Cinecon Takes Its Old Films to Glendale

Hollywood’s loss is Glendale’s gain.

After six years at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Cinecon, the Society for Cinephiles, will hold its 33rd annual film festival at the Red Lion Hotel and Alex Theater, the Glendale’s magnificent, fully restored movie palace, tonight through Monday morning.

Over the extended Labor Day Weekend, Cinecon will present a wide array of silent pictures and early talkies and whenever possible, panel discussions with the actors and technicians involved in their making. There will be two large ballrooms at the Red Lion filled with dealers of movie memorabilia.

Cinecon is a film buff’s paradise, offering a lot of movies most people never heard of, or if they did, thought were no longer extant.

As fun--and exhausting--as Cinecon is, it is also involved in the serious business of restoring and preserving our film heritage. The Society of Cinephiles was founded in 1965 in James Stewart’s hometown of Indiana, Pa., by Sam Rubin, publisher of “The 8mm Collector,” a forerunner of the current “Classic Images” journal for film collectors and enthusiasts.

Among the many films the Society for Cinephiles has helped preserve is “Bud’s Recruit” (1917), the earliest surviving work of director King Vidor, and “His Glorious Night” (1929), which certainly will be the most eagerly anticipated film screening in this year’s festival. This is the film that sent the career of silent screen hero John Gilbert, making his talkie debut, onto its downward path, culminating in his early alcohol-related death in 1936.

For years it was commonplace for Hollywood veterans to remark that Gilbert’s high-pitched voice was at odds with his image as a romantic hero; in more recent decades there have been claims that Louis B. Mayer, in apparent anger at his costly star, sabotaged the recording of Gilbert’s voice. The screening of “His Glorious Night,” however, may well reveal that Gilbert was simply the victim of the combination of primitive sound coupled with an image and acting style more suitable to silents than talkies.

In any event, it’s been described as a muddled Ruritanian romance in which Gilbert plays the captain of royal guards who wins the heart of a princess (Catherine Dale Owen) betrothed to another. “His Glorious Night” was directed by Lionel Barrymore from Ferenc Molnar’s “Olympia.”

Among the other 25 films being screened are Erich von Stroheim’s “Blind Husbands” (1919); Ernst Lubitsch’s “Eternal Love” (1929), starring John Barrymore; Frank Capra’s “So This Is Love” (1928); Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “A Letter to Three Wives” (1949); Frank Borzage’s “Little Man, What Now?” (1932); Carl Dreyer’s “The Parson’s Widow” (1920) and “Wild Bill Hickock” (1923), starring William S. Hart and restored by Cinecon.

There will be a panel on the Hollywood Blacklist and appearances by Diana Serra Cary, Kathryn Grayson, Virginia Grey, June Havoc, Marie Osborne and director Vincent Sherman, among others, including Carla Laemmle, niece of Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle. The annual awards banquet regularly features surprise guests.

BE THERE

Cinecon ’33 Festival, schedule and information: Red Lion Hotel, 100 West Glen Oaks Blvd., Glendale, CA 91202. (818) 956-5466.

Alex Theater, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, CA 91203. (818) 243-2539.