San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2024

Back home in Kansas City, Huggins projected his purchases and became the first person in decades to see a twelve-minute master print of a short comedy from 1923, long believed to have been lost: The Pill Pounder, directed by Gregory La Cava and featuring—in a small role as the girlfriend of an annoying customer at a drug store—Clara Bow. “It took me a few weeks to realize what I’d found,” Huggins tells Cathy Free in the Washington Post.

One of his friends got in touch with David Stenn, the author of Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild. “I asked Gary to send me a quick film grab—a magnification of one of the frames—and my eyes bulged,” says Stenn. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: seventeen-year-old Clara Bow, still unknown in her third film, shot in a small studio in Queens.” Within a few years, Bow would become the “It Girl,” one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. “Women wanted to be her, and men wanted to be with her,” adds Stenn. “She’s a genius on the level of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and nobody who is breathing right now would have seen this film before.”

The Pill Pounder originally ran twenty minutes, and while Stenn carries on searching for the missing eight minutes, the newly restored twelve we have now will premiere at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which opens on Wednesday and runs through the weekend. “It’s such a charming little comedy that I hope audiences everywhere will get a chance to see it,” says Huggins. Stenn will introduce the screening, which will be followed by Herbert Brenon’s Dancing Mothers (1926), starring Bow as Kittens, “the perfect flapper,” according to Obscure Hollywood, “pretty, fun-loving, mischievous, with a vibrant personality, but also selfish and sexually aggressive.”

SFSFF 2024 will open with the new restoration of Albert Parker’s The Black Pirate (1926) that launched the twentieth edition of To Save and Project in New York in January. The Technicolor adventure stars Douglas Fairbanks “in reliably athletic, charismatic form as the sole survivor of a ruthless pirate attack who manages to infiltrate the marauders’ own criminal ranks to wreak his revenge,” writes Dennis Harvey at 48hills. “Those fond of such swashbucklery will also want to go the following evening to Frank Lloyd’s 1924 The Sea Hawk, an elaborate intrigue set in Elizabethan times, drawn from a novel by the author of Captain Blood and Scaramouche.”

Friday starts early with The Opportunist (1929), a satirical comedy about a small-time black-marketeer steering a camel through Russia while the civil war sparked by the October Revolution rages. As Peter Wong points out at Beyond Chron, director Mykola Shpykovskyi “ultimately has little sympathy for either the Bolsheviks or the White Russians.” The day then sees screenings of East Side, West Side (1927), which the festival calls “Allan Dwan’s love letter to New York”; Poil de Carotte (1925), the first of two adaptations of Jules Renard’s autobiographical novel that Julien Duvivier (Pépé le moko) directed; and Harry A. Pollard’s Poker Faces (1926), a farce starring Edward Everett Horton, who is currently being fêted in Berlin with Glorious Sidekick, a series running through April 17.

Later in the evening, Friday goes dark with Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922), a series of vignettes linking medieval witchcraft with early twentieth-century psychology and a precursor to the folk horror of the 1960s and ’70s. “With its vigorous storytelling, its vivid and shocking imagery, its rich mise-en-scène, and its profound ambiguity,” wrote Chris Fujiwara in 2019, “Häxan can be considered one of a handful of silent films that still have the power to engage a noncinephile audience on their own terms, and without needing alibis for performance style, cultural norms, technical means, or narrative conventions.”

Like every SFSFF screening, Häxan will be accompanied by a live musical performance. The Matti Bye Ensemble will perform the score Bye composed for the Swedish Film Institute in 2007. “Häxan uses models, paintings, woodcuts, animation, a ‘mechanical altar of Hell,’ and live-action sequences led by Christensen himself in full costume as Satan,” writes Brian Darr for Screen Slate. “Bye’s somber melodies, eerie textures, and modulated dynamics wrap these disparate elements into a cloak of intense focus, creating nothing short of a cinematic séance.”

The weekend brings the laughs, courtesy of Laurel and Hardy, who star in three shorts made in 1928; Buster Keaton, who gets lost in the movies in Sherlock Jr. (1924); and Yasujiro Ozu, whose I Was Born, But . . . (1932) would be reshaped in 1959 as Good Morning. In The Joker (1928), set against the backdrop of carnival festivities in Nice, a lawyer blackmails a noblewoman. Director Georg Jacoby, “a German cinema workhorse who focused on farces and musicals (up to, and during, the Nazi era) has a good sense for atmosphere if a standard directorial style,” writes Peter Labuza for Screen Slate. Jacoby “brings a travelogue-like fascination to the towering papier-mâché statues parading throughout town during the film’s carnival sequences. The main hotel where the action takes place features a party with dozens upon dozens of extras all playing out little subplots in the corners of the frame.”

In Ted Wilde’s The Kid Brother (1927), Harold Lloyd plays the one little reedy guy in a family of burly men. “Made at the apex of Lloyd’s career and of silent film, it is the most lyrical of his features and, arguably, the funniest,” wrote Carrie Rickey in 2019. “For many years, he cited it as his favorite among his movies. I watched it with a counter in hand and reckon that it averages three good laughs—from giggle to chuckle to guffaw—per minute. A 1927 review in Variety supports my tally: ‘Harold Lloyd has clicked again with The Kid Brother, about as gaggy a gag picture as he has ever done. It is just a series of gags, one following the other, some funny and others funnier.’ Variety was wrong about one thing, though: it’s not just a series of gags—it’s a series of gags with a tender romance that runs through it, and a terrifically funny and suspenseful action sequence in its third act.”