It's a shame that short films have largely gone the way of the dodo, at least outside of bundled showings at film festivals. Edison famously remarked that he didn't think anybody would sit still for a movie longer than a half hour, and short films used to be a standard part of the theater-going experience along with newsreels and cartoons. Most shorts shown theatrically from the 30's through the 50's were serial films shown one episode at a time, and once TV came along theatrical serials quickly became obsolete. Theaters started shedding shorts along with newsreels and cartoons (also largely rendered obsolete by TV) in an effort to fit more screenings in per day. Short films occasionally get shown on TV for special occasions (such as Mickey's Christmas Carol or Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance) but almost never theatrically, the main exception being Pixar shorts shown in front of their own feature films. Home video has helped shorts out somewhat but only in bundled form and usually under the banner of awards consideration, such as the Academy Awards shorts collections released each year. It's because of this lack of availability that short films have a sort of fleeting preciousness, so I appreciate whenever I can find a good older one, and for that purpose I'm once again grateful to the fine uploaders at YouTube and Internet Archive. The latter hasn't been featured too much on this blog but has been an invaluable resource for collecting interesting movies that have fallen into the public domain or whose owners don't mind putting up for free. A while ago I snagged an interesting short from the Internet Archive, The Antique Collector, made by an industrial film maker in the mid-70's and remaining a finely crafted curio from an age when shorts were at their most threatened.
A young boy named Tom (Scott Hart) works at his grandmother's antique store, scooping up items where he can and learning the fine art of marking up prices and haggling. His grandma (Edna Macafee) is an expert in the business but her spirit is gradually fading, and one day is charmed by a wealthy-looking man (Tom Ramirez) who buys an expensive piece of glassware from the store without asking the price. What she doesn't know what Tom sees - the man pitched the item into the trash after leaving the store. After he comes around a couple more times Tom realizes that he's not interested in the items he buys from the store, but rather buying Tom's grandma - and he may not realize how literal the collector's intentions are.
Unfolding like a delicate Twilight Zone episode, The Antique Collector is a warm and strangely resonant fable that has held up rather nicely for being almost forty years old. The direction and cinematography seep atmosphere and mood, the store among a pocket of antique shops stuck in a strange, dusty strip mall. The store is so displaced that the characters seem to inhabit a kind of dreamworld, an atmosphere supported by the boy having a secret best friend in an unsettling mannequin propped on a balcony. The acting, while not exactly Hollywood-level professional, is at least impassioned and works well with the odd premise. The only actor to have appeared in anything else (according to IMDB) is the grandma, Edna Macafee, who managed to appear in both Warlock Moon and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, a resume I'd kill to have. The music is pure 70's and extremely charming, and the ending has a cozy, still-shot quality that puts it in league with the best of 70's horror flicks (...like Warlock Moon, for that matter). Its writer/director, Jerry Callner, apparently had an award-winning career in industrial and educational films (much like Carnival of Souls director Herk Harvey) and his son James went on to make a number of films about obsessive compulsive disorder, a condition he suffers from himself. It's a shame this is so unknown that it doesn't even have an IMDB entry, nor does its creator or hardly any of the actors involved, but that's exactly what Internet Archive is for - helping people like me fill in the gaps of American film culture. Here's the short in full for those with just under a half hour to spare, not even breaking Thomas Edison's famous prediction of the maximum amount of time that people would sit still for a film.
~PNK
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