The Criterion Collection

In 1927, director Paul Fejos stumbled across a very short script in the Universal story department titled Lonesome. Though met with resistance from the studio, which considered the property little more than a travelogue, Fejos declared “Well, travelogue or not, that’s what I want to make, and my contract says I select the story.”

Barbara Kent, who plays Mary in the film, was Miss Hollywood of 1925, and had been given a contract by Universal and appeared in a few small roles. Glenn Tryon, who plays Jim, was a young comedian already established in shorts and features. He saw this film as his chance to break through in a dramatic or romantic part, acting as if he were still playing silent comedy. Tryon would work again with Fejos on the director’s next feature for Universal, Broadway. Kent overcame studio concerns about her rather tinny voice to star alongside Harold Lloyd in Welcome Danger (1929) and Feet First (1930).

Universal’s press book admits that (with the exception of some introductory stock footage of the actual Coney Island, where the film is set) Lonesome was actually shot at “Venice, the Coney Island of the Pacific Coast.”

The Venice midway did not have a roller coaster with parallel tracks, which Fejos needed in order to shoot the key scene in the film where Jim and Mary are separated. So one minute the pair are in the arcade in Venice, and the next they get on the Jack Rabbit Racer, which was actually located at a Long Beach amusement park.

Because cameraman Gilbert Warrenton had to photograph the roller coaster scenes at night, he used the first car of the ride to carry not only a camera but also lights, along with the heavy batteries that powered them. That amount of weight at the front end of the train, as Warrenton told film historian Kevin Brownlow, caused the wheels to repeatedly leave the tracks and come crashing back down.

After the first “all talkie,” Warner Bros.’ Lights of New York, opened on July 6, 1928, Universal ordered Fejos to add three short dialogue sequences to Lonesome, so that it too could be advertised as a talking picture.

Lonesome employs a color technique that had long been superseded by Technicolor but that worked better for Lonesome’s nighttime sequences, as it didn’t require light the way Technicolor did: the color was painted onto individual release prints, either by hand or using a mechanical process.

In 1935, Universal remade Lonesome as a Zasu Pitts vehicle called The Affair of Susan. Unlike the original, which had earned the studio solid returns on its investment, the remake failed to recoup even its modest shooting costs.

In 1940, a young Michelangelo Antonioni was taken with the naturalness of Lonesome’s performances, the “everyday” quality of its plot, and its effective use of outdoor locations. But predictably, he saw some things he didn’t like too, especially the visual pyrotechnics, which he thought of as relics of the 1920s European avant-garde cinema—a style he, a dozen years later, considered obsolete.

When the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, wrote to Universal in 1950 about acquiring films for its collection, the studio responded that all silent negatives had been sent to a recycling center to salvage the valuable silver in their emulsions. The three Fejos films included in this release (besides Lonesome, The Last Performance and Broadway) exist because elements were salvaged from the few worn release prints that survived, mostly in Europe, or, in the case of Broadway, because talking films were often considered to retain some commercial possibility and therefore spared from the flames.

Jason Altman is a producer at the Criterion Collection.