Montreal 1900 Video Search

Here’s a still from a Gaumont 1910 newsreel, capturing an “Indian Chief” in the 1910 Eucharist Convention Parade. Montreal.

Canada likes to put its native people on public display for the world: they just did it for the 2010 Olympics. And in 1908, for the Quebec Bicentennial, which Margarent and Norman Nicholson attended, they went all out.

Although I am simply mesmerized by the quality of the early film footag now available on YouTube, especially the British Film Institute’s films that have been restored to near perfect quality, (and plays at normal speed) I am upset because I can’t find any footage of Montreal.

St. John’s Newfoundland, yes. But no Montreal.

The only other film of 1910 era Montreal I have found was an Edison short of a firetruck. Very dull. In winter too.

Sad, really. But I’ll keep on looking. Maybe the National Archives has some or the Bibliotheque Nationale.

I watched the beginning of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World last night. In 64, I went to see it at the cinema and remember laughing so hard it hurt. I was ten years old then and of ‘legal’ age to go to the movies. In 1927 there was a fire in a Montreal theatre, where children and babies died, so they made a law that no one under 10 could attend the cinema. I was tall, I think I saw certain movies at 9 years old. Not many though.

Last night, I was enjoying the film, (I remembered only the ‘kick the bucket’ bit, which my brother adored)but I was too tired to stay up. I will watch the rest later. Compared to say, the Great Race, it seems really low budget. I mean the movie was filmed along that highway between Las Vegas and L.A. and wherever else in studio (I’m guessing). But all those famous actors, most of whom are dead. Well, Mickey Rooney is still alive, I think. (I know that road. My husband got a migraine during a drive from Los Vegas to LA in 1996 and my California cousin, who was driving, had to find a place to get off the road so he could throw up. Not easy.)

Let’s face it, I can count on the fingers of one hand the comedies which made me laugh really really hard. (My personal favorites are Trading Places and Ruthless People oh, and Billy Crystal comedies. Oh and the Panther movies and Python movies too.) Today’s comedies I find a little crude (not that there’s anything wrong with excrement, urine and semen jokes.)

Jim Carrey movies work for my husband, but I find his comedies (except for Liar Liar) a little stupid. (Well…) I count Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Truman Show among my top 10 movies, however. With respect to Eternal Sunshine I am not alone. About 6,000,000 Facebook users list it as one of their favourite movies. (I think I saw that!)

Anyway, all this to say, Mack Sennett, the Richmond Quebec Native (wikipedia says Danville) died in 1960. I wonder if he would have been given a cameo were he still alive in 63.

He was sick (and broke) at the end, I think.

I bet Edith and Flo both say It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. My husband’s mother, Marion, daughter of Marion Nicholson loved the comedy The Russians are Coming The Russians are Coming. So my husband tells me.

The Nicholson women, especially Marion, loved a good laugh.

Anyway, I’ve also taped some March of Time newsreels off Turner Classic Movies. Too bad they aren’t running the 1953 television versions. I have been trying to track down Number 19, about the Malayan Emergency (Fight against an Invisible Enemy) because I have figured out that there’s a sequence with my grandmother, Dorothy Nixon, scoring cricket at the Selangor Club – I guess to show that life is going on as normal.

The Malayan Emergency is not a part of history widely remembered in North America. Odd, because it has many parallels to this current so-called War on Terror. No less a person than Lewis Mackenzie said so in a speech I heard him give last year.

Today, the BBC Radio Four website has a home page teaser: Has the Taliban won in Afghanistan? According to General MacKenzie, if we had conducted the War In Afghanstan like the Malayan Communist Emergency, it would have gone better.
My story, Looking for Mrs. Peel, www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html is about Dorothy’s trials as a Japanese Prisoner of War.

Richmond’s King of Comedy

Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett in An Arcadian Maid, 1910. Both Pickford and Sennett are Canadian. Sennett is from Richmond, Quebec, or thereabouts, depending on who tells the story. He had changed his name from Sinnott and I have documents showing that Norman Nicholson did business with Sennett’s father. I also have a document fromm 1900 that shows that Sinnott was a Conservative voter. The family moved away in 1902.

In 1909, Marion,who is working as a teacher in the city of Montreal, goes to see Man in the Box at the Nickelodeon. Possibly with Edith, her older sister. Margaret remarks upon it in a letter. I have no idea which one. It likely wasn’t the Ouimetoscope, Montreal’s largest and most prestigious motion picture house, with 1200 seats and made to look respectable like a theatre.

They didn’t use the term ‘movie’ back then: in fact, I have a 1917 letter where Flora’s sister Edith writes that she went to the ‘movies’ and she puts the word in parantheses which indicates it is a new term.

Man in the Box was a silent short that happened to star Mack Sennett. Whether Marion (or Edith) recognized Sennett as a boy she had seen around town (he would have been a contemporary) is unknown.

I did read somewhere that it wasn’t until the 1960′s that Richmondites realized Mack Sennett was that Sinnott boy. Sennett, who went on to become the King of Comedy in Hollywood, wrote an autobiography in 1954 and he talks about his early life in Richmond, about how he spent most of his time going to funerals and how he felt closer to French Quebeckers than English Quebeckers, because they were Catholic, like he was.

There were hundreds of Nickelodeons or Nickels in Canada…. They were considered rather seedy places, if not downright dangerous. That didn’t stop most middle class citizens, including the very proper Nicholson women, from attending. Here’s an article from the Ladies’ Home Journal 1909 with a negative take on the motion picture shows. Remember, this was a day and age when many -if not most- children around 10 to 16 worked, sometimes in factories, so this argument seems a little lame. I imagine parents sent their kids to the Nickel to get them both out of the house and ‘off the street’.

Are some parents asleep that they allow their children to go to the prevalent five-cent moving-picture shows in our cities or ‘nickelodeons’ as they are called? Have they any conception of what their children see at these places? Immoral pictures? someone asks. No, not immoral in the sense we generally mean it, but just as bad, if not worse. Here is the program of one show: a beautiful lady, with dress of lace, bedecked with jewels, comes in an opening picture, then men with swords and long, waving plumes in their hats, swords flash out, a duel ensues, the hero kills his rival! So we have murder for a beginning. Next comes a haunted house with beds sliding down inclined floors. This is followed by the Devil jumping out of the moon! Next is a series of pictures of the plates, pots, the oven, the bread and pies and the stove, all of which was so exhiliarating on one occasion recently a little girl in the audience went into hysterics and ever since cannot be persuaded by her mother to go into the kitchen. The Next treat was a huge frog in a fountain, which suddenly stuck out a large red tongue at the audience, frightening almost out of their senses no fewer than a dozen little girls present. So reposeful for delicate nervous systems of children, is it not? Then came the final prize series: a man-monkey steals a woman out of a house and keeps her a year: the succeeding pictures show their love and affection for each other, and when in the last picture the husband finds his wife, she refuses to go back because she has fallen in love with the monkey! Hundreds of parents actually furnish their children with money to go to these pictures….”They should be illegal” some say. But why the law? Isn’t it more to the point that we should not furnish our children with the money to go to these places. They would close soon enough.”