Silent Volume

Mabel's Busy Day (1914)

2012-02-04T16:58:00.000-05:00

I’ve seen nearly every silent film Charlie Chaplin appeared in, from Making a Living (1914) right through to Modern Times (1936). So when I tell you that Mabel’s Busy Day is one of the strangest Chaplin films there is, I do so with some authority.

It isn’t just Chaplin’s film. It belongs equally to Mabel Normand, Keystone Studio’s biggest female star; a gifted comic in her own right, as well as a director. Normand may have directed herself in this film; or it was Keystone boss Mack Sennett who did it—my sources dispute this. But whoever’s responsible created something memorably strange. Surreal, in fact, in a way Chaplin rarely was, even once his growing creative control let him try anything he wanted.

Mabel’s Busy Day is a short, set at a racecar track. The fact that cars are racing is totally irrelevant; what matters is that the race has drawn a crowd, and a rowdy one, held in by a wooden fence. Outside the fence is Mabel, a woman selling sausage dogs. She wears a big tin drum slung over her neck, holding the links in one side and buns and mustard in the other. It looks like a washbasin. Mabel’s not making much cash outside the fence, so she bribes a Keystone Kop to let her inside, where the mob is. It turns out the mob is mostly male, and drunk, and maybe, Mabel’s not prepared to deal with that.

Early silent actresses tended to have a defining trait that informed their on-screen-persona. Mary Pickford’s was often aggression; she faced situations with her fists-up, though behind this a soft heart lay. Lillian Gish was almost the reverse. Normand’s essential quality, I think, was appearing overwhelmed. She could lash out, as she does in this film, but her punches lacked the authority of a Pickford smack. Those big, mournful eyes of hers gave it away—she was a gentle soul, terrified of a world too big for her. Her character was, anyway.

In Mabel’s Busy Day, the heroine is quickly and repeatedly loomed over by loutish men. They grin and steal her food without paying. She slugs one down, but mostly she’s abused by them, and we’re soon conscious—in a way that makes us uncomfortable—of the presence of the crowd. It is always a little close. It is watching her. Mabel’s seems almost to be onstage. The film’s main action takes place in and around a wide semi-circle of dirt, ringed by these people, and I don’t know what purpose such a space would serve at a racetrack, but in this film, it makes a very good gladiatorial pit.

And where’s Chaplin been all this time? Like Mabel, he wants to enter the track area without paying, but his method is cruder: he just assaults a Kop and bypasses the line.

I don’t think Chaplin is the Tramp in this film. His clothes look too new. Then again, the coat and the shoes are too big, so this is not his tipsy millionaire character either. Nor is it his blue-collar working man. It is some strange mix: a drunk, apparently wearing someone else’s nice clothes, attending a populist event and acting a lot like the Tramp.

How does that sound to you? Watching him here, it occurred to me how much of our tolerance for the Tramp’s behavior rests upon our acceptance that he’s a desperate man. He picks pockets and steals food because he’s broke and starving. He flirts with women above his station because he’s lonely—and really, almost every woman is above his station anyway. But take away the obvious symbols of his poverty—the clothes—and isn’t he just a nut? Or something worse?

Like Normand, Chaplin performs here for an audience within the film, as well as for us. Watch the sequence in which he confuses one of Normand’s discarded links for a cigar: it’s odd, to us, to see a man who is not a bum picking up food off the ground—but it’s also odd to the people in the film. At least half the crowd is watching him, big grins on their faces. They’re either cruel or post-modern (and Keystone films were occasionally both).

Even Chaplin’s movement is warped. His second run-in with a Kop is more of a dance than a fight—and when you read this, understand that I’m describing a fight that, within the context of a film, is very much a fight, but often looks like a dance; I’m not describing a balletic fight scene. Not just the dropkicks, haymakers, tumbles and rolls of a typical Chaplin brawl. I mean a duet of footsteps, with coordinated spins.

Soon after, Chaplin happens across a bigger Kop, and tips his hat to him. Then he circles him, and does it again. And again—the behavior is compulsive; robotic. More importantly, it isn’t efficient. The true Tramp’s behavior was often strange, but it always had its own logic, and was designed to achieve a goal with minimal expense of time or resources. This sequence does the opposite. I can’t compare it to anything Chaplin did before or since, except possibly his Mutual-era short, The Rink (1916). Even that one isn’t much the same.

Always the crowd hangs around; observes; looking a little hungry as they do it. I’m not giving away much when I tell you that the crowd gets theirs—a little bit of retribution from Mabel and Charlie, anyway. But what is the message? Don’t tell me Chaplin and Normand and Sennett didn’t have one. They’re saying something about audiences here, even if this is a Keystone comedy, and even if the crowd was, in part, a real crowd of non-actors.

When talented comics and directors make a dark comedy about an audience that breathes down performers’ necks—an audience of fickle, shallow, mocking people; tasteless and thieving and cheap, well… it must have felt good, at the end of a long week, to play that reel.

Where to find Mabel’s Busy Day:
Mabel’s Busy Day can be found on Disc Two of Flicker Alley’s fantastic four-disc set, Chaplin at Keystone.

La Bohème

2012-01-17T21:58:00.000-05:00

I have a love for Lillian Gish’s work so strong it approaches prejudice. She’s my favorite actor, and the promise of seeing one of her performances is enough to make me watch anything she’s in. But, when I do, I often find the actors around her, the sets—the whole movie, even—blurring into the background. Gish did not work in a vacuum, but sometimes, that’s how I remember it.

La Bohème is, surprisingly, the first filmed adaptation of Puccini’s opera. It is not the best film Gish ever starred in, but its cast and director were game, and deserve their props, just like her. It has moments that are sublime, though those moments are few, and mostly confined to the first half.

King Vidor, whose interest in poor and hopeless souls reached an apocalyptic peak with The Crowd (1928), here delivers something intermittently light. John Gilbert is perfectly cast as Rodolphe, a playwright who has barely a franc to his name, and seems exhilarated by it. Gilbert, an actor with real charm, seems almost balletic in his big scenes: standing well-poised and straight; his form tapering to a thin waist, and his footsteps light. He is Carelessness.

Gish, as Mimi, is Concern. She’s an embroiderer; as dirt-poor as Rodolphe, but more preoccupied with the consequences of it. It’s a typical Gish role, in the sense that she plays a woman who suffers greatly, but persists, thanks to the strong spirit inhabiting her weak body.

Oh, the things she does. I’ll describe just two. First, Mimi’s trip to the pawn shop, where she spills a bundle of goods on the proprietor’s table—an amazing piece of pantomime, as Gish manages to attach a split-second’s worth of meaning to each object as the man casually flicks them aside. The pace of this bit makes it comic, but the intensity—and range—of different reactions Gish delivers, using her eyes and mouth, shoulders, arms and hands, makes it moving too. To achieve both is genius.

The second example, also ostensibly comic, occurs soon after Mimi and Rodolphe meet. Mimi arrives at her neighbour’s apartment badly chilled, and so he offers to let her warm herself by his stove-pipe. There’s a fairly obvious joke here (one Vidor intended, I think, since he gives a lot of screen time to a packing tube and loaf of French bread later on); but that’s not the point of the scene. The point is to sexualize Mimi without compromising her character. Even covered neck to foot, wearing a shawl, she must still envelope the stove pipe to get all of its heat, and then, turn around to warm her rear. And when she does that, arching her back and turning up her face, there’s something a little Garbo-esque about Mimi right then.

This is all great silent acting, of course. But what’s more interesting to me is that both scenes have a beat to them I’d call musical. The first, Gish composes of short notes; the second, of long draws of the bowstring. We are adapting opera here, after all. The music has to come out somehow. Combine these scenes with the totality of Gilbert’s performance and you see how Vidor proposed to do it.

Other elements, though, just feel stagey. The bohemians’ living space is gigantic, or at least it looks that way, as though theatrical width was needed for a film with no dance numbers or otherwise complex choreography. Rodolphe’s friends are painted a bit too broad for a film from the mid-20s. And the costumes, especially for the women, are outsized and garish. This looks wrong on Gish.

Actually, joy looks wrong on Gish. And maybe that’s why, as La Bohème wore on, I cared less. If you know the plot of the opera, you know joy is fleeting for Mimi, but there is a point, about in the middle, where she has a lot of it. And damn it, seeing poor, sweet, suffering Gish waltz through a grove with Gilbert, in swoon, seemed cheap. A cynic would say she had no gift for light comedy. Being prejudiced, I prefer to think of Gish as having created a character too full, too nuanced in her fears and goals, to be as air-headed as the rest. Maybe I should believe in love instead. But frankly, I couldn’t believe that Mimi believed in love, and that’s the trouble.

Though Mimi is pursued by a drooling Viscount, who manipulates opera glasses like a probe, she remains above reproach—a more virginal character than I understand her operatic counterpart to have been. The sexual politics thus simplified, the film can only concern itself with whether Rodolphe and Mimi will find happiness; which, in a film like this, really boils down to whether or not Mimi will die. I haven’t seen Gish die very often, but, it should be noted, she can collapse like nobody’s business.

Where to find La Bohème:
I saw La Bohème live, as part of Revue Cinema’s Silent Sundays series, organized by Eric Veillette. Accompaniment was provided by William O’Meara.

***Can't get enough King Vidor? No, of course you can't. Read my posts on The Crowd and his super-rare 1920 film, The Jack-Knife Man.

Yol (The Way) (1982)

2012-01-11T14:46:00.006-05:00

You can gauge the grimness of a film by the number of jokes you hear once the lights go up. Not jokes made at the film’s expense, but to lighten the mood. “Well, that was a laugh-riot…,” et cetera. When Yol ended, I heard a lot of people trying to be funny.

I worry this will deter you from seeing Yol. I might further deter you by telling you the movie is old: made in 1982, and subtitled: spoken in Turkish and Kurdish. It is melodramatic, at times shamelessly so; its performances are sincere but archetypal; its dialogue, expository. But it is also a righteous masterpiece, containing one of the cruelest sequences I’ve ever seen on film. It is profound and unsparing in its tragedy. It should not be missed.

Turkish director Yilmaz Güney created Yol by proxy, while a prisoner. He managed to smuggle footage out of his country and into Switzerland, then on to France, for editing. Appropriately then, his subject is imprisonment and freedom: the stories of five Turkish convicts, each serving a long sentence, and each given a week’s leave, over the course of which they must travel back to their homes and assess the damage. The damage, for several of them, is great. The convicts’ week out is not a vacation, but a brief window within which to conduct necessary business.

Nor are they ever, really, free. Güney portrays Turkey as a police state, in which obeying the law is more a matter of self-preservation than proof of good character. This is made clear in a remarkable early scene, when one of the convicts informs soldiers that he is, in fact, a convict, then sits comfortably among a crowd of commuters, several of whom bum cigarettes off him. They seem unfazed; as though he’d said he was a dentist. Imagine a similar situation here.

Following rules is an end unto itself. One of the men loses his papers and is immediately locked back up. Sorting this out may take the entire week. The man hasn’t seen his wife in years. “You shouldn’t have lost your papers,” says a soldier. Another man, a Kurd, trudges home to the Syrian border, where different soldiers (but the same, the same), shoot villagers almost daily. The first thing he hears when he arrives is the pound-pound-pound of gun fire. Having never heard this in real life, I thought it sounded almost domestic—like a very loud sewing machine.

It so happens that we hear a real sewing machine soon after, sounding almost as ominous, greeting a convict who returns to a family that does not want him. His cowardice led to his brother-in-law’s death, we learn. His wife (running the sewing machine) must choose: go with her husband and children, disgracing her family forever, or turn her back on him. This is her choice, but not her rules. Her own father and brother make it clear that, if she forgives her husband, she’s as good as dead to them.

This is deep misogyny. We get, loud and clear, that the plight of women here is no easier than it is for men, and in some ways, is far harder. It is not enough that women suffer too; they must also justify mens’ suffering by staying pure—maintaining the promise of a happy home so that convicts may fantasize about returning to one, some day. Yol’s central story, concerning the convict Seyit Ali (Tarak Akan) and his wife Ziné (Serif Sezer) takes this to the extreme. In this story, the wife has fallen. She prostituted herself in her husband’s absence, and her life is forfeit.

Years after watching Yol, when the rest of the narratives have faded or blurred, you’ll remember this man and his wife. You’ll remember her, in her thin red shawl, shivering, stumbling, then crawling through the snow after her better-dressed husband, crying out to him for help. You’ll remember him—his face—as he summons enough rage to remain pitiless. “If you weaken,” his father told him, “I will haunt you from the next life.”

Seyit Ali set out on a five-hour winter trek, on foot, with a weakened wife in tow, and he gave her practically nothing to wear. That is murder. And yet, he had been the film’s noblest character up to this point: tall, quiet, firm in tone and bearing. We are conflicted. We have pity, in abundance, for the wife, but even a bit for the husband, because we know that he too has been offered a hideous choice, and because, as a man with a heart, somewhere, he will be crushed by guilt and regret, should his wife succumb. It is an epic scene, multi-faceted; detailing a total failure of human nature.

Seyit Ali and Ziné both broke the rules. His crime put him in prison; hers made her a pariah. But when they try to follow the rules, they risk destroying themselves and each other, at least emotionally, and perhaps literally, too. Everyone in Yol, then, is a victim, including the perpetrators and persecutors. Everyone’s life is tenuous when privacy counts for nothing and the misdeeds of the few are blamed for the failings of the whole.

Yol depicted places unfamiliar to me, filled with men and women in circumstances I found alien and hard to fathom. But I was unable to remain an outsider. The film accepts no passive viewing—to even try, we have to close our eyes not just to Güney’s society, but to our own. Bigotry, zealotry, misogyny, even so-called ‘honor killings’, are still with us. The fight against them must be constant, and we must all be part of it.

So start by watching this film.

Where to find Yol:

Yol screens at 6:30 pm, Saturday, January 28, 2012, at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox—part of The Way Home: The Films of Turkish Master Yilmaz Güney, an eight film retrospective showcasing Güney’s work. The retrospective, which also includes The Hungry Wolves (1969), Hope (1970), and Elegy (1971), runs from January 26 to February 5.

Metropolis (Moroder Version) (1984)

2012-01-04T15:06:00.000-05:00

First things first: the Maria Robot is not gold, she’s silver. I know this. I’ve seen her that way for years, onscreen and in my head.

Indulge me a moment’s reflection. In 19XX, when I was a boy of fifteen, I saw Metropolis for the first time. I don’t know what version I saw, but I do know it wasn’t Giorgio Moroder’s, because it wasn’t in color, and Pat Benatar was nowhere to be heard.

I saw the movie alone, late at night, on TV. The French channel. The intertitles were subtitled into French, which didn’t matter at all, of course. I was hooked. This blog is a product of that night.

I wanted to see the movie again, immediately. I mountainbiked up the road to my town’s local Blockbuster Video (RIP), found the store manager, and informed him of the VHS tape I wished to order: specifically, whatever tape had Metropolis on it. No Internet, folks. The only way to learn was to ask.

“Which Metropolis?” the guy asked. Which? “The one that was on TV last night—on the French channel,” I explained. He hadn’t seen it. “Was it in color?” he asked me. No. “There’s a colorized one,” he said. “And the soundtrack’s by Queen.”

That sounded weird to me. It certainly wasn’t what I’d seen the night before, and given that mail-order, with its minimum-six-week delivery time, was the only way to get a silent movie of any kind in Lindsay, Ontario, in 19XX, I wasn’t prepared to take a risk. Besides, it seemed like bad form to watch what was—probably—a mangling of the original film before seeing the original. I did order the original, and something like nine weeks later, it arrived. I still have that tape.

That video store manager was the first person to alert me to the existence of the Moroder Version, though he didn’t describe it right. Queen didn’t do the soundtrack—Freddy Mercury’s song, “Love Kills,” is simply part of it, along with Benatar’s “Here’s My Heart,” Adam Ant’s “What’s Going On,” and lots of electronica composed by Moroder himself. And Moroder did a lot more than add color to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film. He also compiled bits of footage from copies spread around the world, fusing them together for the first time in decades.

