while being catalogued following its arrival at the archive in November 2012. The print is part of a collection of film cans that belonged to a local cinema in the small town of Hattem, near Zwolle.
Cinema Theater De Vries had only been active for three...
- 4/3/2014
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
George Pearson's 1923 rags-to-riches story starring Betty Balfour had been on BFI 'most wanted' list for years
There are few who can claim to have seen the 1923 film Love, Life and Laughter, but the critic of the Manchester Guardian appears to have enjoyed it, acknowledging its masterpiece credentials and calling it "ambitious, spectacular" and "lit and photographed with a beauty to dream of".
Film-goers will now be able to decide for themselves. The BFI has announced, with some excitement, that the long lost film has been rediscovered in Amsterdam.
There are few who can claim to have seen the 1923 film Love, Life and Laughter, but the critic of the Manchester Guardian appears to have enjoyed it, acknowledging its masterpiece credentials and calling it "ambitious, spectacular" and "lit and photographed with a beauty to dream of".
Film-goers will now be able to decide for themselves. The BFI has announced, with some excitement, that the long lost film has been rediscovered in Amsterdam.
- 4/2/2014
- by Mark Brown, arts correspondent
- The Guardian - Film News
Joel and Ethan Coen movie ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ tops 2014 National Society of Film Critics Awards (Oscar Isaac in ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’) The National Society of Film Critics is the last major U.S.-based critics’ group to announce their annual winners. This year, their top film was Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, a comedy-drama about a hapless folk singer. Inside Llewyn Davis also earned honors for the directors, star Oscar Isaac, and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel. Additionally, the Coen brothers’ film was the runner-up in the Best Screenplay category. Inside Llewyn Davis is the first movie directed by Joel and Ethan Coen to win the top prize at the National Society of Film Critics Awards. Back in early 2008, whereas most critics’ groups — and the Academy Awards — went for the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, the Nsfc selected instead Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
- 1/7/2014
- by Steve Montgomery
- Alt Film Guide
Alfred Hitchcock silent movies added to Unesco UK Memory of the World Register (photo: Ivor Novello in The Lodger) The nine Alfred Hitchcock-directed silent films recently restored by the British Film Institute have been added to the Unesco UK Memory of the World Register, "a list of documentary heritage which holds cultural significance specific to the UK." The nine Hitchcock movies are the following: The Pleasure Garden (1925), The Ring (1927), Downhill / When Boys Leave Home (1927), The Lodger (1927), Easy Virtue (1928), Champagne (1928), The Farmer’s Wife (1928), The Manxman (1929), and Blackmail (1929) — also released as a talkie, Britain’s first. Only one Hitchcock-directed silent remains lost, The Mountain Eagle / Fear o’ God (1926). Most of those movies have little in common with the suspense thrillers Hitchcock would crank out in Britain and later in Hollywood from the early ’30s on. But a handful of his silents already featured elements and themes that would recur in...
- 7/18/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Arts and culture website The Space will be screening Alfred Hitchcock's newly restored silent comedy, Champagne — thanks to the BFI. Bring your bubbly to the computer on Thursday, September 27 at 3:30 p.m. Et for a look at Hitch's eighth film about a spoiled heiress named Betty (Betty Balfour) living off daddy's trust fund. Pops is in the champagne business and isn't a fan of Betty's gold-digging boyfriend so he devises a plan to get rid of him. Hitch wasn't in the business of killing off his characters in 1928, so the shady Romeo lives to tell about it. In an interview with François Truffaut, the director expressed his unhappiness with the story, stating that "the film had no story to tell." Initial reviews of the film were mixed...
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- 9/26/2012
- by Alison Nastasi
- Movies.com
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