National Film Registry additions announced, including the 1927 film “Stark Love”

The Library of Congress listed its films added to the National Film Registry at the end of the year.  The registry is of films “that will be preserved as cultural, artistic and/or historical treasures for generations to come.”  It’s always a mixture of famous and esoteric films.  This year, they added “Jezebel”, “The Incredible Shrinking Man”, “Dog Day Afternoon”, “Mrs. Miniver”, “The Muppet Movie”, “The Mark of Zorro”, and “Pillow Talk”.  Although the list is American films, they added “Once Upon A Time in the West,”  a Sergio Leone spaghetti western.

Shorts that were added to the list included the “Thriller” video and the student film made by Martin Brest (director of “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Scent of a Woman”) in 1972 at NYU Film School, “Hot Dogs for Gaugin,” which stars Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman in her film debut.

I ended up reading online about one of the films that was new to me, “Stark Love,” a silent film that was made on location in western North Carolina and released in 1927.  It was for decades a lost movie, but was mentioned favorably by James Agee in his 1940s film criticism.  The Library of Congress describes it:

A maverick production in both design and concept, “Stark Love” is a beautifully photographed mix of lyrical anthropology and action melodrama from director Karl Brown. “Man is absolute ruler. Woman is working slave.” Such are the rigid attitudes framing this tale of a country boy’s beliefs about chivalry that lead him to try to escape a brutal father with the girl he loves. “Stark Love,” cast exclusively with amateur actors and filmed entirely in the Great Smoky Mountains, is an illuminating portrayal of the Appalachian people.

There’s a nice bit of history about it in a story connected to a screening of the movie in Knoxville; it details what happened to cast members (although the publicity claimed that only the female lead had ever seen a movie, one was a University of Alabama football star who was the father of Fob James, 1970s-80s era governor of Alabama!), and how a print of the long-lost movie was found in Europe.  The New York Times review of the movie from 1927 (which is very favorable) is startlingly dated (“An engrossing and trenchant pictorial transcript of the daily life of those slothful mountaineers of North Carolina and Tennessee…  [I]n depicting the attitude of the lazy men toward their women or the willingness of the women and girls to carry out the work allotted to them by their unnatural taskmasters, Mr. Brown never is extrvagant. The men are harsh and indolent and the women do the bidding of the males as if it were only natural. …Mr. Brown deftly portrays the ignorance of these people and their primitive methods of doing things, whether it be the washing of clothes, the cleaning of shoes with stove-black and grease or the baking of bread in the hot ashes.”).

I posted about a film shot in Memphis in the thirties that was added to last year’s list here.  H/t to the blog of John Belfuss, the Commercial Appeal film critic.

Update: Fob James date corrected as per comments.