Yet, at 82 minutes, the Moroder Version is still notably fleet. It is short not just because some things were left out, but because Moroder sped other things up, added fades in a few spots, and replaced the intertitles with subtitles. A few scenes he also slowed, but overall, this Metropolis is faster and more hectic than others I’ve seen, even by the standards of its spastic leads, Brigitte Helm (Maria) and Gustav Fröhlich (Freder).

Is there any point in rehashing the plot? If you’ve read this far, you’ve seen Metropolis. On the off-chance you haven’t, I direct you to my review of the fully-restored Metropolis, which debuted only last year, and, at about 148 minutes, feels positively gargantuan compared to the Moroder Version. They are different films, in more ways than one.

The Moroder Version omits nothing you remember from Metropolis—I mean really remember. Meaning the big scenes, the ones you never forgot, even after your first viewing: the clock; the flood; the robot’s handshake; the Moloch explosion; the Story of Babel. It’s all there, in its own way.

But now, the electrodes in Rotwang’s lab buzz hot with white light. The signs in the seedy Yoshiwara District, which we always imagined glowing neon, now do. Sepia tints establish the Robot is gold—or not silver, at least. Jarring, all of it, but not necessarily bad.

Maybe the music’s the issue? For something must be. For the Moroder Version has been, since it debuted, a film many silent film fans loathe. Some of the bile can be explained away by stuffiness—a resistance to any tinkering with a classic—but some of those fans I know, and they’re smart, open-minded types. Yes, I blame the music. It is the big problem for me, too.

I have a theory about silent film accompaniment, which I touched on here. It goes beyond the “must be sympathetic to the film” stance, though I do agree with that, unless the purpose of the presentation to create cacophony, in which case, the music and image ought to clash. This is legitimate, insofar as the film is seen as an element of another artwork, rather than an artwork itself, in need of supporting music. In such cases, we’re watching (and listening to) a piece of artwork that includes silent film imagery, rather than a silent film.

Anyway, the theory states that the brains in a silent film audience are very busy ones—in a constant state of reconciliation. They are reconciling image to tune—something much harder than reconciling image to sound-effect, as they might have to do in a talkie… when, for example, they see a dog bark and hear the sound of barking in perfect synchronicity. In a silent film, usually, there is no attempt by the musicians, even if prerecorded, to mimic the sound effects that would be caused by a thing on-screen. So, the image of the barking dog would not be accompanied with a bark-like sound, timed on cue with the opening of the dog’s mouth. There are certainly exceptions to this, but not many.

The result is that silent films require intense concentration. This is why some people dislike them. It is also why a good one can so totally captivate its viewers—those viewers have put more into it than they ever have a talkie. This creates a sense of ownership. Through this constant reconciliation, we sort of “make” the silents we watch—we construct them from images and melodies not inextricably linked. They belong to us a little.

And the Moroder Version, at times, steals Metropolis away.

It doesn’t do this in scenes backed with Moroder’s own music, which is all instrumental. In those scenes, the music is sympathetic enough to make reconciliation possible; in fact, Moroder’s electronic beats suit the film well—at least this version, with its breakneck pacing. But the rock songs, blaring their lyrics over what we see, become troublesome.

I have no opinion on the songs as songs. I only care about how they impact this particular piece of art. And their effect, to me, was mostly obnoxious. The problem with lyrics is that they’re words; they’re specific; they describe a particular thing and, should an image accompanying them not match that description, it falls into contrary relief. It ends up supporting the lyrics, rather than the music supporting the image.

Thus, a music video is born. The music video is silent film’s close cousin, with the emphasis reversed. Music videos can be wonderful art (I even reviewed one once, right here), but transitioning from one form to the other in the same film is frustrating. We connect with Metropolis, assemble its sounds and images, piece together something striking, and then, bang! There’s a voice from outside, telling us what we’re seeing. Locking us down. It isn’t fun.

Though it is, occasionally, funny. Like the sequence, late in the film, where the rioting workers charge the machines. “You say the situation’s/getting out of hand!” sings Loverboy. Well, no shit. Or my favorite: “How does it feel to lose control?/Feels like Hell./So who’s a friend and who’s a foe?/Can we tell?”—sung over the image of Jon Fredersen and Rotwang, descending into the catacombs to spy on Maria’s sermon to the workers. Too. too blunt. I was reminded me of a joke from The Simpsons, where Homer loses Maggie, phones a hotline for missing children, gets put on hold, and hears “baby come back.” If I thought Moroder was going for humor, this wouldn’t be a criticism.

(However, the “Hell” pun is pretty clever, on its own).

I don’t want to end this review with complaints. There were moments I really enjoyed in the Moroder Version, particularly anything that shook up my now-venerable mental image of what Metropolis is. The electric blue eyes of the Maria Robot made her far more menacing, for instance; as did the metallic note Moroder played every time the unaltered Robot took a step. Moroder’s decision to add traffic sounds to an early scene of, well, traffic, is surprisingly compelling—changing the effect from one of awe at the scale of the buildings, to one of everyday life in an urban environment. There’s nothing wrong with this.

And replacing intertitles with subtitles... why didn’t more silent-era directors try that? Intertitles were a necessity, up to a point, but also an aesthetic choice; they break the action, for good or ill, whenever they appear. When Grot the Foreman screams to the rioters: “Listen, fools, if you demolish the machines then you will flood your own homes!” your eyes never leave his trembling body, and his mix of panic and rage feels forceful and immediate; more so than I recall from other versions. There’s nothing wrong with this either.

Giorgio Moroder claims to love Metropolis, and I take him at his word. His restoration, pulling together disparate elements of the film held in different countries, took three years—proof, I think, that he was committed to making something great. He didn’t, quite. But his failure isn’t tasteless, or crass, and it certainly isn’t blasphemous. It boils down to a simple lack of faith. Moroder wanted to make Metropolis “modern”, and I don’t believe he trusted Lang’s imagery to connect with people any more. In fact, it still can. And the irony is that the Moroder Version, almost impossible to find for years and years, has now been re-released after the fully restored Metropolis. The Moroder Version is the artifact. And it is the Moroder Version, after almost 30 years, that we must struggle to comprehend.

Where to find the Moroder Version of Metropolis:
Kino International’s new Blu-ray release of the Moroder Version includes trailers and a brief documentary (more like a featurette, really) called The Fading Image, which describes Moroder’s restoration process. A second, newer doc, considering the wisdom of, and controversy surrounding, the Moroder Version, would have been welcome.

A Christmas Accident (1912)

2011-12-24T14:41:00.003-05:00

Merry Christmas! If your heart-cup happens to be overflowing with holiday spirit right now, perhaps you can do me a favor. I can't find a single image online for A Christmas Accident. If you have one, let me know. This post would really benefit from a few visuals specific to the film. In the mean time, you can see the whole thing (all 15 minutes of it) here.

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Christmas-themed silent films are always about death. It’s implicit in everything they celebrate: family, hearth and home; the bond between parents and children. We watch these films, from a distance of a century, and wonder how much of what they depict would be gone, were it all real. The house, maybe. The gifts, probably. The people, for sure. All of them, even the tiniest children, gleefully opening presents. But of course, the people—the actors—really are dead. It’s difficult to forget this.

Maybe, if I didn’t take this morbid approach, I wouldn’t find A Christmas Accident so creepy. There’s an undertone to this little film so grim it has stayed with me for years; yet, with one exception, there is nothing in the plot itself that could be called dark. It’s a simple story of a miser’s redemption, facilitated by a little girl, pure of heart. No one (no person, anyway), dies. The ending is happy. So it must be me.

But still, there is strangeness here. Imagery and compositional choices meant, I think, to tweak things embedded deep in our brains, things stretching further back in our collective memory than Victorian stories do.

Mr. Gilton and his wife are an elderly couple, living in the right-side of a duplex. The Biltons, a younger couple with four children under ten, live on the left side. The Giltons, with their few expenses, are well-off, while the Biltons must scrimp. The families share a porch, leading to identical front doors. This becomes important later.

Rhyming names, one house with identical doors—this seems like a farce-in-waiting. But the film is never funny. In fact, Mr. Gilton (William Wadsworth) is a bad neighbor and a nasty man to almost everyone; a grump who berates the Bilton children and shakes his fist at their father and mother over little misunderstandings. The Biltons tolerate him, but they’re the saints of the story. To us, Gilton’s an old goat with no redeeming qualities at all, aside from treating his wife pretty well. He’s a little too mean to be entertaining.

He’ll improve, of course. That Mr. Gilton will learn the true meaning of Christmas is a certainty, so much so that it isn’t worth dwelling on. The “accident”, which occurs at the end of the film, is Gilton’s own: caught in a blizzard on the way home from the butcher’s, he blunders into the Bilton’s home by mistake. Covered in snow, a turkey under his arm, and bearing a slight resemblance to Santa, he’s embraced by the Biltons and invited to join them. He is moved, and redeemed.

That Gilton is saved is not compelling—what matters more, I think, is what it means to cross that porch. Director Bannister Merwin pays very close attention to the two halves of his frame, as many fixed-camera filmmakers tended to do. In this case, he splits the lower façade of the house exactly in two, dividing the centre of the frame with a porch pillar standing between the two front doors. The rear of the house has almost-identical doors as well, with a tall railing spindle marking the midpoint between them. Gilton almost never crosses the midpoint on either side of the house.

Photographers and cinematographers usually avoid this kind of symmetry because it looks rigid and fake. But here, I believe, that’s the intent. We’re not to see the halves of the house as parts of a literal object, but rather, as the world of sin and the world of righteousness; compartmentalized, but close.

Observe the objects in the backyard. On the Biltons’ side: a water or wine barrel, and a flowering vine; on the Giltons’ side: a tree stump. Life and death. During one altercation between Mr. Gilton and the Biltons’ eldest daughter, Mr. Gilton’s little dog can be seen in the background, sitting directly underneath the centre spindle. In the next scene, the dog has been poisoned—and lies facing Gilton’s side of the building.

This placement of symbolic objects is a clue. So is the metal hoop of the butcher’s scale, which almost—but never quite—encircles Gilton’s head when he buys the turkey. And so is the pillar in front of the house: an architectural detail that splits the image, but not, literally, the object on-screen. The pillar is in front of the façade, and doesn’t truly divide the house, since Gilton could walk behind it (across the porch) whenever he wished.

The model here isn’t classical theatre, or even a vaudeville stage—it’s medieval painting. Those ancient pictures, produced for illiterate populations, are filled with objects representing other things: goblets, skulls, gold, for example. They’re weirdly flat, as the principles of perspective were still to be discovered. And medieval artists often depicted architecture in purely symbolic ways, compartmentalizing parts of the image so as to highlight elements of the artist’s message. Used like this, an element like a pillar is less a part of the picture than a part of the frame—the distinction is collapsed, much as it is in A Christmas Accident. Even the woodenness of the film’s characters is in keeping with medieval art, which was concerned not with individuals, but with archetypes.

All of which brings me back around to the film’s “feel.” If I’d watched A Christmas Accident when it first came out, I’d have seen a relatively light story, but one bearing the trappings of a much older medium, steeped in symbols of judgment and death. Watching today, through a decades-thick veneer, the gloom saturates every scene. Everyone’s gone. The message is eternal, but still, the people were not.

Where to find A Christmas Accident:
A Christmas Accident is available on Kino Video’s A Christmas Past, a DVD that also includes offerings from D.W. Griffith and Edwin S. Porter.

The disc also includes J. Searle Dawley’s excellent early take on A Christmas Carol (1910). I wrote about that one here.

The Wildcat (1921)

2011-12-18T10:56:00.000-05:00

Inside Fort Tossenstein, everything looks like fondant. Furnishings, lintels, standalone statues—the snowbound base’s interior details are broad and bulbous, wavy and swooping, conveying shapes but not convincing you of them; they’re decorative, but not practical. Were a character to break off a piece of a coffee table and eat it, you’d not be surprised.

That doesn’t happen in The Wildcat, but it could have. Ernst Lubitsch’s 1921 effort is a piece of comic hyperactivity, unconstrained by plot or much else except physics. It is not a sophisticated film, and would be offended to be so accused. Main characters Alexis and Rischka, and Alexis’ would-be father-in-law, the pompous Bavarian stereotype who commands the Fort, have only the simplest motivations. What matters here is what they do, not why, and the story, such as it is, exists only to get us to the next joke.

The Wildcat concerns, to the minimum degree it has to, the love life of Lieutenant Alexis (Paul Heidemann): an officer transferred to the Fort, and captured, en route, by mountain bandits. The bandits include Rischka, played vigorously by Pola Negri. She lets him go, but keeps his photo on the wall of her hut, along with his pants.

The characters seem in on it, especially Alexis. He has little reason to frown, and so he almost never does. But he doesn’t quite smile either—it’s sort of a befuddled smirk. It’s hard to describe. Think of the smile you might put on if your wife ran into your girlfriend at the king’s dinner party, and no one could really afford to look bad, and so things are a little strained, but really, you suspect, you’ll be scoring a three-way out of it later.

Negri, who’s described as “smoldering” and “exotic” a lot, isn’t here. She’s practically feral, feared and lusted after by the rest of the bandits, whom she regularly beats the tar out of. They don’t much mind. Her Rischka is intrigued by Alexis, and the frothy interior of the Fort, and the various perfumes and powders women wear in there, but you get the impression she could take it or leave it all. If Heidemann, half-bemused, half-zoned-out, sets the tone of the film, it’s Negri, with her berserker energy, who sets the pace. Watch her grab Alexis for a lip-lock, hauling him into her lap like he’s her virginal bride.

The Wildcat is already strange-looking film, with its blunt fakery and glamorous lead, dressed in rags, hair looking like a shrub—but that isn’t enough for Lubitsch. No. He often pulls us further into Weirdsville by blocking off portions of images, literally distorting what we see.

This technique couldn’t be less subtle. Lubitsch’s irregular black frames enclose whatever we’re looking at, effectively giving the scene a ‘shape.’ Some shapes are simple ovals, circles or rectangles, but others are elaborate, forming the outline of a woman’s lips, or an octagon, or sharp teeth.

Lubitsch doesn’t frame every scene this way (thank god); but I’m not sure why he ever does it. This preoccupied me. Sometimes the shapes emphasize action, as when he uses a slanted rectangle to frame a slide down a snowy hill, but other times, the framing obscures what we’re looking at. And there’s no logical thread we can tie to the story itself. In one case, a character peers through a keyhole and the next scene is keyhole-shaped; in another case, a character uses binoculars, and the image is encased in a pair of circles. But no device is shaped like teeth.

Yet, there is a telescopic effect at work here. Looking at figures through a telescope trivializes them—they’re smaller than you, their affairs distant and puny. The more serious they take themselves, the sillier they become—the more dangerous they are, the dumber they seem, because they’re unaware of being watched. Lubitsch’s masking technique gives us a similar, superior attitude as observers—a status we’re unable to forget about, because Lubitsch makes the frame so intrusive. Only an audience can see a frame.

The Wildcat loses steam in its last act. Here, and only here, does Lubitsch attempt a comedy of manners—challenging Rischka and Alexis to commit or cut bait. It’s a mistake, because their love story, up to now, is driven more by the conventions of love stories than actual feelings. We know it, and so do they, and it was a good for everybody. Still, the film is as close as the Silent Era gets to the Marx Brothers or even Monty Python, subordinating everything to the joke, including itself. For that, and for the unique aesthetic it delivers, The Wildcat’s an easy recommendation.

Where to find The Wildcat:
The Wildcat (Die Bergkatze) is available on DVD through Kino International.

Seven Years Bad Luck (1921)

2011-12-10T14:25:00.000-05:00

I didn’t plan on writing another post so soon, having just finished a weighty one two days ago. But I can’t let a weekend slip by without telling you about Max Linder. It’s my obligation.

You may know the name. Linder was a Frenchman; a stage comic who entered motion pictures before 1910, becoming a director, screenwriter and big, big star. He established the model his successors would follow: a stock character, returning in film after film, distinctively him.

