Upstream
About Upstream
In a cheap boarding house of vaudeville acts, a knife-thrower lives among players who cannot get work. Earle Foxe plays a vain actor from a famous stage family who is sent to London, for the name, to play Hamlet. An old tragedian coaches him. He comes back to New York a success and a snob, and the house cuts him down.
Cast & crew
More about Upstream
John Ford directed. Randall Faye wrote it. Charles G. Clarke photographed it. Fox released it on 30 January 1927 at 60 minutes, silent, with English intertitles. It was treated as lost until a tinted nitrate print turned up in the New Zealand Film Archive in 2009. Fox, the National Film Preservation Foundation, and the Academy archive backed a restoration done in New Zealand.
Themes
Making
Unlike the other American silents found in that archive, Upstream was restored in New Zealand because of Ford’s name. The print is tinted nitrate.
Reviews
Richard Brody, in The New Yorker of 21 June 2011, recounted the boarding-house plot and the Hamlet trip after the Academy showed the restoration.
Look
Charles G. Clarke shot the boarding house. The lighting takes up Murnau’s chiaroscuro and forced perspective, which Ford had not used this way before.
Music
Silent, with English intertitles.
Preservation
Thought lost until 2009, when a complete tinted nitrate print was found at the New Zealand Film Archive. Restored in New Zealand with support from 20th Century Fox, the National Film Preservation Foundation, and the Academy Film Archive.
Notes
- The working title was The Public Idol. Another Fox project already called Upstream had been sold and never made, so this film took that title.
- Grant Withers, Jane Winton, Lydia Yeamans Titus, Émile Chautard, Francis Ford, and Dwight Frye are in the cast. Nancy Nash and Raymond Hitchcock are on the catalog bill.
- It is the first Ford film to use F. W. Murnau’s forced perspective and chiaroscuro. Murnau had started at Fox in 1926.
- New Zealand projectionists kept American prints they had been told to destroy. This one was never shipped back.
- Richard Brody described the Hamlet plot in The New Yorker on 21 June 2011, after an Academy screening.
- The same New Zealand cache held a trailer for Ford’s lost Strong Boy (1929).
Scenes
- The actor is called to London to play Hamlet because of his family name.
- The old tragedian coaches him.
- He returns conceited, and the boarding house answers him.
Influenced by
- F. W. Murnau’s forced perspective and lighting, after he arrived at Fox in 1926
