Still from If My Country Should Call
The time: the 1910s. The place: the United States and Mexico. The subject: war with Mexico, war in the world.
Two films, one produced by Universal and the other compiled by Felix and Edmundo Padilla, were screened Thursday night at Orphans. The first, If My Country Should Call, was notable, as University of South Carolina Film and Media Studies professor Mark Cooper said, for its “ordinariness” even though its subject matter and production history might have been unusual in other time periods. The second, La Venganza de Pancho Villa, is remarkable for its oddity, as it tells a story that Hollywood never told using footage from other people’s films.
Cooper introduced If My Country Should Call by discussing Universal’s rather unique history as the only major studio to employ a significant percentage of female directors (Twelve percent of its directors were women from 1916 to 1919). While If My Country Should Call was not directed by a woman, its screenplay was written by Ida May Park, who went on to direct for Universal. This short-lived phenomenon of women directors ended by the early 1920s. Cooper suggested that it wasn’t until 1982, with Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, that another woman sat in the director’s chair on a Universal lot.
In this film, which was missing two reels (made up for by Karen Young’s narration of the missing scenes), wars come between mothers and sons, and betrothed couples must choose between a love for their country and just plain love. With an introduction by the Library of Congress’s Mike Mashon (who jokingly described the film’s excavation from a Canadian landfill) and a score played by the inimitable Dennis James, the film played beautifully even if its hokey plot (involving no less than a patent medicine that guaranteed one would be found unfit for service and a woman who breaks an engagement in order to marry a millionaire) was less than overpowering. But the film’s ambivalence about war made it very different from films made about later wars, as if this film, like others made in its time, helped convince Hollywood (if not the public) that fighting for one’s country is always a higher good than love and family.
Mike Mashon
Actress, Karen Young, helps narrate the film.
Dennis James and Karen Young
For the second half of the evening, Gregorio Rocha, whose life as an archivist becomes more complex with each donation, showed some his recent acquisitions, including some 9.5 mm film taken in the late 1920s in Mexico with a Pathé Baby projector. These films included a newsreel about Charles Lindbergh’s flight to France. He also showed 16mm footage of a visit to the Yucatan Peninsula.
But, the big show of the night, one that has been seven years in the making, was the screening of La Venganza de Pancho Villa, compiled by Felix and Edmundo Padilla, itinerant exhibitors who screened the film in the U.S. and Mexico border regions from 1925 to 1937. Curator for the American Film Institute Collection at the Library of Congress, Kim Tomadjoglou led the preservation effort for the film and introduced the work. She noted again the difficulty of preserving a film that was constantly being edited and reworked by the Padillas in order to meet audience demands.
The film itself includes footage from a half-dozen films made in the late 1910s and early 1920s, with bilingual title cards produced by the Padillas. NYU students helped score the film, using records from the Padilla’s own collection and adding more traditional Mexican music from Smithsonian’s Folkways Recordings.
Given that the Padillas shot no footage of their own, the ability of the title cards to provide a cohesive narrative is nothing less than astonishing. And, as a film that was re-edited continually according to audience demands, it’s possible to see how Mexicans and Mexican-Americans understood the story of Pancho Villa in relation to their own history.
Gregorio Rocha and Kim Tomadjoglou
And a big thank you to Judson Memorial Church for hosting a wonderful dinner this evening!