Linder’s “Max” is well-off, at least in the films I’ve seen. He’s inventive and clever, though not always practical. He drinks and womanizes and makes his own messes, and arguably, his greatest single skill is getting out of them. It’s our pleasure to watch him do this. Linder was, to quote Charlie Chaplin, “the master.”

The master didn’t make many feature films, unfortunately. Linder’s life, which ended in 1925, was terribly tragic—not least because he died in the middle of the greatest decade in the history of filmed comedy. He would have made it greater. I’ve written that Roscoe Arbuckle, had he been allowed to continue working, would have been silent comedy’s “fourth genius,” alongside Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd; after watching Seven Years Bad Luck, I think Linder could have been the fifth.

Linder’s work in Seven Years Bad Luck typifies that magic touch a talented person must have to be great. The story is basic, even by slapstick comedy standards: Linder, playing a wealthy man named “Max Linder,” offends his fiancé and decides to take a trip to clear his head. Trouble follows.

Of course, it’s all in how he gets there. The film’s a bunch of big gags, each so self-contained that you could show them as standalones and they’d still work. But they’re greater than the sum of their parts here, because each one causes the next, and all are rooted in who “Max” is, inside. Because of this, he achieves a narrative flow in Seven Years that a lot of comics couldn’t in their movies.

Consider the second half of the film, which features Max on the run, pursued by cops. Max hopped a train without a ticket, that’s why they’re after him. But Max is wealthy, so why would he need to? It’s because earlier, at the train station, he was accosted by a mugger. No, he wasn’t mugged—he was threatened, and because Max is brave, he took off his jacket to fight back. Too bad the man he handed it to was friends with the mugger. And so Max’s wallet is gone.

Max is broke, not just because he was robbed, but because he is brave.

The gags themselves are tight. The first major one is familiar too: a scene where Max stands before an empty mirror frame while a servant, dressed to resemble him, mimics his gestures. Though it’s best known today as a gag from Duck Soup, I think Linder does it even better than the Marx Brothers. Linder tackles head-on the problem with the gag: the fact that no one looking into a “mirror” this way could be fooled, even for a moment. His establishes, first, that Max has just woken up from a very late night; he’s bleary-eyed and probably still drunk. And his servants, desperate to hide the fact they’ve broken the mirror, work together to maintain the ruse.

It takes courage for a slapstick artist to face implausibility. Acknowledge it and you risk undermining everything else you do. Linder gets away with it here because he creates the right conditions.

‘Courageous’ describes the character too. Max’s Max is more of a man’s man than most clowns. There’s that fist-fight with the mugger, for one thing; and the internal strength it takes for Max, rejected twice by his high-strung fiancé Betty (Alta Allen), to step back and plan a trip to clear his head. He merges toughness with wit when he accidentally superglues his hand to a woman’s outfit, then must hide this fact from her father, even while he’s tearing her dress completely off. Max even evades the cops by climbing into a cage filled with big cats. Deliberately.

I’ve never seen a gag like that. Yes, I’ve seen a lot of comics scared shitless by lions and tigers they’ve encountered in the wild, or backed into, unwittingly, at the zoo. But I’ve never seen a man swagger into a cage filled with dangerous cats, sit down, and throw dice with them to pass the time, while outside, the petrified police decide what to do. I should add: these are real animals, and the editing is minimal. Linder paws and wrestles with full-grown jaguar in that cage, never showing fear. And so, neither does Max.

I thought of Odysseus. Is that too much? A brave and clever man, trying to get home, facing many challenges along the way… and waiting for him, hopefully, his true love.

Seven Years Bad Luck is such a satisfying film—watching it’s like eating a really good trifle. And I could go on about it. I could tell you about the dance sequence that gets Max in trouble with Betty—one of the few examples in silent film of a scene that “feels” like a musical number. Or Max’s surrealist dream: reconciling with Betty while nymphs rise out of sod-mounds in a great lawn. I’m still trying to puzzle that one out. But enough. I have errands to run, and you have a movie to watch.

Where to find Seven Years Bad Luck:

Seven Years Bad Luck is available on Image Entertainment’s Laugh With Max Linder, a single disc that includes the feature film along with several of the master’s shorts.

Blind Husbands (1919)

2011-12-08T19:51:00.001-05:00

Here’s a movie that begins with a loaded question. A poke, of the kind that starts arguments:

“Guilty! says the world condemning the “other man”…

…But what of the husband?”

Indeed. Few victims earn easier pity than cheated-on spouses, unless they’re abusive. But Blind Husbands, an interesting film in many ways, suggests that emotional neglect can be abusive too, and a husband, so long as he puts work before wife, might rightfully lose her.

Margaret Armstrong, the tempted wife in the film, is paralyzed by her profound sadness, something director and star Erich von Stroheim exploits gorgeously. Francelia Billington plays the lovely, lonely doctor’s bride; Von Stroheim is Von Steuben, a predatory Austrian lieutenant at the same Alpine lodge; while Sam De Grasse is the workaholic Dr. Robert Armstrong—a dupe who catches on pretty quick. Dr. Robert, a noble figure when it comes to his duties, is guilty of no crime here except inattention. But that opening intertitle indicts him from the start. He’s not the victim.

"Idea films" often age badly, but Blind Husbands feels fairly fresh. This is partly because the issue it examines is timeless, but more so, I think, because what shocked audiences at the time wasn’t just the depiction of adulterous acts, but the sober look Von Stroheim took at why someone would cheat. To do this is to humanize the wrongdoers, and denies us the pleasure of being their judges.

Just look at Von Steuben. He arrives uniformed, head-to-toe—standing stiff in a tall hat. He looks like the Nutcracker. The mountain men who run the place smirk at him. They tower over him too, like almost every other guy in the movie. We learn nothing of Von Steuben’s past, but we do know he’s short, unattractive, self-important and dull to talk to. If he hooked up with anyone, we’d be surprised.

And oh how he knows it. Von Steuben takes himself seriously because no one else does. His womanizing at the lodge is apparently an annual thing: a conquest of both the women and their men. He seems motivated by nothing but ego. Unlike the protagonist in Foolish Wives, shot by Von Stroheim three years later, there is no suggestion here of a villain in need of money, or protection, or in the grips of nymphomaniacal or sociopathic impulses. There is only a little man who hates himself.

As for Margaret, she’s consumed with guilt, but not because she drew Von Steuben’s attention. It’s because she knows she might take advantage of it. She barely musters the will to repel him the first time, which he interprets, perhaps fairly in this case, as an invitation to try again.

Von Stroheim makes Margaret pitiable. However, he also lets us see her as the lieutenant does—as the lieutenant really does, consciously or not. We often see Billington’s face bathed in light: beautiful, but always terribly down. In one key moment, she leans her head against a wire-backed chair and the pattern makes it appear as though she’s pressed against a bed of nails. This is a woman out of Von Steuben’s league, but so unhappy that she might succumb to him. I doubt he analyzes it that deeply.

He encourages her self-loathing. He undermines her confidence: “Husband? Love? How can one love alone?” then compliments her with the words of a man who’s sincerely paying attention. He gives her gifts. But he is most insidious when he compliments Dr. Robert. “Your husband does not think of you—he climbs the mountains,” Von Steuben tells Margaret one night, the two of them alone in her room. Were Dr. Robert out skiing, this would be an insult; but the doctor is tending to stranded climbers. He’s out saving lives.

This tells Margaret two things: one, that she’s straying from a worthy man; and two, that her husband, dedicated healer that he is, will always put his Hippocratic oath ahead of his wedding vows. Self-hatred and hopelessness make a toxic mix. They make one vulnerable.

Blind Husbands, like Foolish Wives, is paced for this kind of reflection and analysis more than entertainment, and it can be taxing to watch, despite being relatively short. Von Stroheim directs like a poet composes—focusing maximum attention on a single moment, unpacking and pondering it for as long as is necessary to draw from it every bit of meaning it could impart. I’ve never seen a man nose a woman’s neck for as long as Von Steuben does a waitress’s in one early scene. But because the director lingers on the act, we learn much about Von Steuben’s technique, plus his shamelessness and cruelty toward women desperate for affection. Stick with the film, and you will be rewarded.

But poor Von Steuben. Yes, I’ll say it--I’ve met more Von Steubens in my life than Dr. Roberts. Blind Husbands’ third act, much of it spent on a treacherous alpine incline, would be nothing but meaningless action if not for the emotions already sparked by this villain, who is all too tragic himself. The man is redeemable, I think. With a little time, or a little love of his own, he might not be the villain at all. He might be Rick Blaine.

Where to find Blind Husbands:
Blind Husbands is available on DVD through Kino International. The disc also includes an early talkie, The Great Gabbo (1929), starring Von Stroheim as a mentally unbalanced ventriloquist.

Les Vampires (1915 to 1916)

2011-12-04T17:43:00.000-05:00

This is a post I should’ve written two days ago, when I had more time. On Friday the floor was cleaner, and could’ve waited. Today, in an hour, I’ll have to stop and vacuum it. I’ve been stalling, and where’d it get me?

I didn’t like Les Vampires at all. When I finished it, late last week, splitting the hour-long last episode into two 30-minute halves so as not to find it so tedious, I already knew the whole thing wasn’t for me. I didn’t expect the finale to save it, and the finale did not. But since then, I’ve tried to ponder what makes this ten-part serial so well-liked by so many. For indeed, there are many who find it wonderful.

It’s the subject matter itself that thrills them. That’s my take. For if I tell you what Les Vampires is about, you will want to see it. If I tell you how Les Vampires is about it, you may not.

The former: Les Vampires is an early French serial, released between Winter 1915 and Summer 1916, composed of ten episodes varying in length between about fifteen minutes and sixty. It concerns the attempts of star reporter Phillippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé) and his comical sidekick, Mazamette (Marcel Lévesque) to outwit the Vampires, a high-functioning French gang of terrorists and thieves.

The Vampires are led by a Grand Vampire (a position in frequent rotation). Always a ‘he,’ the Grand Vampire has access to advanced poisons, able to paralyze or kill in miniscule doses. One even has a portable cannon, transported in luggage, able to destroy a nightclub, or even a passenger ship. The GV’s operatives are ruthless; possessing powers of hypnosis in at least one case, and substantial physical skills in almost all cases.

Dressed in black from head to toe (yes, like ninjas), Vampire operatives can penetrate any safe, or safe-house, to get what, or who, they want. Greatest of them is Irma Vep (play around with those letters), the cagey bad-girl with a lot of curves in her black bodysuit. Irma is a mistress of disguise, impersonating several people over the course of the serial, including a young man. She’s hard to kill and, you figure, the kind of woman the rest of the Vampires would love to spend more time with.

Sounds cool. I picked up the DVD and right on the cover was Irma’s (Musidora’s) face, snarling at me like a blood-lusting, sexy animal. I popped it in and up came the menu screen, playing Les Vampires’ most famous image: a woman in black, with the ears and wings of a bat, twirling in a continuous loop.

In fact, there are no vampires in Les Vampires. The crooks are quite mortal. The woman in the bat-suit is an actress and dancer—one of their early victims. I was let down. But none of this, of course, needed matter if the serial was good.

Les Vampires was filmed during a transitional period for silent films. It was around the mid-teens that directors really began shaking off the trappings of the theatre—moving the camera more, closing in on actors’ faces more, urging them to perform more subtly before the lens. In this respect, Les Vampires’ writer and director, Louis Feuillade, seems mostly on-track. But otherwise, he seems years behind the point cinema had already reached.

Les Vampires just plods. Here’s why: Feuillade’s willingness, in episode after episode, to show us the entirety of a long action—start to finish. Imagine footage of a man running, from foreground to horizon, across a field. Imagine that, in medium to long shot, with the camera fixed in position, this takes about 90 seconds. I assure you that the reason for the man’s run, no matter how dramatic, will not keep you from growing bored.

Feuillade pulls this kind of thing a lot in Les Vampires; perhaps believing that the spectacle of what a character was doing could, by the very idea of it, transfix us. I remember a longshot of the side of a building, and a Vampire scaling its entire height in one unbroken shot. And much later, a shot of an open Vampire codebook, and Philippe’s pen, connecting one letter to the next. Many, many letters. Sometimes the characters just stood and jawed to one another, uninterrupted even by intertitles, which made me suspect that what they were saying was not so crucial that I had to witness it all. No episode of Les Vampires needed to be longer than 35 minutes.

There are problems, too, with the progression from one episode to the next. Les Vampires has no cliff-hangers of the type we’ve come to associate with serials—in addition to each episode being slow, they offer little to make us want to watch the next one. Feuillade typically opens an episode with some development in either the Vampire’s camp (a new scheme; a new operative); or in Guérande’s (he is visiting a relative; he is now engaged). Conflict is inevitable, but not always intentional, and it’s sewn up by episode’s end. The only ongoing problem is the continued existence of the gang.

In this way, Les Vampires is more like a season of a television series—presenting a season-arch (the persistence of the gang) against which the individual scenarios of each episode play. Each episode, insofar as the events in it can be resolved, is self-contained. However, we rely on good TV to advance characters as well as stories, and Les Vampires never really does this.

Mathé is an uncreative hero and the Grand Vampires, though they do interesting things, are not interesting themselves. Lévesque, as Mazamette, delivers the best performance, but as a comic figure in a serial that deals with pretty serious matters, he’s never the main focus. Musidora is loved by the camera, but to those who praise her acting here, remember this: Theda Bara or Nita Naldi could have played Irma Vep just the same.

The standout episode—that is, the one that hummed along best for me—was number 6: "Hypnotic Eyes." In it, the Vampires are challenged not only by Guérande, but by a second criminal gang, led by Moreno, a conniver who pulls Irma into his arms. Moreno’s gang, in turn, is tripped up by a pair of small-timers working their own scam. "Hypnotic Eyes" has a complicated plot, but this is a good thing, because it gives Feuillade less time to linger. And it’s as close as we come to real character development, thanks to Irma’s divided loyalties.

It just kills me to call a silent film “boring.” Some are. But it’s so often a charge leveled against the whole art form, by people who don’t watch silents to begin with, that I hate it. Les Vampires, though, bored me in every episode. There were moments of beautiful photography—like the Vampires in shadow, entering a roomful of partygoers they’ve just gassed, or Irma Vep, rappelling out a window like an unwinding kite-string spindle… or the actress in the bat-suit—but they were brief. And the serial was so, so long.

Where to find Les Vampires:
The complete Les Vampires is available as a double-sided DVD, which you can learn more about here.

7th Heaven (1927)

2011-11-27T20:57:00.000-05:00

There’s a lot of climbing in 7th Heaven—up winding stairs to loft apartments; up rungs from the sewer to the street. The symbolism is literal: it’s about escaping depths for the light, for good. It’s about achieving a better life.

The vertical momentum of its leads: Diane and Chico, make 7th Heaven a gushy crowd-pleaser. One of the highest-grossing films of the silent era, it’s loaded with the kind of rhetoric you’d find in any self-help book today. “I’m a very remarkable fellow!” declares Chico, repeatedly—with the grin and swollen chest of a man who believes it, even while raking out blockages in the sewer. And to Diane (Janet Gaynor), whom he finds on the street, a depleted human heap of misery: “The trouble with you is you won’t fight. You’re afraid!”.” Easy for big Chico (Charles Farrell) to say—but his confidence is infectious. She loves him as soon as she’s able to, which is long before she loves herself.

Diane must come out of her shell first. Her face, in the moments after Chico meets her (only minutes after she’s been nearly killed by her alcoholic sister, Nana, played by Gladys Brockwell), is a mask: immobile, dead eyed, unresponsive. She’s a suicide-in-waiting, totally enclosed. We’ll see her open up in time, but it will not be the unfurling other actresses might have made of it. Gaynor just seems to switch on.

