Friday, April 19, 2002
8:00 pm
Admission: $6.00
Moore College of Art & Design
20th & Race Streets, Philadelphia
(215) 568-4515, ext. 4099

The Secret Cinema at Moore College of Art & Design
presents silent comedy PATHS TO PARADISE, with live music

On Friday, April 19, The Secret Cinema will once again show a lesser-seen but still classic feature from the wondrous world of silent films, when it presents the acclaimed 1925 comedy PATHS TO PARADISE. The film is one of the few extant masterpieces of star Raymond Griffith -- a major talent who today is admired by historians and select critics as a worthy peer of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, yet has been sadly forgotten by modern audiences.One reason for Raymond Griffith's non-recognition factor is that so little of his work survives (a problem with much of silent film's history). PATHS TO PARADISE, a delightful blend of mannered comedy fitting to Griffith's dapper, cucumber-cool persona, and genuinely thrilling physical and chase scenes, makes one marvel at what we have lost -- particularly so in this case, for all prints of this film are missing the seventh, final reel! And
that is the way we will show it.

Providing authentic live keyboard accompaniment will be Don Kinnier, who has played for every previous Secret Cinema presentation of silent movies. Don is Pennsylvania's most prominent silent film musician, and has been plying his craft for over thirty-five years. The Philadelphia native (now based in Lititz) has studied the techniques and repertoires of the original
theater musicians of the silent era. Don has added piano and organ soundtracks to silent screenings at the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, International House and the Jewish Y in Philadelphia, and for several years now at the annual Betzwood Silent Film Festival at Montgomery County Community College.

The screening will also include unusual SILENT short subjects. There will
be one complete show, starting at 8:00 pm.

PATHS TO PARADISE (1925, Dir: Clarence Badger)
In his first starring vehicle, Raymond Griffith plays his top-hatted, super smooth comic character to the hilt as a clever con man that must team up with his female equal (Betty Compson) to heist a priceless diamond necklace. Full of inventive gags and surprising twists, the film climaxes with one of the wildest chase scenes in all of cinema, leading from California to Mexico. When PATHS TO PARADISE was restored in the early 1970s, the final reel was lost (as it still is). However, the feature as it
exists nonetheless reaches a satisfying dramatic and comedic conclusion."It may be a silent-era film, but PATHS TO PARADISE is also a very modern comedy which satirizes many of the social targets found in films today. In the first ten minutes, the film makes fun of gullible tourists, stereotyping of Asians, drug addiction, murder, extortion, corrupt authority and police brutality. The two con artists portrayed by Raymond Griffith and Betty Compson lie, cheat and steal throughout the whole movie -- they have a jolly good time doing it too!" - Bruce Calvert, silentsmajority.com

After working as a child stage actor, a circus performer, and a vaudeville pantomime, Raymond Griffith began in movies around 1915, as a gag man and actor in short comedies. Even in the frantic two-reel shorts of Mack Sennett he managed to display the traits that would become his trademark in the next decade: always calm, suave, impeccably dressed, and just faintly bemused by the odd goings-on around him. Walter Kerr wrote in The SILENT CLOWNS that "Griffith's originality, and the essence of his comedy, lay in his perfectly honest undemanding, unregretted, eternally grinning iconoclasm." After progressing to scene-stealing character roles in feature dramas, he was given complete creative control in a series of comedy features for Paramount. He enjoyed great critical success, with some writing that his Civil War comedy HANDS UP! was superior to THE GENERAL,
but with the coming of sound, Griffith moved to a behind-the-scenes role in filmmaking. Some have theorized that this was because he was a difficult and egotistic perfectionist, but most attribute his vanishing from the screen to his hoarse, whispery voice (the product of either a childhood bout with diptheria, or as Griffith claimed, the nightly scream required of an early stage role). His final acting job was as the French soldier dying in the foxhole in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, a role Griffith lobbied for and played without pay. By then he had already begun a highly successful new career as a producer and script doctor, which would last until his retirement in 1940.