Film Society Reaches Age of ...
The Dartmouth Film Society, established in 1949 "to review the history of the motion picture and study social and technical aspects of this new art," celebrated the opening of its silver-anniversary year with a re-run of W. C. Fields' Million Dollar Legs, the film chosen to launch the society.
Teamed in a late-evening double feature January 11 in Spaulding Auditorium with Jack Benny's To Be or Not To Be, the Fields classic also served to open the Society's winter series, Comedy Avalanche, which will bring to the campus ihe comic genius of the great funnymen of films: Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and others. Planned for a Winter Carnival Special is Bob Hope and Bing Crosby's Road to Utopia, to be featured with a Roadrunner cartoon festival.
Dartmouth has long been a leader, under the skillful guidance of J. Blair Watson Jr.. in the serious contemplation of film as art form and has produced an extraordinary number of film notables, too many to mention without risk of omitting Precisely those who deserve top billing. The College was the site of the first national conference on "Film Study in Higher Education" in 1965, where much of the preliminary work for the formation of the American Film Institute took place.
There's a Horatio Algeresque aura about the story of the Film Society: impoverished antecedents, humble beginnings, orphan-in-the-storm wandering from-pillar-to-post, and other variations on the struggling-youngster-makes-good theme. Its early predecessors began, before World War I, sponsoring film-society type series shown Sunday afternoons at the old Nugget. After war, the scene shifted to 105 Dartmouth, where the Society offered its programs after its official birth in response to the demands of a few students and faculty members, vocalized by TheDartmouth. Screenings were held there and in Filene Auditorium and in the Fairbanks Hall theater until the completion of the Hopkins Center in 1962 provided a suitable home with splendid acoustics for the Society. Spaulding Auditorium is now used more for films than for any other type of program, and the Society currently boasts a membership of over 1700, largest in its history.
Had the popularity of film presentations been anticipated, Watson says, "I would have been, along with others, quite adamant for a separate film theater." In his view, any major addition to the Center should include two film theaters, seating 200 and 500, respectively. "Really," he predicts, "the educational use of all kinds of films has just begun."
Heroes and heroines may be all but indistinguishable in these shots of Bob Hope andDorothy Lamour in Road to Utopia, the Dartmouth Film Society's Carnival feature, andBrigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli in Contempt, reputedly a Dartmouth favorite, butclose examination will reveal a distinct difference in furniture design between the eras.