What kind of strength does Diane have inside? And if 7th Heaven is her story most of all, is it so much about finding heaven as it is about finding the strength to withstand hell? For all Chico’s big talk, we suspect that, like most braggarts, he’s insecure. Diane, though, barely says a word. In a remarkable early moment, she and Nana are visited by a wealthy aunt and uncle, just returned from the South Seas, who promise to elevate them from their life in the slum, so long as they’ve been good. Suspicious, the uncle asks Diane, not Nana, to be candid with them. And Diane, guilty that they’ve stolen to eat and drink, admits they have not been good, thus blowing the deal.

Director Frank Borzage, who places this straight arrow in an Expressionist world of angles and twisting wood and metal, deliberately gives us an ‘ending’ first. Then has Diane reject it. The way out is not a matter of means, or of luck. It is not about fortune in either sense. The way out is within.

Unsubtle, without a subplot—without, even, a traditional second act—7th Heaven makes all of this clear, right from the start; and yet, the lives of the two leads improve so fast, materially speaking, that it can be missed. Key is Gaynor’s first scene. She’s introduced to us on the floor, being whipped by her sister, cringing and crumpled, with her dark hair covering her face. Nana barks at her to go get some absinthe. Diane leaves the apartment. But she pauses for a moment, looking up. Hair now away from her face, Gaynor poses—and Borzage lights her—as a classical starlet. Then the moment’s gone. But we remember.

I haven’t mentioned that the whole thing’s set in Paris, and both Diane and Chico are French. As in most silent films, nationality is irrelevant here; until fairly late. After much sweet and gentle comedy, during which we never doubt that Diane will prove loveable and indispensible to the blustering Chico—after they consummate, with their eyes, everything we expect them to—the War comes. Now it does matter that we’re in France, because it is the Germans who are advancing, and fast, and Chico must leave for the front, very, very soon. In an hour.

They make a promise right then: to pause every day at 11 am, no matter where they are, and turn their thoughts to the other, and recite, “Chico…Diane…Heaven.” Schmaltz in a lesser film, no doubt; but Gaynor and Farrell make it work, through their honest portrayals.

I think Diane and Chico really do keep their 11 am promise, though it’s difficult to know for sure. Borzage, who filled the film with the couples’ first meeting, their disagreements, flowering of love and finally domestic comfort—each moment overlapping the last like the ends and beginnings of songs in a dance club—now crosses four years of separation in one go. Giving us no time to adjust. 7th Heaven also trips here, turning from the couple entirely to deliver a climactic battle scene that cannot be the climax of anything, since it’s the couple, not Paris, we really care about.

Still, there is mortal danger behind it all. It will dawn on you, by this late point in the film, that Diane has become a woman capable of withstanding crushing loss. But you’ll also know, by now, that 7th Heaven is an extreme fantasy, in which conventions of storytelling may be subverted, and the emotional needs of the audience seem to dictate events more than the other way around. Put simply, anything is possible.

A spoiler, following the photo…

Chico, we’re told, is dead. Confirmed dead, even in writing. But Diane barely has time to weep before we see Chico barreling his way through the crowd of Armistice revelers to reach their home, and her. He’s blind, so this scene is impossible. When he bursts through the door, wide eyed and staring into his own blackness, it’s as though he’s occupying a different plane. Now watch Gaynor fall into his arms. Watch her fall through them, clinging instead to his legs—an action that tricks us into thinking he’s incorporeal. “I’ll never die!” he tells her, as Borzage bathes them both in the light of God.

Diane can handle anything now, we know.

Where to find 7th Heaven:
7th Heaven has been released as part of 20th Century Fox’s DVD box set, Murnau, Borzage and Fox. It also includes the Borzage silents Lazybones (1925), Street Angel (1928), and Lucky Star (1929).

Also: a shoutout to Silent London, for pointing out to me that Bérénice Bejo’s scene with the coat sleeves in The Artist (2011) is borrowed from Gaynor’s own in this film. Both women are fantasizing about the men they love, but Gaynor’s innocent waif, appropriately, makes it more sweet than erotic.

Les Espions (1957)

2011-11-22T14:44:00.000-05:00

Henri-Georges Clouzot saw potential in tucked-away places. His most celebrated films, The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955), are set in an isolated South American village and a rural French private school, respectively. His early work, Le Corbeau (1942), is in a French village noteworthy for its distance from urban bustle.

Les Espions takes this to an extreme. It places its characters, and us, in an asylum. The asylum is occupied by only four individuals when the film begins: its resident physician and owner, Dr. Malic (Gérard Séty); an elderly nurse; a bedridden man in treatment for alcoholism, and Lucie (Véra Clouzot), a childlike mute who hears everything.

Dr. Malic, we feel, has gone to seed. Single, childless, in need of funds, with little work to do and no one to talk to in the asylum save his grouchy assistant, he visits the local pub a bit too early in the day for professional propriety. One day he meets a man named Henderson; an American who drinks with him and offers him a ludicrous deal: five million francs to house a secret agent in his facility for just a few days, hiding him from foreign spies and agents and assassins. One million upfront, even—Henderson produces a wad of bills from his pocket. The men drink and talk, repairing to the bathroom to finalize the details.

Henderson is as candid with Malic as he’s able to be. There will be many visitors, he warns the doctor: agents affiliated with Henderson, who will drop in to assess the situation; and agents working for others, too, trying to get to the agent, codenamed “Alex.” Malic will not know who is who. Malic, flush with cash, accepts these terms.

Perhaps Malic is an idiot. This certainly occurred to me. Ignoring the weirdness of the deal—which no one sober enough to walk could be content with—there is Malic’s behavior upon returning to the asylum. He stumbles through the doorway, and in response to the nurse’s scolding, flashes his wad of bills. “I’m not allowed to say anything,” he tells her, after Henderson urged him to secrecy.

Maybe I’m not being charitable here. Maybe this is simply a man so relieved to have the money he needs, to do the work that matters to him, that he ignores all else? His concern for Lucie seems real enough. But I don’t think that’s it either. I think Malic hides away in his asylum, alone with his thoughts, his measure of authority and no women, save an old one and a crazy one, because it is there that he can be free to be himself. His trip to the bar, where he meets a strange, dark-haired man over drinks, promising adventure and maybe, exhilaration, seems like the kind of thing Malic really wants. “Nothing illegal…or degrading,” Henderson promises him. It’s so much easier to believe things when you want them to be true.

Soon Malic doesn’t know what to believe. His institution—supposedly difficult to enter or exit—becomes porous, with blatantly suspicious persons showing up unannounced and asking him questions. Among them are Kaminsky (Peter Ustinov); a menacing man who looks like a math teacher; and Cooper (Sam Jaffe); possibly an American spy, possibly a friend of Henderson’s, and far more sinister than the intellectual he played in my favorite sci-fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Malic’s employees are suddenly replaced. The elderly nurse, whom we’d presumed would act as the voice of reason throughout the picture, is the first to go. When “Alex” finally arrives, well after others already have, he turns out to be a grim, secretive German who wears sunglasses even in the dark.

Curd Jürgens, as Alex, delivers a key speech in the middle of Les Espions; one so world-weary that we’re tempted to take it at face-value. He laments the life of a spy; one in which a man must be constantly on guard, and cannot enjoy the luxury of believing anyone loves him for who he is, rather than what he can offer. Alex implies a community of such lost people—indeed, so does Clouzot, as the spies in the asylum, and later, in the pub, seem to know each other and commiserate. And Alex points out, perhaps as a warning to the naïve Malic, that information is everything—that spies trade in it and trade up for ever greater knowledge, to get ahead and indeed, to justify their continued existence. And so, in the end, it doesn’t matter who they work for, or even if they themselves know who, just so long as they have some piece of information to pass along. It is the same moral no-man’s-land occupied by men like the Enron traders, so consumed with the mechanics of give and take that any consequences of the exchange become irrelevant.

People betray other people in Les Espions; they collude, they lie, they kill. No one’s motivations are clear—not even Malic’s, except on an emotional level. He is a moralist and a romantic. He has wound himself up in a grand narrative, which must conclude—be sewn up—so that all torments are justified. When it seems no righteous conclusion can be found, Malic longs to leave the deal, but the doctor can’t just do that, can he?

Nor, in a sense, can the director. After tethering us for two hours to a man we neither respect nor fully understand, in the end, Clouzot puts us in the same boat with him. We believe no one; we assess the claims of the various characters and conclude that none is more trustworthy than the others. Minor parts, like the alcoholic, or a taxi driver who comes and goes one night, could be the lynchpin of everything. Even Lucie could be a plant. We lack the information to be sure. We need more information. Les Espions could go on and on like this—could last for years, ending only when every player is dead.

The only other way to stop it, for any of the men and women in it, is to simply decide to trust. Not to question, not to attempt to out-maneuver—just to accept what one is told, and try to live life. What madness, that.

Where to find Les Espions:

Les Espions (The Spies) screens, Thursday, November 24, at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox—part of the retrospective The Wages of Fear: The Films of Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Click to read my posts on Clouzot films The Wages of Fear, Le Corbeau, and Diabolique.

Arrival of a Train (1896)

2011-11-19T17:46:00.001-05:00

Film's here: http://mubi.com/films/arrival-of-a-train/watch

Eighteen months ago, I devoted blog-space to a very old silent film called Washerwomen on the River (1896).

It was my favorite of more than 80 shorts available on Kino International’s out-of-print DVD, The Lumière Brothers’ First Films. I loved it best because, in the span of only one minute, with no movement of the camera, it managed to tell a story. And in so doing, it put the lie to the notion, held by some, that the Lumière’s actualities (documentary films) lacked artistry.

Arrival of a Train, another Lumière short from the same year, makes the same overall point. And, it’s a stunning piece of art. A snapshot (almost literally) of a passenger train arriving at a station, and the mass exodus of its ticket holders, Arrival of a Train contains not one but several triumphs of composition.

First, the arrival. Like Washerwomen, Arrival’s frame is split into thirds, one on top of the other. In this case though, the middle-third tapers to a point on the horizon just before reaching the left edge of the frame. This is the line of the track, widening rightward along the length of the train station. As the film begins, the train is already rolling into the station, but we see the station for a few seconds first.

I find this visual sublime. The train speeds along the middle line of the frame, bisecting it, and obscuring the station. It does this precisely, for it is almost the same height and shape as the building. From our point of view, it is as though the station is a groove, into which the train slides, like a component in a masterfully machined device. The brighter sky and ground, above and below the train, become part of this device too. The world is one object.

This isn’t even halfway through the film. Before the train’s wheels have even ceased rolling, the tall side doors and roof hatches of its passenger cars open and heads and bodies appear. These figures are a fair distance from the camera at first, so they are small. But being so small, and so suddenly numerous—and all over the cars, at the sides, on the top—they give an unsettling effect. It’s insect-like. These men and women—wealthy ones, though we don’t know that yet—appear to infest the train, swarming over it like ants overwhelming a bigger bug.

Yet it is all orderly. From about the 20-second mark on, the crowd of serious looking men and women in tall hats march past the lens, everyone layered in the semi-formal to formal styles of the time. Many glance at the camera, but they don’t linger, and the image is clear enough, and close enough, for me to say that few of them grin.

When I show this film to people, they generally remark on the look of the men—their hats and whiskers. There is this novelty to Arrival of a Train; there is, too, an eerie sense of familiarity with the dead. We’re seeing these people on a normal day, moving as they normally would. We’re connected to them in some way closer to reality than we’d get from an old still photo, for which they would have posed, likely in a very formal way. I was struck, too, by how so many of them exit the train with their heads down, fussing with things like gloves and cigarette cases—looking much as I do, when I check the time on my mobile after leaving a subway car.

Arrival of a Train wasn’t the first example of a train on film, not even from the Lumières. But compare it to their Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, filmed the previous year. The events themselves are similar, and the documentation equally competent. The newer film, however, unifies foreground and background more artistically, using the camera’s position to both merge the train and station and to find the weirdness in a commonplace scene. The distance at which the crowd first appears, and the off-putting look it has, generates a moment of suspense, since we know that crowd is headed our way. Arrival of a Train is more than footage; it is art, and its superiority over Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is entirely due to aesthetics.

I’ve watched Arrival of a Train many times now. The stationary camera, the mechanistic feel of the scene—the flatness of it, as though elements in their differing depths collapse into one—all of this feels more to me like a still photograph than a film, and yet it moves. I don’t know if there’s a word for that. To me, Arrival of a Train is less akin to a movie than a clockwork miniature. Maybe a music box, which, when its lid is opened, produces a little spinning dancer along with the tune. Motion occurs in time, but we feel its boundaries acutely; it is circumscribed in the way all movie action really is.

Where to find Arrival of a Train:
Arrival of a Train is currently available to view on MUBI’s website—free of charge. Check it out while you can.

Trains, of course, have always been a powerful image in filmmaking, from the Silent Era on. Check out my post on Daily Violence (2010), a minute-long silent offering a modern take on the chaos of commute by rail.

Diabolique (1955)

2011-11-13T15:06:00.000-05:00

The films of Henri-Georges Clouzot engage me quickly and totally. I don’t mean they pull me in—I mean they open the floor beneath my feet, and I drop.

Down, down; ever swifter, into darkness uncertain. This is my journey as a viewer, and often the characters’ too. It is the journey of the heroines (if heroines they be) of Diabolique: Nicole Horner and Christina Dellasalle, who live and work as teachers at the same boarding school in France. They are involved with the same man, and together, they execute a plot to kill him.

Michel (Paul Meurisse) is the school’s headmaster; Nicole (Simone Signoret) his mistress; Christina (Vera Clouzot) his devoutly Catholic wife. The three of them persist in a triangle created by Michel’s selfishness and inhumanity, dealt equally to both women—who, perhaps because of this, remain friends. Christina is moneyed. It seems unlikely that things will change until Christina dies of the heart condition that afflicts her—or Michel dies of something less natural.

These details, collectively weird, are communicated in the film’s early minutes. Then we’re off. There’s a three-day weekend coming up—the perfect time to dispose of the hateful Michel—and Nicole and Christina take advantage. They lure him to an apartment hours away from the school, and through a combination of guile and chemistry, they drown him. Or appear to.

Is Michel really dead? When the women transport his body back to the school, dump it in an algae-filled pool, then discover it missing, is it because they somehow failed to kill him? Unlikely, surely. Could he have risen from the dead? Unlikelier still, in a film such as this. But as things begin unraveling for Nicole and Christina, as they grow more superstitious and paranoid, we begin to ask ourselves: what kind of film is Diabolique? The answer determines what we’re prepared to accept.

Diabolique is based on a novel, Celle qui n’était plus (She Who Was No More). Alfred Hitchcock supposedly tried to buy the rights to it, and you can see why. Like several of Hitchcock’s films, it’s a story of deception and persecution, in which the position and purpose of the lead characters seem unstable. Clouzot even adds an icy blonde in Signoret. But it is most Hitchcockian in the way it toys with the viewer, turning our preconceptions about genre against us. Diabolique opens with the promise of a complex relationship drama; turning quickly into something between a caper flick and True Crime, as we observe, with fascination, Nicole’s clever plot to eliminate Michel—involving expert timing and an intuitive sense of the psychology of those around her, whether they’re involved in the murder or merely incidental to it.

Transporting the body home—in a wicker chest, in the back of a battered hatchback—proves fraught. The women are nearly discovered several times, and now the film grows tenser, and we expect more near-misses. We get them, but in a different way: through the appearance of the seemingly jovial Fichet (Charles Vanel); a former police commissioner who discovers Christina inquiring at the morgue and offers to take on the case of the missing husband. He’s so insistent, and she, so reluctant, that we’re convinced he’s on to her. Suspense.

As the likelihood of Michel’s survival shrinks, so grows the list of clues that he is, in fact, alive; his face even appears in a class photograph taken at the school. This seems too much. About this time, the scenes shot in shadowy corners multiply, and closeups of creepy hands doing suspicious things do too. Christina, guilt-ridden and terrified, now becomes the centerpiece of a horror film.

