With thanks to Ken Faig Jr., a link to the new Shots Around Providence (1930s-1940) on YouTube. Via the Historical Society, which has kindly placed the amateur film online.

In one scene we see a Lovecraft-alike man shopping for a Christmas tree. These being stacked around the city’s Market Place fruit-market site on the waterfront in November/December 1934. I’ve lifted the shadows in Photoshop, which are always too dark on such things. I’ve also added a basic colourisation. Contact the Society if you want to give the film a thorough work-over and stabilisation.

I seem to recall that 1934 was the year that Lovecraft — having moved into 66 College St. — surprised his aunt by installing a Christmas tree and then merrily decking it and the halls. A family tradition that had long been in abeyance if I recall rightly. If it wasn’t that year, it was likely the next.

Back in summer 2011, I blogged here about the architecture of H.P. Lovecraft’s entrance into New York City. This being the Pennsylvania Station…

When Mr. H.P. Lovecraft stepped down onto the platform of the Pennsylvania Station, on his first ever visit to New York in April 1922, he was surrounded by the neo-gothic imagination in the very architecture of the place.

I now see that a 60-minute PBS documentary film appeared a few years later, American Experience: The Rise and Fall of Penn Station, being added to what appears to have become a cottage-industry of books about the station. The documentary seems very well reviewed by critics and buyers alike, and is now on Amazon Prime at $3. Though only in America. In the UK we have to get Prime and then buy a monthly subscription to PBS.

Further to my recently look at S. Fowler Wright and his biography and influence on Lovecraft, I’m pleased to see a post today lauding the restored 1933 movie of Fowler Wright’s science-fiction disaster classic Deluge (1927). It’s now available to stream…

Once a lost film and for decades only available in an Italian language print with English subtitles, it was recently restored from a newly-discovered 35mm nitrate negative with the English language soundtrack by Serge Bromberg’s Paris-based Lobster Films. Kino Repertory picked up the film for a limited theatrical re-release in the U.S. and now Kino Lorber Studio Classics presents the stateside disc debut of the Lobster restoration. It looks very good for its age, especially considering the original elements suffered partial decomposition. Digital tools have restored much of the image and the sharpness and the soundtrack is even more impressive, with a clarity not often heard in orphaned films of this vintage and a dynamic range to the musical score. The Blu-ray and DVD Kino Lorber release also features new audio commentary by film historian Richard Harland Smith and a bonus feature: the 1934 B-movie Back Page, a newspaper drama starring Peggy Shannon.

Apparently the movie’s distributor went bankrupt shortly after it was released in 1933, and then the movie was abruptly pulled from cinemas and cannibalised — the spectacular and costly special-effects scenes were extracted and crafted into new “Destruction of New York!” shorts that could generate long-term profits for creditors. This catastrophe scuppered any hope of a Hollywood script-writing career for S. Fowler Wright, and he returned to England.

Did Lovecraft see it? Well, after a long hiatus Lovecraft had returned to movie-going circa the winter of 1932-33, as the quality of movies rapidly improved. He was later wowed by the historical time-travel drama Berkeley Square in 1933 for instance. It’s thus quite possible that the prospect of seeing the ‘pest zone’ of New York entirely destroyed and swept away would have enticed him to a 1933 viewing of Deluge (the movie’s makers had swopped out the English Cotswolds for New York).

Though the Barlow letters suggest that Lovecraft was often tardy in such things, waiting until the very end of a film’s local run before visiting the cinema. Presumably there was less of a noisy distracting crowd in the cinema during the last few days of screening, and that was the way he liked it. Perhaps the tickets were also cheaper at such times. Such tardiness may well have meant he missed Deluge, it being abruptly pulled from release before he could see it. I know of no evidence that he managed to catch the movie before it was pulled.

He somewhat sporadically continued to attend cinema shows, for instance adoring the 18th century British Empire romance-adventure Clive of India (1935) showing the founding of the British Empire in India. This he held up to Barlow, alongside Berkeley Square, as a movie that had given him a ‘real kick’. In such continued cinema-going it’s not impossible he may have, at some point in 1934-36, seen and enjoyed one of the “Destruction of New York!” shorts that Deluge became.