Wednesday, January 14, 2015

To Tell The Family Secret, My Grandmother Was Dutch

Actually, she wasn't, and that's the problem.

No doubt like you, I've been wanting to see Norma Talmadge's biggest hit, Smilin' Through (1922), for a long time but to my knowledge, you can't buy it on DVD and it turns out the only copy I could find is in the Dutch Film Archive. With intertitles in Dutch, a language I don't speak.

So you get a lot of dialogue like this:

"Nu veertig jaar geleden ... op een mooien Junidag ... was ik de gelukkigste man ter wereld ... Monica en ik zouden worden vereenigd in den echt."

That's easy for him to say!

Fortunately, the Google knows all and with the help of its Translate site, I've been slugging my way through. Good movie. I think — it's hard to tell. If God had meant us to watch movies in a thirty second burst followed by an eight minute interruption, he would have given us AMC in the womb.
You can watch Smilin' Through here, but as for the translation, well, all I can say is, "Son, you're on your own."

1 comment:

mister muleboy said...

I remember when AMC ran no commercial, and was trying to go head-to-head with TCM (actually, I think it pre-dated TCM, or was at least on most systems). I was sad to see it go -- but they were just airing the leftovers and scraps. . . .