I believe it was Clouzot’s intent to make us believe, by the end of Diabolique, that Michel could, possibly, rise from dead. Not because he never died, but because he was something supernatural. We need not assume it—we need only entertain it, for a second, and Clouzot has succeeded. This did occur to me, and I was surprised at how organic the notion seemed in a film so grounded in reality, at least in its first hour. Like the women in the film, especially Christina, I found my standards for plausibility shifting—only for me, it was because the movie itself seemed to shift from one genre to the next, and each genre, I knew, came with its own set of rules.

There is really nothing steady or consistent in Diabolique—nothing you can tether yourself firmly to—except for a single fact: the fragility of Christina’s heart. In a film where even the deadness of a man seemingly killed in front of us is uncertain, Christina’s illness is indisputable. We see her buckle more than once, gasping for breath, clutching her chest. Doctors examine her, pronouncing her condition grave.

So the only thing we know for sure is that, at any moment, and without much warning, our heroine could drop dead. Even our certainty rests on something unreliable.

Only at the end the film, when secrets are revealed that really, you feel, you should have picked up on before, do you realize how little you ever knew about the characters to begin with. How much time do you ever spend alone with them? Are they not almost always together in some combination—mostly pairings—ac ting or chattering away to advance the story? Who are Christina, Nicole and Michel, inside? Maybe they have no true insides, anymore than they have a fixed outside. Maybe this is why Diabolique has such momentum: because it never pauses to let us discover these three, but instead, propels them, and us, ever downward, into new and uncertain places.
Where to find Diabolique:
Diabolique screens Thursday, November 17 and Tuesday, November 22, 2011, at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox—part of the retrospective The Wages of Fear: The Films of Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Diabolique is also available on DVD as part of The Criterion Collection.

Click here to read my posts on Clouzot films The Wages of Fear and Le Corbeau.

Shinsedai in Toronto

2011-11-10T15:59:00.000-05:00

Torontonians and beyond: The Shinsedai Cinema Festival arrives here in Summer 2012, and your support is needed.

The 4th annual Shinsedai Cinema Festival, showcasing new independent films from Japan, takes place between July 12th and July 15th, 2012, at The Revue Cinema. Ideally, the filmmakers themselves will be on-hand to present their films to the Canadian audience. For all their hard work, they deserve it. But that costs money.

Shinsedai's online fundraising drive is on now. The goal is $7,000: funds that will go directly to paying for roundtrip airfare for Shinsedai's Japanese guests. Here's the link.

If The Revue Cinema rings a bell, that's because it's home to Silent Sundays, the monthly series of live-accompanied silent film screenings I regularly attend, and blog about. Supporting Shinsedai means supporting The Revue, which means supporting silent film.

Japan's silent film legacy, I might add, is a rich one. The Japanese Silent Era persisted into the 1930s, providing an early outlet for legends-to-come like Ozu and Mizoguchi. Though very few works survive, those that do include some of the most sensitive and artistically bold silents ever made. Here are just three:

Tokyo Chorus (1931)
The Water Magician (1933)
Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933)

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927)

2011-11-09T16:43:00.000-05:00

Uncle Tom’s smile, and what you make of it, is either your way in, or your way out, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

It’s a big, toothy smile, filling James B. Lowe’s face. It’s gleaming white against his very dark skin. (Lowe, thankfully, is not a man in blackface, but an African-American actor.)

The smile’s benevolent and gracious; just like Tom. It also looked, to me, to be strained, as though Tom, or at least Lowe, had to put effort into appearing so content. So we moderns would assume. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, set during and just before the U.S. Civil War, presents Southern slavery as a system almost as idyllic as it is vile. The film is even-handed on an issue we no longer demand evenness from, with the result leaving you unsure—how could someone argue against the cruelty of slavery without arguing against the owning of slaves?

This ambivalence had deep roots. By the time Universal set out to film Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel was already an established American classic. It had been filmed many times, and formed the inspirational core of endless stage shows that toured both North and South. But those shows were very different, depending on where they were performed. David Pierce, in a lengthy essay on the film, included on Kino International’s DVD, explains:

“Productions were tailored to appeal to different audiences—abolitionist for the North, minstrel for the South, and spectacle for both, including a loose adaptation by P.T. Barnum.”

Universal, of course, did not have the luxury of creating two films, each one suited to the tastes of half a country. They did the next best thing, though. I urge you to read Pierce’s essay in full, so you can learn about the company’s frantic, sometimes clumsy, often craven attempts to make a movie that would appease everybody.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin begins with a quote: “There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.” Wise words, which happen to have been spoken by Robert E. Lee, future leader of the Confederate forces. We’re then introduced to a garden party at the estate of one Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, “whose gentle rule of the slaves was typical of the South.”

The Shelbys are celebrating the wedding of one of their slaves—a woman named Eliza—to another slave, owned by someone else, named George. You might be confused when these characters first appear on-screen, since they’re both as white as the Shelbys.

Eliza is played by Margarita Fischer, wife of the film’s director, Harry A. Pollard. This explains her as a casting choice, but it was apparently the Universal sales department that insisted the couple—both mulatto in the story—appear demonstrably white onscreen, so as not to offend audiences uncomfortable with the sight of non-whites in the throes of romance.

Uncle Tom, introduced some twelve minutes into the film, is a longtime slave of the Shelbys, so loyal that he can be sent to retrieve money from a free state and be expected to return. When things go wrong, he merely prays. Tom’s not a negative character, necessarily, but he is boring; figuring in few of the film’s memorable moments. What makes him notable is his forbearance, but while the film considers this a strength, we’re more likely, today, to consider him cowed or psychologically damaged.

It is Eliza, tears streaming down her face in scene after scene, whose suffering takes up most of our time. Her husband’s master is a brute, keeping them apart before and after their son is born. When financial troubles force Shelby to sell both Eliza and Tom, her family is threatened even more, and she spends the rest of the film either in transit or on the run—resold, abused, and desperate to protect her son from slave traders.

We see Eliza pushing through a blizzard to escape her fate, over snowbanks shoulder-high. We see her running after a carriage containing her son, the camera keeping pace with her even she falls behind, and then, in her rage, turning a bullwhip on the man who held her back. In the film’s best scene, Eliza, child bundled in her arms, leaps from ice flow to ice flow across a fast-running Ohio River to escape her kidnappers and their hounds. These is pure action, and worthy film-making.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin trades in these scenes, and in the ache of the near-miss—Eliza nearly saving her son, Eliza and George almost stumbling into one another, et cetera—creating a film that’s compelling, so long as you forget the actress’s skin color. And you can forget, from time to time. Fischer is strong in her role and her plight is honestly tragic. We can say, without qualification, that no one should go through Eliza goes through. Bondage, beatings, suggestions of rape, splitting of a family—these things are universally understood to be bad, and insofar as we wish them on no one, they are not matters of race at all.

But Uncle Tom’s Cabin keeps hedging. Dropped like a bomb into this post-racial reflection are Eva and Topsy, two bizarre child characters who form an—apparently—steadfast friendship across racial lines.

Eva, played by Virginia Grey, is the young daughter of a New Orleans slave owner to whom Tom is sold. Grey is one of the most beautiful children I’ve ever seen on film—a glossy, ivory-faced doll with curls so lovely and thick that I nearly wrote “golden” here, despite the film being in black and white. Eva’s temperament matches her appearance. She’s an angel.

Her opposite is Topsy, a household slave of about the same age. Topsy isn’t pretty at all, and she’s a rascal, though not mean-spirited. She is played by Mona Ray, a 4’7”, 19-year-old white actress, making this one of the film’s few blackface roles. I think I know why.

There is a scene, shortly before Eva’s death, when she tells Topsy she loves her. Though patronizing by modern standards, it’s still a tender moment of genuine emotion, between two young girls presented as equals. It is intimate, the way confessions between close friends are. But whatever greater point it is intended to make, Pollard ensures this scene happens between two whites. Universal’s butts were covered.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a funny film. It’s earnest and cynical in equal measure; an exhilarating movie that pulls you in, then pushes you away. I honestly liked it, for its pacing, its action, and the quality of its performances. I disliked it for its blindness to history, and its choice of casting. Yet, that cast performed well, meaning my disapproval is based, in a way, on the color of the actors’ skin. What an odd feeling that is for a viewer. Maybe this is the legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: to be the film that gave a little to everybody, and satisfied none of them.

Where to find Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is available on DVD through Kino International. It includes the essay, “ ‘Carl Laemmle’s Outstanding Achievement’: Harry Pollard and the Struggle to Film Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by David Pierce—a fascinating look at the film’s tortured production history.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin shares several cast members with another Universal silent: The Cat and the Canary (1927).

Buster, Twitter, and the 21st Century

2011-11-05T17:08:00.000-04:00

Here's a piece I wrote recently for Project Keaton, over at the (excellent) Kitty Packard Pictorial:

My Twitter avatar is Buster Keaton. It’s a screenshot of him, behind bars, from THE GOAT, one of his short films.

People love it. They’ve called it ‘perfect.’ It’s cool to them the way Buster’s bars exactly touch the edges of the frame, as though he’s imprisoned in Twitter’s own digital superstructure. One small, innocent man, peeking out of one window, in a building that has millions of them.

I didn’t think about this when I chose it. I just thought the picture looked funny. But reflecting back on it now, after a couple of years, maybe this little picture sums up why Buster matters so much to me. Not just as a fan of silent films, or as someone who writes about them regularly—but as a modern person, navigating life. Buster is me, or us, in a way the other clowns weren’t.

Almost all of us want to understand how the world works, if only so that we can fit into it better. We want to be happy, comfortable, respected, loved. We want fulfillment, freedom, sex—all the usuals. And the better we ‘get’ our world, particularly the circles in which we want to travel, the easier all this becomes to achieve. I’m not excepting the counter-culture types here either; at heart we all want to succeed on our own terms, and the most alternative person you know still, probably, wants to be part of his or her world. The only people who don’t are hermits—or possibly tramps—and you don’t know many of them.

However, most of us are not fulfilled or successful. And if we are, we’re encouraged not to rest on our laurels—to keep striving. This can be a tense thing, because the world remains big and complicated and we can’t always be sure what we’re striving for, or how reasonable our chances really are. On our bad days, we wonder if we’re good enough; on our worst days, we get metaphysical: wondering if the world is designed to thwart us.

It is a gigantic, amoral, mysterious, multi-geared machine of a world like this that all of Buster Keaton’s characters occupy, and yet, every version of him does his best to work within it. Think of the newlywed in ONE WEEK: a man who dreams of building a house; who owns the parts; who has the instructions for assembly and the mindset to follow them strictly. And he does. And he’s destroyed, because unknown to him, the man his wife turned down has changed the numbers on the crates. The house has all the right pieces, but none in the right order.

And yet he tries and tries to make it right. Just as he tries to please the people he cares about, from the sweet wife in that film to the cruel girlfriends in SPITE MARRIAGE and THE GENERAL. Can you imagine one of Fatty Arbuckle’s louts negotiating the terrain of social graces that Buster must in OUR HOSPITALITY? What about the Tramp? I think the Tramp would sooner get drunk.

The exceptions prove the rule. Buster’s sociopathic gunman in THE FROZEN NORTH is a dream; just like his alpha-male master sleuth in SHERLOCK, JR. In THE NAVIGATOR, Buster’s hero is born into wealth, but it does him no good. All Buster’s little fellows are part of the system, trying to work their way through it. They’re never trying to escape it. That would mean giving up.

Back to the Twitter thing. I was saying (actually, tweeting) to someone just today about how most people on Twitter are trying to promote themselves, one way or another. They have a sense of their own smallness, because they think so much about the world, in its vastness. They also think about how to get bigger, and see Twitter as a tool that can help. They’re convinced it can be done.

That’s a modern philosophy, and it’s a Buster philosophy all the way.

How would the other clowns approach Twitter? Lloyd would tweet regular updates about the weather and his kids’ favorite songs. Langdon wouldn’t get it—he’d try updating from his rotary phone. Arbuckle would spam you. And Chaplin, I think, wouldn’t have an account, though you’d still hear from him somehow. But Buster would be there.

It’s Buster, in spirit and in shared plight, who speaks to us best.

Now, none of this makes him better than the others. For what it’s worth, I give Buster the nod for best silent comedy feature (THE GENERAL), but not for best short (Arbuckle’s CONEY ISLAND and HE DID AND HE DIDN’T transcend even COPS and THE PLAYHOUSE). Nor was Buster the actor, innovator, businessman, or comedy polymath that Chaplin was. But Buster had genius, and his particular brand of it has aged the best.

You know… I don’t call Chaplin, Arbuckle or Lloyd by their first names. Funny thing, that.

The Cat and the Canary (1927)

2011-10-31T21:48:00.000-04:00

When I watch any silent film for the first time, it’s always with the expectation I might write about it. Last night, I had my second viewing of The Cat and the Canary, a horror-comedy I first watched, oh, about three years ago.

I didn’t write about it back then because it didn’t leave much of an impression on me. It still doesn’t. The Cat and the Canary’s sometimes funny and sometimes scary, but it’s mostly goofy and grotesque, and my taste cleaves to more intense entertainment. That doesn’t mean the movie’s bad—in fact, you should see it for yourself. It just means that I need a good reason to give it 800 words.

After my second viewing, I may have found one. But first the basics. The Cat and the Canary is the story of a will—one of those cinematic last-wills-and-testament crafted to torture those who hope to inherit from it; a post-mortem F-U from the deceased toward those who mistreated him in life. In this case, the middle finger is delivered by Cyrus West, a lonely old millionaire, dead twenty years when the film begins. Cyrus, it is claimed, was loved only for his money—he felt himself a canary, surrounded by cruel and hungry cats. And so he devised a will that could not be opened for two decades, and would gather together six would-be heirs, denying five in the face of the sixth.

I’ve never quite figured this out. If Cyrus aimed to leave the money to the one heir he truly loved, why wait twenty years? He or she could be dead too, by then. Cyrus also tacks on a weird rider: if the rightful heir is judged insane, he or she loses the inheritance. This is supposed to be a reflection of Cyrus’ own bitterness at being thought crazy, but if he can sympathize, why put someone else through it, particularly if he likes the person?

None of this will bug you more than a moment. The film’s charm and greatest strength is its self-aware silliness—its refusal to take seriously what isn’t serious. As the six relatives assemble in Cyrus’ creaky mansion, on a dark and stormy night, near the stroke of midnight, we settle quickly into our roles as observers of, rather than participants in, their terror.

Several of the family members are cowards. Particularly Aunt Susan (gossipy, easily ruffled), her daughter Cecily (implicit party-girl) and Paul Jones (Harold Lloyd sans urge to make good). They shriek and run a lot. More solid are two of Cyrus’ nephews, Harry and Charlie, who bear some grudge against one another that the movie mentions, then perversely drops. The stage play upon which The Cat and the Canary is based must have expanded on this.

Our heroine is Cyrus’ niece, Annabelle (Laura La Plante). Now, I’m not saying lovely Annabelle is the heiress, but it seems awfully likely—and we find out well before the film is done. Annabelle is loved by the good-hearted Paul, resented by Susan, and mostly ignored by the rest.

The cast also includes a dour lawyer (and future corpse of a lawyer) named Crosby; an asylum guard in search of an escaped lunatic; and of course, said lunatic, who creeps through the mansion’s shadows and seems to know exactly where every secret panel slides open. All the better to throttle an heiress unawares, I suppose. And we cannot forget, no matter how hard we try, the mansion’s housekeeper, Mammy Pleasant (childless, unfriendly), who probably had a torrid affair with Cyrus, likely in the stage play.

I’m rambling. The Cat and the Canary, Wikipedia tells me, is an Expressionist film, perhaps because it has a lot of long shadows, or perhaps because its director, Paul Leni, is an Expressionist director. Leni, more famous today for The Man Who Laughs (1928), had a gift for moving the camera in unsettling ways. Here he confines it mostly to filming from below, meaning the corpse falls onto you instead of in front.

But Leni does do one neat thing, repeatedly. The Cat and the Canary is chock-full of what you might call Expressionist (or at least, highly expressive) intertitles. Words like “Ghost!” quiver and shake. Others blur or splatter or fall the length of the frame. This is noteworthy because it’s so rare. Later, over dinner, I asked some friends of mine what other silents they could name that bore animated text like this. They couldn’t come up with many, and neither could I.

