Word: brownlow
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...film circulated through the years, it was not until last week, in Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall, that the public got a chance to see a Napoleon that can be regarded as definitive. Close to 4½ hours in length, it is a reconstitution by Kevin Brownlow, a talented English film historian (The Parade's Gone By, Hollywood: the Pioneers), who spent a decade painstakingly collecting bits and pieces of film. It is appropriate, perhaps inevitable, that Brownlow's work should be presented by Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), a modern inheritor...
...most vivid element in Brownlow's reconstruction is a concluding 18-minute triptych in which three well-synchronized images are simultaneously projected on a suddenly expanded screen, as Napoleon is preparing to lead his army into Italy and the campaign that made him a world figure. By another name, this is Cinerama, though it is 30 years ahead of that gimmick's invention. It is also crudely stirring, and just about as big a finish as any movie has ever...
...Brownlow's oversize album is an adjunct to the Thames Television series now being shown in the U.S.-and an unofficial supplement to the author's classic about the silents, The Parade's Gone...
...succinct commentary, Brownlow manages to illuminate the crucial aspects of his story, from the revolutionary impact of The Great Train Robbery in 1903, to Hollywood's World War I boom era, to the arrival of Will Hays' censorship. Most of the time the story is told, as it should be, through testimonies of survivors. Without resorting to the keyhole journalism of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, Brownlow removes the filters from some widely accepted views. Roscoe ("Fatty") Arbuckle is presented as a guileless clown who became a national symbol of infamy before he could grasp what...
...anecdotes are often tinged by sorrow, the melancholy is appropriate. Brownlow feels a true sense of loss about the era he describes. So many of the people and landmarks are gone now; so many early films have literally turned to dust. Brownlow holds that the advent of sound robbed movies of their power to stimulate the viewers' imaginations: once the audience no longer had to imagine voices, it ceased to be an active "creative contributor to the process of making a film." Hollywood: The Pioneers offers powerful support for that belief, including a 1928 photo that draws the curtain...