As well as piano, he often incorporates other instruments into his performances, sometimes simultaneously. A pianist at London’s BFI Southbank for thirty years, he has played in over twenty countries across Europe, North America and Asia. Stephen Horne is internationally considered one of the leading silent film musicians. He was twice nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and was one of the 36 founding members of The Academy for Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Henry King (born January 24, 1886) was an American actor turned director who became one of the most commercially successful directors of the 1920’s. As the critic of Moving Picture World wrote in 1925, “There are few so blasé that they won’t feel a tug of the heart, a lump in the throat and moist eyelids while viewing Stella Dallas.” With its screenplay by Frances Marion, Hollywood’s leading female screenwriter, the film is particularly sensitive to the emotional violence of slights, snubs and omissions, as King builds the drama toward one of the most visually and emotionally impactful climaxes of any melodrama. When her daughter ( Lois Moran) becomes engaged to a fashionable country-clubber (a young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), Stella’s dilemma becomes painfully clear: Only by leaving her life can she ensure her daughter’s happiness. Produced by Samuel Goldwyn and directed by Henry King, the film is a powerful indictment of the rigid class barriers then emerging in the prosperous, postwar America of the 1920s, but the emotional center of the film is Stella (a brilliant portrayal by Belle Bennett, one of 73 actresses tested for the role), who marries “above her station” (to a temporarily embarrassed banker’s son, played by Ronald Colman) but is unable to adapt her dress and behavior to the bourgeois standards of her new husband. A stage adaptation soon followed, as did this film version in 1925 (the first of three). Stella Dallas, the working-class mother who makes the ultimate sacrifice for her socially ambitious daughter, became one of the most resonant figures in American culture from the moment Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel appeared in 1923. So I am grateful to MoMA for commissioning this score, fifteen years after that original screening”. In 2016 I prepared a duo arrangement for piano and harp, but the film’s emotional scope always felt ‘orchestral’ to me. I accompanied it several times over subsequent years, the music evolving from improvisation to composition. However, it soon became apparent that this was a truly great silent film. I was not able to watch the film beforehand, so discovered it while playing. “The first time I saw Stella Dallas was in 2007 – said Stephen Horne – when Kevin Brownlow asked me to accompany it on piano at a private event. “ Stella Dallas was acquired for the collection of The Museum of Modern Art by Iris Barry, MoMA's first film curator, in the 1930s, a time when ‘women's pictures’ were not considered worthy of serious attention,” said Dave Kehr, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Film. “Now, nearly a century later, the film has rightfully assumed the status of a classic. Together with our partners at The Film Foundation, we are most grateful to the Venice International Film Festival for giving us the opportunity to present our new restoration of Stella Dallas the way it should be seen, on a big screen with a full orchestral accompaniment.” But there is no doubt the first version is far superior to the ones that followed, thanks to the remarkable performance by Belle Bennet and the superb direction of Henry King, who makes the most of the expressive potential developed by the language of silent film at the height of its aesthetic evolution, before the advent of sound”. “ Stella Dallas was one of the greatest box-office hits in Hollywood silent film – stated the Director of the Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbera – not coincidentally remade twice: the first time in 1937, directed by King Vidor with Barbara Stanwyck in the starring role then in 1990, with Bette Midler directed by John Erman.
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