These effects make you laugh, but they’re supposed to. What intrigued me about them was not how they looked, but the unrealized potential they represented. The Cat and the Canary came out the same year as The Jazz Singer. Two years later, the Silent Era was dead. But imagine if artists like Leni’d had another ten years, or even five, to explore the potential interplay of live action and animated text? Where could that have gone?

The result might have looked like a moving comic strip, though not quite like a cartoon—a compound verisimilitude. And I really love things like that. So, sniff.

See The Cat and the Canary for that, if you want. Or for some light fare: promised, delivered, and over soon enough.

Where to find The Cat and the Canary:
I saw The Cat and the Canary live as part of Revue Cinema’s Silent Sundays series, organized by Pordenone vino-sipper, Eric Veillette. Accompaniment was provided by Laura Silberberg.

The Cat and the Canary is also available on DVD, from Kino International.

Le Corbeau (The Raven) (1943)

2011-10-26T12:06:00.000-04:00

Released in 1943 and set in a rural French community around that time, Le Corbeau is the story of a ‘poison pen.’ For those in need of a definition (I needed one): a poison pen is an individual, his or her identity secret, who writes threatening letters. The letters may directly threaten the person receiving them—implying knowledge of an embarrassing secret, for example—or indirectly, if a letter containing the same information is sent to someone else.

Gossip, libel, unfounded rumor, anonymity—all this sounds familiar. We’re in a period where cyber-bullying, and its sometimes lethal consequences, make the news every week.

The difference is that today, a teen can send such a letter to a hundred people in five minutes. In 1943, the handwritten letters appear one by one; an insidious trickle over months. First a few citizens get them; revealing their contents privately to confidantes, who sometimes reveal that they too have received one. Only later does the letter-writer, who signs each note “Le Corbeau” (The Raven) grow bold: hiding one note in a wreath in a public funeral, and letting another flutter down from the upper floor of a cathedral during Mass.

Most of the letters attack one man: Dr. Germain (Pierre Fresnay). They accuse him, in an hysterical tone, of being an abortionist and a lecher. There is reason to suspect him of both, but nothing the townspeople (or us) could call proof.

Germain is an easy target. He’s stern and enclosed; he did not grow up in the town and talks to few people aside from his colleague, the psychiatrist, Dr. Vorzet (Pierre Larquey), and Vorzet’s much younger wife, Laura (Micheline Francey). “I have neither friends nor enemies,” he declares, early on; but apparently, that isn’t all true.

A film like Le Corbeau will be about two things: the identity of the letter-writer, and the effect such letters have on the people who read them. If the latter is emphasized, you’re watching a psychological treatise. If the former, you’re watching a whodunit. For all its musings on the human condition and what motivates a poison pen, Le Corbeau is a whodunit first.

Director Henri-Georges Clouzot gives you suspects the way a card shark deals a good hand. You’re curious, always, about this or that person, but suspicious, too, of an option that seems too obvious. Potential Ravens include Laura, whom Germain may love; her husband (due to this); Laura’s bitter sister Marie (Héléna Manson); and various minorly corrupt town officials. There is also Denise (Ginette Leclerc) a glamorous and languid patient of Germain’s, who has more reasons than anyone else to stir the pot. She even owns a stuffed raven.

I wearied of this, after a while. Once you realize a film is playing with you, you begin to engage it as an adversary, throwing in your lot with whatever seems to be the least likely solution, simply because it seems the least likely. Clouzot even addresses this, sort of, through one of Dr. Verzot’s many extended reflections on guilt, innocence, and the criminal mind. “[The police are] looking for someone with logical motives,” he tells Germain. “The poison pen acts on much more mysterious motives, that are incomprehensible to the average man.” But Le Corbeau’s final scene may contradict this (I think it does), and either way, the film’s final jumble of false accusations makes for a flat end.

That the Raven knows so much about so many people is hard to believe. But this is not a negative, so long as you perceive him or her more as a super-villain than a pitiful shut-in. I believe Clouzot saw the Raven this way—from the dramatic code name to the insider knowledge to the ludicrous delivery of the letter from the cathedral ceiling. When the Raven’s identity is revealed, I think you’ll agree with me that he’d (or she’d) be right at home in a comic book.

Within Clouzot’s flurry of cuts and rapid, breezy dialogue scenes are suggestions about what letters like these can do to a person. Especially if they accuse a man of having already done what he fantasizes about someday doing. But these moments of reflection are delivered with too much panache to really sink in. With the exception of one event, in which a letter provokes a suicide, Le Corbeau isn’t even grim. It’s often sexy, occasionally even goofy fun. Read the synopsis and you might be expecting something like The White Ribbon (2009), but no.

I liked Le Corbeau, but didn’t love it. A very early work in Clouzot’s career, it has a tentative quality that the director erased from later films like The Wages of Fear (1953). Le Corbeau entertains, but it does not challenge. It just makes a show of challenging, and eventually, we get wise.

Where to find Le Corbeau:

Le Corbeau (The Raven) screens Tuesday, November 1, 2011, at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox—part of the retrospective The Wages of Fear: The Films of Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Le Corbeau is also available on DVD as part of The Criterion Collection (currently out of print).

Click here to read my post on The Wages of Fear.

Look Before Shooting

2011-10-25T11:46:00.000-04:00

I may have done a bad thing the other day. You tell me. Here’s the story.

The apartment building I live in is part of a crescent-moon cluster of once-beautiful towers, facing outward to houses and parks, and inward to a fountain. The fountain is currently waterless. From ground level it looks like the Parkette of the 1990s, adjacent to the Orbital Mass-Transit Spaceport of 1990s, as imagined in 1956. The Benches of the Future need paint, and Tomorrow’s Drainage is a little brown.

My questionable act did not involve this fountain. It involved, sort of, the parking lot flanking it. There’s a driveway that circles the fountain entirely, allowing access to all buildings in the crescent-moon. But only on one side is it wide enough to accommodate cars parked on an angle. This row of diagonal parking spots stretches downward (technically south-westward), past the fountain, past my building, past the organic garbage bin and its many flies, right out to the street.

Approaching from the street, in your car, squinting ahead, you might think it possible to drive the full length of this lot, right past the choked space immediately post-garbage bin—and onward, to the dimly spied Promised Land of fountain-side angular yellow lines. But you’d be wrong. And by the time you knew why, it would be too late. It’s a trap.

You’d call the thing diabolical, if ‘diabolical’ didn’t imply pre-planning—or at least bylaw-approved landscaping—in the name of evil. There is no deliberate malice behind this stretch of lot, which draws in cars like a pitcher plant at its open end, then grows narrower, and more cramped, before terminating in a length of chain, slung perpendicular to the driver’s intended direction. The whole thing’s just badly laid out. You can go no farther. Though, cruelly, you can see the fountain-side spots quite well.

You’ll also have a hard time turning around. A three-point turn, in this space, is about 15 points shy of adequate. Once you’re in, you’re in for a while.

Imagine the frustration, as you realize you weaved your way into a dead-end, made so only by chain and a metal post. You sit there, tapping the gas, adjusting your car backward by inches, while pedestrians stride past or over the chain, and past you.

Many of those pedestrians are coming from a particular exit—kind of an odd one. You see, the ground floor of my building is actually slightly underground. Leaving the building at parking lot-level means climbing up some steps to an exit. One of those exits puts you just on the other side of the chain.

The steps for this exit are outside. They are the way out of a shallow concrete depression—in practical terms, a ditch—from which the building residents emerge, like joeys from a pouch.

I don’t use this exit much. I don’t have to, since I live in the sky, and can hurtle downward in my elevator to the second floor, then take different stairs, in a different direction, to a different exit. But the Pouch is close to the mail room, and there are times when I’ll use it for that reason.

Yesterday, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, I got the mail. And having accomplished that feat, I decided to reward myself with a cup of delicious coffee from one of the franchised chains on the other side of the park.

I crossed the hallway and reached the door just as a pretty young lady with cocoa skin did the same. I held the door open for her. She gave me a big smile and went through.

I followed her. And the first thing she said to me, as the sun hit my face, was “wow.” Because she saw, just like I did, a black sports car with one front tire slung over the corner of our concrete ditch.

The car, now on a tilt, had been driven partway into the hole. It was undamaged, but absolutely, hopelessly stuck. No gunning the tires; no 18-point turns could’ve freed it; no car, so long as it was shaped like a car, could escape that spot without a tow truck.

On the other side of the chain—the bad side—drivers were shaking their heads. All that space to turn… you wouldn’t see ME ditch a car like that, with all that space to turn…

The lady strolled on, toward the garbage bins.

Clearly, she wasn’t an Amateur Photographer like me. Here was a unique scene, on a bright day: a diagonal shard of black, tinted windows and all, tipped against flat, horizontal white. And while I didn’t have my camera, I did have The BlackBerry. It was meant to be.

In the distance, I saw the lady turn around. Watching an artist at work, I thought to myself. The shot was hard to capture, since the subject was big and there was minimal space to back up. I did a lot of sidestepping and kneeling, trying to get it all in, watching the image float and bob on my little viewscreen. Then…

“Can I help you with something?”

…came a voice, from the car.

I hadn’t seen the driver. The tinted windows blacked him out completely, but once I heard him, it was obvious he was there. The exchange that followed was immediate, and thoughtless:

Me: Oh! Didn’t see you in there!

Driver: Yeah? I guess you find this amusing?

Me: [Pocketing BlackBerry and walking away] Well, since I’m trying to take a picture of it, I guess I do. But it’s nothing personal.

Driver: [unintelligible grumbling response, likely profane]

What a dick I was. But an honest, forthright dick, perhaps. As I wandered on toward the coffee shop, I thought about what I’d done wrong, and maybe, even, if I’d done anything wrong at all.

Consider this: Had I known the man was in the car, I wouldn’t have tried to take a picture. Why? Because I would have concluded that, while the scene was funny to me, it sure-as-hell wasn’t to him. Who wants to rub it in?

But when I say it was funny, I’m being serious. The photo, had I managed to snap it, would have been the kind your co-workers email to you in a themed-batch, along with a dozen other pics of non-lethal parking fails. No one we know was impacted, so we laugh at the absurdity of the scene. Everyone’s anonymous.

Trying for that picture, I stepped into an ethical seam. I thought I was a passive observer, unobserved myself and unable to do harm, and so all that mattered was what I could gain from the situation. The driver, though, was present, and because of that, I was offensive. I just didn’t know it.

Did I even feel bad about it? Maybe so, and that’s why, when he asked me if I found it all amusing, I admitted I did. This sounds like the worst part, but really, it was just an avoidance of hypocrisy. Of course I found it amusing. If I’d said “no, I’m sorry,” I would have been a liar. And still a dick.

I convinced myself of all this as I walked on. But it wasn’t easy. It took awhile. I had to walk father than I’d planned. Down, past the park, past the first coffee shop and on toward a second one. That’s when I saw the cocoa-skinned lady again. She was still walking ahead of me.

She was there, cross my heart.

And I could have caught up to her by quickening my steps just a bit. And I wanted to, suddenly—just to tap this stranger on the shoulder and tell her: “you know, I didn’t see him in the car.” But, she’d say, that was only because you stopped to take the picture, instead of walking past the car door, like I did. He wasn’t so hard to see then.

Five feet ahead of me, she made her turn, and was gone.

I never knew her, or the driver. I don’t even have the picture. But both of them have a picture of me.

The Cameraman (1928)

2011-10-17T19:21:00.000-04:00

The more I know about events in an artist’s life, the more tempted I am to find them expressed in his or her work. This can go too far.

For example, I know that Buster Keaton signed a disastrous deal with MGM in 1928, trading artistic freedom for monetary security. I also know that his career, marriage and even sobriety were compromised within a few years of that deal. I’m inclined, then, to fixate on certain moments in his MGM films that might depict the artist’s inner pain, as artwork tends to do.

But is this real? Or am I simply manufacturing meaning, based on knowledge I’m bringing in from the outside?

The true hallmark of a collapsing artist isn’t brilliant expressions of pain—it’s bad art. Keaton’s second MGM feature, Spite Marriage, is one of his worst silent films. The talkies that followed are beneath him. But his first MGM silent: The Cameraman, is one of his best.

Given that, what do I make (or what can I make) of this film’s central and recurring gag: the image of Buster swept up and overwhelmed by storms? Storms of rain, or paper, or humanity—barreling over him, burying him, threatening him, carrying him away? Is this how Buster felt?

The Cameraman is one of Keaton’s grimmest films—the first in which the world is not just inscrutable, but deliberately cruel.

Keaton’s hero, an impoverished photographer named ‘Buster’, sells 10-cent ‘tin types’ on the street. “They make great ashtrays” he tells a poser, early on. Think about that. Suddenly, Buster is caught in a blizzard of ticker-tape and human bodies, some of them photographers, jostling long-legged wooden movie cameras, and amidst this chaos he is pressed, nose to lovely neck, against Sally (Marceline Day). Buster is smitten.

The crowd disperses. Sally leaves. Now Keaton is alone, standing upon the paper and garbage and the rest of the dregs of excitement.

This scene is tremendous. But it felt, to me, like something Charlie Chaplin would have shot. Keaton’s characters are often men low in society, yes, but they’re still part of it—it’s the Tramp who’s outside society altogether.

Sally’s different too. She’s a sweetheart. She’s a secretary at the MGM Newsreel office who encourages Buster to buy a real movie camera and get a job there. She feeds him tips about breaking stories, so he’ll be first onsite to shoot them. She gladly accepts a date with him, despite attention from several better-looking, more successful men.

Keaton’s love interests aren’t usually this nice. Most represent an obligation; several issue ultimatums that get him in trouble—the most lethal example being The General’s Annabelle Lee. These women aren’t really worth Buster’s time, since they won’t accept him for who he is. And that makes his quest, done on their behalf, absurd.

It also insulates us from true sadness. In The Cameraman, we root for Buster’s love in a way we can’t in any of his other films, because Sally’s not only desirable and attainable, but also likable. She wants him to be more than he is, but takes an active part in helping him do it. She invests in him. When it seems that he’s lost her (and it does, several times) the feeling is gut-wrenching—for us.

One of the reasons Keaton’s humor seems fresher than Chaplin’s today is that it so rarely asks modern viewers to commit emotionally. It is detached and cynical; ironic, sarcastic. As are we. But The Cameraman is not. In a Venn Diagram of Slapstick Genius, it occupies a point of overlap between Chaplin’s circle and Harold Lloyd’s.

Supposedly, Keaton was allowed to improvise only two scenes in The Cameraman; the more famous being one in which he mimes a baseball game in Yankee Stadium, by himself. This scene is self-contained. Perhaps it was an act of rebellion against his micro-managing studio bosses. Or maybe not.

Yes or no, the scene feels out-of-place. Its camerawork is fairly passive; the focus is on the star, who creates an extended routine—out of nothing—using his physical gifts. It is traditional Keaton.

And, it’s atypical of this film, which often makes you conscious of a director’s hand. There are lots of dramatic close-ups in The Cameraman (or so it felt). There's a sequence in which Buster zig-zags up and down flights of apartment steps so smoothly that it’s almost beautiful--because the camera flows upward and downward too. And the scene of the ticker-tape storm is about the storm, as much as the man it obscures.

Where does Keaton fit into his own film? He is the very funny, but very wounded centre of it. I could write paragraphs more about the moments that balance these two sides. My immediate memory is the scene at the public pool, where Buster loses his swimsuit and has to keep Sally occupied without exiting the water. It’s a riot, but underneath is a threat of humiliation that goes beyond public nudity.

You see, it’s one thing for Buster to run bare-assed through an aquatorium. It’s another for him to accidentally flash the girl he loves. But here’s the real stress: as Buster stays submerged up to his chin in the pool, other men crowd around his girl. Bigger, stronger, richer men. Here, the consequence of Buster’s situation is not simply embarrassment, but agonizing, emotional loss. Destruction of self-worth.

