Capitolfest started in earnest on Friday morning, with David Peckham at the organ accompanying the second entry in the 1922 Leather Pushers series of boxing shorts, “Round Two,” which were successful in catapulting Capitolfest tribute star Reginald Denny  to fame. This was followed immediately by the silent melodrama, Crooked Alley (Universal, 1923), starring Thomas Carrigan as likable professional thief Boston Blackie and a teenaged Laura La Plante as his leading lady. Among the other highlights of this initial session of Capitolfests was a fascinating presentation of nitrate film decomposition by George Willeman, the Nitrate Vault Leader of the Library of Congress Motion Picture and Recorded Sound Division.

Some of the extreme rarities of Capitolfest 21 were 1930’s Fox film, Temple Tower, Hush Money, a Fox gangster melodrama from 1931 with Joan Bennett and a stellar supporting cast that included the likes of Myrna Loy and George Raft, the Reginald Denny farce comedies, Clear the Decks (1929) and I’ll Show You the Town (1925), and, in its American premiere, a new restoration of the 1930 Polish film, Janko Muzykant, courtesy of the National Archive of Warsaw. This last was a major surprise for those of us in attendance (which apparently were many!) that were unfamiliar with the Polish film industry during the early sound era, and who found the 105-minute drama to be enormously compelling.

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