The Scarlet Letter
A FILM BY: Victor Sjöström
WRITTEN BY: Nathaniel Hawthorne (novel), Frances Marion (adaptation)
STARRING: Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson, Henry B. Walthall
Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Co-presented by the Chicago Film Society
THE SCARLET LETTER is that rarest of things: a movie adapted from a great work of American literature that doesn't embarrass the source material. Indeed, this tale of adultery, hypocrisy, and mutilation purportedly reached the screen only because Lillian Gish's wholesome bona fides, not Nathaniel Hawthorne's literary reputation, assuaged church group skepticism. Gish stars as Hester Prynne, the Puritan woman whose affair with pastor Dimmesdale (Lars Hanson) brings an out-of-wedlock birth and the injunction that the adulterous wife be forced to wear a scarlet 'A' affixed to her dress. Discussing the choice to hire Victor Sjöström (The Wind) to direct this quintessentially American story, Gish explained, "The Swedish people are closer to what our Pilgrims were, or what we consider them to have been, than our present day Americans."
Print courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive
Technical Information
Production Year: 1926
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Run Time: 100 mins
Format: 35mm
World City in its Teens: A Report on Chicago
A FILM BY: Heinrich Hauser
Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Co-presented by the Chicago Film Society
The quintessential film genre in the late 1920s and early 1930s may well have been the city symphony—an international idiom that bluntly analogized the frenetic pace of modern urban life with celluloid montage. One especially neglected example is Heinrich Hauser’s Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein bericht über Chicago, which offers almost as many perspectives on the Windy City as its mouthful of a title has inspired variant English translations, among them World City In Its Teens, A World City Stretches Its Wings, and Metropolis at an Awkward Age. Hauser, a nomadic German writer and photographer, visited Chicago in 1931 and recorded a wide range of neighborhoods and conditions, fashioning a civic portrait both dazzling and bleak, sterling and sobering. Back home, the Berliner Borsen-Zeitung praised the film for its vision of “America stripped of illusions.” For us, Hauser’s film serves as a reminder of the longevity of Chicago’s tangle of contradictions.
Print courtesy of EYE Filmmuseum
Technical Information
Production Year: 1931
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Run Time: 74 mins
Format: 35mm