This undertone makes The Cameraman Keaton’s most complex, human film, if not his most creative. Among his features it ranks near the top, alongside The General (1925), and The Navigator (1924). But it was the beginning of the end.

I could make the case—but choose to believe, either way—that he could feel it.

Where to find The Cameraman:

The Cameraman is available on DVD through TCM—part of its Buster Keaton Collection, packaged with Spite Marriage and the early Keaton talkie, Free and Easy (1930).

Project Keaton: Guest Post

2011-10-14T23:32:00.000-04:00

Silent Folk, listen up: The good and talented peeps at The Kitty Packard Pictorial are devoting October to Buster Keaton. Click this link to find out how you can contribute to PROJECT KEATON.

And click this link to read my guest post, where I give my thoughts on what Keaton means to us today, and why. Along with a few more thoughts on my favorite black-hole of usefulness: Twitter. There is a connection.

Enjoy!

The Wages of Fear (1953)

2011-10-11T19:13:00.000-04:00

I’d never seen The Wages of Fear, but I knew what it was about: men driving trucks, carrying nitroglycerin.

I expected tense moments. Tires hitting bumps; hands clenching steering wheels; crosscuts to plastic containers of explosive fluid, jostling in the beds. It would be impossible, in the hands of a director as talented as Henri-Georges Clouzot, for this not to be a nail-biter.

The Wages of Fear delivers on that, often enough. And like all really good suspense stories, it goes further, giving us four drivers (two per truck) whose tales interweave prior to the trip. You may not exactly care if these men live or die, but they are all fascinating in their ways.

But before discussing all that, I have to bring up the sky. It’s what I remember most about The Wages of Fear; what I noticed immediately, when Clouzot introduces us to the busted up, dusty little South American town where the men live. The sky’s cloudless and vast. Bleak. Almost—blank.

This film is shot in black and white. An empty sky, in such a film, can appear like a screen without a signal; and the objects and figures beneath it, displaced—pasted on, as though they’re not really there. It’s like this early in The Wages of Fear. And the men are nowhere—underemployed Americans, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians, their chatter a mash of languages—arrived to work for the oil wells in some fashion, but unable to get good work. Just hanging around in a hopeless town, where nothing changes and no one earns enough dough to fly home.

Mario (Yves Montand) is a Corsican; he’s unfocused and maybe a bit lazy, like most of the men in the town, but he has more spirit. He’s also younger, taller and more handsome than the rest, meaning he doesn’t have to work hard for the attention of Linda (Vera Clouzot), the prettiest girl around. Maybe if sex with Linda was harder to achieve—or really, if there was anything else to strive for—Mario would be happy. His best friend, the sunnier Luigi (Folco Lulli), has been told he’s got a lungful of concrete dust. Both of them would love to move on.

Things speed up a little with the appearance of Mr. Jo (Charles Vanel). Mr. Jo is a Frenchman too; he arrives having built some sort of reputation, somewhere—he cleaves quickly to Mario and disdains the rest.

It is clear that Mr. Jo presented a threat, at least in his youth. He knows how to control people; showing steel early on in a showdown with Luigi and a pistol. He’s also on a first-name basis with Bill O’Brien, the Patton-like chief of operations at SOC, an American oil company, whose well, some 300 miles away, just exploded. But Mr. Jo, like Mario, Luigi, the brooding Bimba (Peter van Eyck) and the rest of the townsmen, needs money desperately. So desperately that he joins the other three on a mad-person’s quest: transporting nitroglycerin to SOC’s burning well, hundreds of miles away, in two trucks that are not properly fitted for the task. One wrong move—one pothole, one rock, one slip—and they’re all vapor.

The volatility of the mens’ cargo, and the paucity of their tools, makes death a constant, intimate possibility. And the tension’s further heightened, because the film’s first hour, spent in the town, erases much of the ‘safe time’ we, as the audience, counted upon. One assumes that none of the main characters will be killed in Hour One. But they begin their journey in Hour Two.

Many great moments follow. Most memorable are scenes involving a rickety wooden bridge, on which the huge trucks must make an unplanned three-point turn; and much later, a pool of oil that covers the men in grease and filth: seemingly a comment on what they’ve reduced themselves to.

On its surface, The Wages of Fear is about men, capable in other fields, who must now face an environment where nothing is possible if one is afraid. Not everyone shines. Mr. Jo’s air of menace evaporates when he’s faced with his own mortality, and the once-subordinate Mario must take command. Jo weighs the risks, and so he’s paralyzed; Mario, unwilling or unable to absorb the danger, comes alive.

But the film is just as much about nihilism. Not an essay on it, so much as an apprehension of it. The men have their little dreams about pretty girls, fine French tobacco or simply getting the hell out of town, but they don’t spend much time thinking about why they’re in the town, or even if they should be. Mario and Mr. Jo are outright amoral beings. Bimba has a personal code that doesn’t quite equate to right and wrong. Luigi, a man who states he will not kill, seems to adhere to higher ideals, but he’s also the most frivolous.

Neither is the world around them moral. Their town is full of louts who claim to want work, but probably don’t want much of it. And SOC, the source of their cash, is frighteningly indifferent to death. O’Brien is a loud, demented Libertarian who believes he’s justified in sending men on suicide missions so long as they know the risks and SOC pays the survivors as promised. Clouzot’s image of men standing before the oil well—still a raging inferno—is less a symbol of Hell than of a furnace, into which all their efforts, courage, and pointless paper money will be cast.

If there is no good life, then a life cannot exactly be wasted. Perhaps then, it’s pointless to dream about a long life, or to wish you had more time. (Mr. Jo, for example, may have lived too long.) I cannot tell you exactly how long it took the men to make their 300-mile drive. Sometimes their trucks crawl—other times they race. No one seems to sleep. I also don’t know how long Mario and Mr. Jo spent in the town beforehand—the days blur together. Clouzot portrays one of their conversations by cutting from one location to the next. Each time a man answers, the two of them are somewhere else. Perhaps they had this conversation over weeks, or simply talked about the same thing, always.

Overhead, the sky gives nothing. No change of season, almost no gradation—just white and black. That, and the occasional plane, too expensive to board. Offering tickets, if one could afford it, to Anywhere But Here. When you watch the film’s final scene, ask yourself if it even matters.

Where to find The Wages of Fear:
The Wages of Fear (La Saliare de la Peur) screens several times this month, starting October 13, at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox—part of the retrospective The Wages of Fear: The Films of Henri-Georges Clouzot.

The Wages of Fear is also available on DVD and Blu-ray as part of The Criterion Collection.

A tip: If you like The Wages of Fear, try watching Night of the Living Dead (1968). The films are totally unalike in setting, story, and genre, but philosophically, they share a lot.

And by the way, if Shigeru Miyamoto or Takashi Tezuka are fans of The Wages of Fear, I’m unaware of it.

1911 (2011)

2011-10-05T22:05:00.000-04:00

In my third year of undergrad, I got to choose an elective History course. Most of the selections were nation-related, and Western: Irish history, Russian history, British history, etc. I chose Chinese. Specifically: The History of Twentieth Century China.

The course was tough. Remembering the names of key figures, places and events was tough. Pronouncing them was tough. The professor—Chinese-born herself—had no special aptitude for teaching, so that was tough too. However, the course remains one of my favorite academic memories. Because now and then, our prof would tell us to close our textbooks and listen to her recollect.

Not once did she bore us. Everything she told us about the food, the customs, and the society she grew up in was new to us. And the tales she told of the Great Leap Forward, which she lived through; and the collective farm on which she worked every day, passing a picture of Mao on her morning and evening commute; they were captivating. This was real. This happened. This small, shy woman had touched and tasted and breathed a universe each one of us was struggling to construct, from dates and paragraphs, in our heads.

When it’s claimed that a film ‘brings history alive,’ the claimant usually refers to a feeling like the one I got from my history prof—namely, that the past takes on a dramatic, human dimension that facts alone cannot convey. This may come at the expense of accuracy or balance, but it is compelling. In such cases, though, we’re not describing how well a film expresses history, but rather, how exciting it makes that history appear to be.

Jackie Chan’s 1911 attempts to do both, and fails at both. It fails because it expects us to find drama in the fact of events, rather than the way they’re portrayed. This might work for an audience familiar with the historic roles of men like Sun Yat-sen, or the significance of the Xinhai Revolution—but I suspect not, because this film, in any language, anywhere, would still be a collection of triumphant speeches, gun battles and comically wooden delivery.

Chan co-directed the film, and also stars as Huang Xing, a soldier and ally of Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen (Winston Chao). These men, along with thousands of other Chinese, seek to overthrow the centuries-old Qing Dynasty, by then in decline.

Scenes in the Forbidden City are dominated by Empress Dowager Longyu (Joan Chen, apparently ageless); she shrieks and cries and berates the sycophantic retainers around her, yet is the most lucid when it comes to her family’s future. In addition to revolutionaries, the Empress Dowager must contend with conniving general Yuan Shikai (Sun Chun), who seeks to profit from the failures of both sides. Chun’s performance in 1911 is the film’s best, since it’s funny on purpose.

Huang Xing spends the first half of the film fighting in China, while Sun Yat-sen spends it in San Francisco, in exile, leveraging political support. His biggest concern is the U.S. and European banks, who plan to grant the Chinese Government a loan it will then use to crush the rebels.

Sun is fervent in his mission and I believed in him. What I did not buy, for a second, were the Western leaders. The actors appear to be dubbed, even when speaking English, which is a strange effect; but worse is their dialogue, which is credulous and thick. It’s as though all they need to do to be convinced of Sun Yat-sen’s righteousness is to sit and listen to him. The performances are simply awful.

But they have nothing on ‘Homer Lea,’ author, friend and advisor to Sun. The portrayal here is of a man who’d have trouble mastering long division. It comes closer to resurrecting Stanley Spadowski than anything I’ve seen since 1989. Homer generated a lot of laughs from the theatre I was in, but none were intentional.

Text pops up constantly as new characters are introduced, identifying their names, titles and political allegiances, but many of these characters are insignificant. This is actually a very old silent film technique, but in the work of Griffith and others, it was used in lieu of credits, and typically not used at all for characters who didn’t matter much. Chan simply blitzes us with this information, as though the important thing is for us to know that some obscure figure is in the scene, doing something, likely off-camera.

Punctuated by (or perhaps punctuating) the sighs, wails and brooding are battle scenes of serious intensity. Chan borrows a lot here from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), which is a compliment. The violence is gory and frightening at times, without seeming excessive; it doesn’t grow tedious, despite an excess of cuts (actually, several dialogue scenes have the same problem). I suppose it’s the best part of 1911.

The worst part, for me, wasn’t in the movie at all; it was the fact that I left it knowing little more about the events it portrayed, or their meaningfulness to the Chinese people, than I did before.

1911 reminded me of silent film in one other way: like very, very old silent films—1910 and earlier—it only works if you’re familiar with the source material going in. Those old films were short; adapting popular novels and fairy tales was both a draw for viewers and a way to tell more story in less time—the viewer knowing, beforehand, what the characters are all about. The films revel in the novelty of their famous characters being portrayed on screen. The acting is secondary.

One hundred years on, 1911 seems just as giddy to show you just as little. I don’t know why this was enough for Chan, whose work I typically enjoy. And I regret that so much money and time was spent to make something with less force, forethought and purpose than a single Chinese woman, with a good memory, could generate.

Where to find 1911:

1911 makes its Toronto premiere exclusively at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday, October 7, 2011.

Our Dancing Daughters (1928)

2011-10-02T09:54:00.000-04:00

Sexual politics is tough enough today—I can’t imagine what it was like in the 1920s.

You might think I could. By now I’ve seen just about every variation of the male-female dynamic committed to silent film. But in a way it’s meaningless, because those relationships were idealized. They were reflective of what people felt they ought to be, or worse, what they were forced to pretend to be. The truth boiled underneath, but you didn’t see it.

Nevertheless, the Gishes and Pickfords, in their guises of committed, suffering wives and premarital virgins, expressed something important. They expressed a high watermark of values against which average people could measure themselves—probably unfavorably—just as a starlet’s beauty expressed an ideal to be constantly approached, if never matched. I have to wonder if, just as one could be complimented for looking a little like Mary Pickford, one could also have been respected for being nearly as pure, all things considered.

Nobody’s perfect.

But you always wonder what people thought, because the official line, so much of the time, at least on film, was no to vice. Oh there was innuendo, and some damn sexy actresses toward the end of the silent period (time for your close-up, Greta and Louise), but the idea of a woman both heroic and easy was really not a Silent one. I can’t name too many films pre-1929 that seriously challenged traditional sex roles, at least to the end of the last reel.

I’m not sure Our Dancing Daughters does, either. But I’ve written you a three-paragraph preamble to it because, if nothing else, the sheer confusion of values in this film tells us something. Maybe the only constant in the Jazz Age was confusion—the mashing of traditional values with emancipatory glee; indifference, guilt, rage, nihilism and sexual abandon embraced in equal measure; maturity blurred with selling out. I loved this film, readers. I loved it to its chaotic core and I don’t know, or care, how much of it was that way on purpose.

Joan Crawford—more fresh-faced than you’d recognize, but already a star—plays the heroine. She’s Diana, a rich man’s daughter blessed with great beauty and magnetism. She’s the girl everyone wants to be around. I’ve seen enough of Crawford’s silent work to call this her gift. She was not enigmatic, like a Garbo, nor was she the flake that Clara Bow’s heroines tended to be; she seemed approachable in a way that belied how desirable she was.

She’s of course fascinating for these reasons, but there’s more. For Diana, despite her wagon-train of male admirers, still tries too hard. “I'm known as Diana the Dangerous!” she announces, early on, to prospective beau Ben Blaine (Johnny Mack Brown), at a night club. That’s quite the nickname, and it would imply a lot… if someone else had given it to her. But what if a woman gives it to herself? And what if she says it while holding a tuxedoed hunk tight on each arm, as though she were wearing a luxurious fur coat made out of men? And what if she moved in to kiss Ben anyway?

Diana has a reputation alright, but has she earned it? Should we even care? The film isn’t sure. Her chief rival for Blaine’s affections is a Good Girl, named Ann (Anita Page), but Ann’s virtue isn’t held up as some mighty force that Diana’s sexuality can’t match. Meaning, Ann’s not a way for the film to lecture us on Diana’s failures. Ann is a shallow snot. She has saved herself for marriage because she believes purity is the best way to land a rich husband.

Ann views decency and restraint as means to an end—she does not view them as worthwhile unto themselves. And so she does not recognize their capacity to make her a better person. Ergo, she’s not that good. But she’s no more a hypocrite than the dozens of society folk who judge her favorably—who demand no more of her than the surface goodness she earnestly maintains. When she blows up and calls Diana a slut (yes, really), she’s being true to their code of values. In an older film, Ann would have been the victim.

Ben is a handsome but bland figure; motivated by what he thinks he ought to do. He’s passionate, but he seems able to shift that passion from femme to femme—the way a flashlight can be switched on and off and directed at any target with equal intensity. Both Ann and Diana seek to manipulate him, but by different means.

In between—wedded, but always available for a chat—is Bea (Dorothy Sebastian). A truly decent soul, Bea once earned the bad reputation Diana flirts with. Her transgression may have been no more than a pre-marital lay (we never learn), but it has left her marriage permanently fraught. “I love you—then I hate you—then I love you again—” her husband declares one day, before storming out of their house to brood.

Bea sums up Our Dancing Daughters’ remarkable inner turmoil. She illustrates the dangers Diana faces, but she’s an object of sympathy and affection at the same time—and the one we trust most. We believe she’ll never live down her mistake because she says so herself. We believe Diana is still a virgin because Bea says that too.

With Bea watching from the sidelines, Ann and Diana battle it out for a man less interesting than either of them. Their goal is marriage, because that bond, once forged, is unbreakable. But this too is strange, because annulments were possible even then (Crawford’s Our Modern Maidens, made only a year later, details one). And for Ann, there may be no such thing as a permanent defeat.

Diana learns, though. “Because I was a woman—not a lying imitation—you decided I was unworthy,” she says, finally, in the third act. “But I thought there was nothing finer than truth—and I still think so!”

Perhaps she’s simply learned to be herself. Maybe that is all the film intends. But Diana is still Diana: She’s still fun and free, and ready for new adventures. And she’s a woman. The term belongs to her; it describes her, without qualification. She’s made it her own.

No one tells Diana what to be.

Where to find Our Dancing Daughters:

Our Dancing Daughters can be viewed as a made-to-order DVD, purchased online from the Warner Archive Collection.

If you enjoyed Dorothy Sebastian’s suffering sweetheart role here, be sure to check out Spite Marriage (1929), in which she plays the opposite. Her Trilby Drew is one of the meanest women around.

The Interrupters (2011)

2011-09-27T14:59:00.000-04:00

There are places in Chicago where violence can erupt over nothing. These are street corners, alleys, schoolyards, lawns—common sites. But the people in them are uncommonly poor, oppressed and angry. They reach their boiling point early in the day, and disrespect alone can be too much to take.

This isn’t the Chicago I’ve seen in person. My trips there have showed me great architecture, great shopping; exposed me to fine art and cool music. I’m a tourist. Occasionally, The Interrupters shows us that Chicago too—mostly in brief tracking shots of gleaming towers like the ones I walked beneath. But the towers are always moving, because the people director Steve James is documenting here are bussed past beauty and wealth like this, and on to dilapidated schools and homes where aspiration just doesn’t seem appropriate.

In conditions like these, the line between predator and victim is clearly drawn, and people avoid victimhood by resisting; pushing back; projecting an aura of lethality that hopefully leaves them untouched. They are smart; they know the futility and tragedy of their situation. Says one teenage girl, enrolled at a high school where another student was just beaten to death with a 2x4: “I don’t like to fight. But I’ll fight if I have to.”

The Interrupters tells several of their stories. We meet Caprysha, an obese 18-year-old, seemingly alone in the world, equal parts angry and sad; and the Oliver brothers, who live under the same roof but belong to different gangs. Their constant fights have driven their mother out of her own home. And there’s ‘Flamo,’ a pissed-off hood who could make it in comedy if the things he complained about weren’t so immediate and deadly.

These young people live in a rage-filled environment. Their survival depends on their ability to avoid conflicts that happen suddenly and escalate from words to fists to knives and guns in seconds. The Violence Interrupters are among the few allies they have.

Violence Interrupters are men and women who voluntarily step into confrontations and try to defuse them. Part of an organization called CeaseFire, they’re former criminals themselves. They talk tough and stand down bigger, scarier, angrier people more effectively than you might think. They do it by appealing to their common sense; by reminding them that socio-economics is the real reason they’re prepared to fight and die over nothing but slights; and by reminding them, too, that they have an obligation to make things better. That this works as well as it does is really the point.

We learn the Interrupters’ stories too. There’s Eddie Bocanegra: a car thief who spent half his life behind bars for a retaliatory shooting; and Cobe Williams, son of a drug addict. They’re earnest about their work (you’d have to be), but their pasts haunt them. James, and his documentary partner, author and New York Times columnist Alex Kotlowitz, show us photos of Eddie and Cobe and others in the bad old days. Lots of sunglasses, big hats, big hair and colorful clothes. The Interrupters know how seductive crime can be.

The star of the film is a female Interrupter named Ameena Matthews. A former party-girl turned Muslim, she’s also the daughter of Jeff Fort, once Chicago’s most feared gang leader. Photos of him are intriguing: they’re images of a criminal, but also of a black power advocate, and Ameena, it seems, has inherited some of the latter identity while expelling the former. Physically small, she’s an immense personality who speaks bluntly—and loudly—to the young people she’s trying to save.

I would’ve liked to know more about how CeaseFire works, and what happens when its methods fail. We get snippets of that—such as a board meeting with a South African administrator who expresses concerns about CeaseFire’s position relative to cops and crooks. And we meet an Interrupter who got shot. But little else is said about the organization’s vigilante element, or what it might inspire. I’ve no doubt CeaseFire has its critics.

Surrounding everyone are lamentations. James gives us clip after clip of politicians talking, community leaders talking back, and pitiful piles of teddy bears, some covered in snow, marking the spots where teens were gunned down. Every one of these victims was loved. And hated enough, at least for a moment, to be murdered.

These memorial acts amount to nothing, and they can be dangerous. The Interrupters shook me with an early scene, where a gathering of community members dissolves into angry shouting between the tearful father of the victim and the victim’s aunt. The purpose of the gathering—a call for safer streets—becomes ironic. Much later, Ameena speaks at the funeral of a murdered teenager, and calls for the young people in the audience to stand up and take account of themselves. She has watched them file past the casket and pose for photos with the corpse, as a sign of respect. The funeral director explains it: they’re just hoping that when they die, they’ll be celebrated the same way. He’s anything but glib; he tells the camera that 90 percent of the bodies in his funeral home belong to youths.

The Interrupters is shocking and sad, and the immensity of the problem it describes cannot be denied. As a documentary film, though, it is average. It gives you the players, with their histories and their motivations, and follows them for a while. James’ earlier effort, Hoop Dreams, was far more than this. It told the story of two exceptional boys with a chance to escape the ghetto, and spun their tale into something epic. Hoop Dreams can’t be forgotten.

The Interrupters isn’t about prodigies like Arthur Agee and William Gates. It’s about everybody else. It makes a point early, and keeps on making it, in the hopes we will get it just once. And while we try, Ameena Matthews will be on the streets, getting things done.

Where to find The Interrupters:

The Interrupters screens this October at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox—part of Steve James: Documenting Dreams, a retrospective of the director’s work. James will be in attendance on October 7.

Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. (1914)

2011-09-19T16:17:00.000-04:00

“In picturing this event, an odd character discovered that motion pictures were being taken, and it became impossible to keep him away from the camera.”

History gives us beautiful symmetries, sometimes. It’s so right that this quote comes not from some mature piece of Chaplin comedy, but from the film that marked the Tramp’s very first public appearance.

Doesn’t it just sum him up? All twenty-two years of him, from these early, blunt Keystone days to the almost post-comic icon he became for United Artists. Always odd, always outside, and always there: drawing our eyes from the centre of life to the periphery.

The Tramp never occupied less time on screen than he does here. Kid Auto Races is brief: just under seven minutes, with a plot equivalent to one gag in a later Chaplin short. The ‘odd character’ is a spectator at a go-kart race, more or less: kid drivers in motorless cars are pushed to the top of a steep wooden slide, then roll down it and along a winding track. The crowd swells at each turn and a local film crew (a Keystone crew, let’s say) positions its camera to catch the action. And time after time, their view is blocked by the Tramp.

Is he a different Tramp from the one we know? Incomplete? ‘Primitive’? No. We have all the parts: the look of the man, with his ill-fitting suit, bowler hat and cane, and the rocking-chair walk.

His persona is familiar too, at least if you know Chaplin’s work prior the First National days. He’s more aggressive, greedier, more physical and less sympathetic—more, I think, like most people perceive vagrants to be. The sweetheart Tramp of later years was a man we knew from the movies, not a man we’d ever meet on the street, where so few of us would’ve deigned to shake his hand.

And he’s persistent. The Tramp, for reasons of his own in this film, wishes to be filmed, and with each rebuff he finds a new way dominate the frame. At first jogs ahead as the camera pans past him; then, when the crew responds more violently, he acts as though he’s been doing it by accident. Finally he reacts as though he’s been offended; but again, it’s all in front of the lens.

I don’t know why the Tramp wants this so bad. Early versions of him are often cloudy this way. Yet Chaplin created a character so refined in his motion and so closely mimicking natural human reactions that it never matters. You might say Chaplin collapsed the barrier between motivation and action. While the Tramp obsesses for reasons we can’t understand, his means of attaining a goal always has logic, and his emotional response to success and failure make him credible, even normal. It sets the Tramp apart—most glaringly in these Keystone shorts—from actors playing caricatured types, who react in caricatured ways to things such types are supposed to react to. The Tramp’s not a Bum; he’s a man who has no home.

Kid Auto Races isn’t much on its own, but it does do one interesting thing: it selectively breaks the fourth wall. It makes the camera Chaplin’s mugging in front of the same one we see him through. I liked the creativity of this, and the cheekiness—Kid Auto Races, like some other Keystone shorts I’ve seen, remind me a lot of the Warner Brothers cartoons that would come along twenty years later. Same snarky spirit; same immunity to convention.

Those cartoon characters never aged of course, and it occurs to me that the Tramp never did, either. He certainly evolved, though not that much. And Chaplin obviously grew older. But Chaplin’s physical gifts remained, and the pancake makeup, mustache and hat still stuck, so there isn’t much to distinguish the Tramp in Kid Auto Races from the Tramp in Modern Times (1936). He’s eternal. Maybe he mellowed a little. But mostly, we mellowed to him.

Where to find Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal.:
Kid Auto Races was Chaplin’s third film for Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios, the first released in which he played the Tramp, but the second film in which he played him (Mabel’s Strange Predicament having been shot shortly before, but released later). Both films, and many others, are available on Flicker Alley’s fantastic four-disc set, Chaplin at Keystone. If you think Keystone films were all cops, bricks and pies, get ready for a major shock.

The Artist (2011)

2011-09-12T08:30:00.001-04:00

Jean Dujardin makes a great Douglas Fairbanks, with his slicked-back hair and pencil mustache and swagger. He plays a silent star about to face the onslaught of Sound--a showdown that will cost the star his career. Dujardin isn't Fairbanks, though; he's George Valentin: a man who never was, but could have been, and represents many who were.

Aside from one archival clip, Fairbanks doesn’t appear in The Artist; he's not even mentioned in passing. Neither are Clara Bow, Greta Garbo or Norma Shearer, the three women I believe were sampled to make Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), Valentin’s love interest. The Artist does not recreate the time in which it is set, so much as create the look and feel of a movie from that time. And kudos to director Michel Hazanavicius for taking this to its logical—and bold—extreme: a 100-minute, modern silent film.

It really is silent. Really. This is not a film without words, like the first half of WALL-E. In The Artist, we see dialogue spoken but cannot hear it, as opposed to simply watching actors say nothing at all. The soundtrack, with rare exceptions, is only music. Its first half-hour is sharp, tight, silent-style romantic comedy, as good as anything produced in the '20s The Artist is the real thing.

George is a man too full of life, and too adored, to see tragedy coming. He extends his gravitational pull even to us, filling the screen with his grinning self and throwing open his arms as if to lock them around the movie audience. Only his wife, the aging Doris (Penelope Ann Miller), seems immune. She sits in plush chairs, in their mansion, and blacks out his teeth in fan magazines.

You can see why George is a star. You root for him. You meet Peppy and root for her too. You follow their lives, as Act One advances them to the points they must occupy for George’s gargantuan fall. To do this, Hazanavicius employs a series of repeating gags (or gag structures) familiar to fans of silent comedy: A succession of playbills, for example, building Peppy’s career from chorus girl to lead; or George and Doris’ succession of dinners—with the mood growing ever colder and Doris’ neckline climbing ever higher—referencing Citizen Kane, perhaps, but with a farcical tone Kane never had. Through it all, you feel the energy of the Jazz Age. The exhilaration, the tipsy nods to tragedy; the amplification of experience.

It's in Act One that you'll find The Artist's best scene. Already in the movies but not yet a star, smitten Peppy sneaks into George's dressing room. He's not there, but she does find his suit coat, hanging on the wall. She stands in profile before the coat, and Hazanavicius films her embracing it with her left arm, while threading her right arm through its sleeve, so it appears to embrace her back. What an incredible thing this is—erotic, funny, and honestly, urgently loving. You won’t see one movie in a hundred that nails a scene like that. But The Artist isn’t always so precise.

Act Two begins with another remarkable scene, just after George and his hardnosed studio head (John Goodman) have finished laughing at some actor’s first sound test. George returns to his dressing room, smug. Sound is a joke. Nothing for him to worry about. He takes a drink, and his glass hits the table with a clunk.

He hears that clunk. So do we. All of a sudden, all around George, are sounds. Breathing, traffic, starlets’ shrill laughter, growing, growing—a phone ringing, his dog barking—he cries out against it, still without words, feeling--sounding!--impotent in this lewd, loud, bonkers new world. George’s soundtrack panic attack (what else would you call it?) creates a sudden emotional turn that couldn’t be achieved through dialogue or action alone.

Now the movie goes grim. George’s films fail. His marriage ends. He hits the bottle. He sells his stuff. He releases his butler (the always sturdy James Cromwell), who would’ve gladly worked for free until one of them died. We get the point, but again and again the movie makes it, until The Artist begins to drag. George gave us so much energy, right off the bat, that it is our own joy we miss, not his. This isn’t the same as sympathy.

The Artist has an obvious structure—it is, after all, a movie about movies like itself—and so we watch for the end point, then become impatient when it remains so far away for seemingly no good reason. Meanwhile, there's Peppy, the It-Girl with the cute face and the heart of gold: unsullied by fame; her long limbs pulsing with the exuberance of the Sound Era, giving us no villainy to be slain, and barely any hubris to deflate. It is her time. She deserves her fame and we aren’t able to invest in her downfall, or even the possibility of it, to keep things interesting.

Maybe this is why, toward the very end, we’re given an intertitle “Bang!” joke that is, frankly, in poor taste. It takes something like this to free us from our listless state, challenging our presumption to know what’s coming. However, we were right to presume. Like Peppy, we see things for what they are.

I liked The Artist well enough. Occasionally I loved it. What interests me more than the film, though, is where it could lead. The next step (and I hope there is a next step) is a silent feature that isn’t about its own silence, or the Death of the Silent Era, but simply about something else. Anything else. Even something mundane: made magical and new through the silent techniques Hazanavicius has so thoroughly mastered. I do believe we deserve it.

Where to find The Artist:

I attended the second screening of The Artist at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox; part of the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. In attendance for a Q&A after the screening were Hazanavicius, Dujardin and Cromwell, all of whom were gracious with the rather limited time we had for questions. Of particular interest: Hazanavicius told us he played music while the actors performed their scenes—something common in the Silent Era but now long gone. Cromwell spoke warmly of that experience, calling The Artist “the sweetest set” he’d ever been on.

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914)

2011-09-08T00:01:00.000-04:00

I love, love, love His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, because it creates a world I cannot pull back from or forget. That world is cheap, corny, and shoddily made; but so what? Better that a film glory in what it is than strive and fail to be something else.

His Majesty was the second of only five features produced by the Oz Film Manufacturing Company. It was bookended by The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) and The Magic Cloak of Oz (released 1917), both terrible films. His Majesty shares some of their flaws: uninspired acting and direction, vague plot, near motionless camera—but its pacing is better, and for all their silliness, its characters seem to believe in what they’re doing.

You’ll know a lot of them. There’s Dorothy, that girl from Kansas; there’s the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion, and the Wizard himself, all more or less intact, as per your memories. This is not the original story though.

Dorothy (Violet MacMillan) first appears as a captive of the witch Mombi (Mai Wells), who is not a Witch of the West, or any other direction, but more of a freelance caster of black magic. Upon escaping Mombi, Dorothy meets the Scarecrow (Frank Moore), and later the Tin Woodman (Pierre Couderc), who’s a bigger brute than Jack Haley could ever be, and resides in a castle made of tin. The Lion is an actor (Fred Woodward) in an animal suit. Woodward excelled at mimicking four-legged beasts, and plays several more in the film.

You may not be familiar with the rest. Besides Mombi, we’ve got King Krewl, the preening monarch of Oz, whose niece, Gloria (Vivian Reed), is in love with the gardener’s son, a boy named Pon (Todd Wright). Krewl disapproves. There is also a living sawhorse, a clever donkey, several more witches, and a boy named Button-Bright, who serves no purpose at all.

Pon needs to go, so Gloria can be married off for political advantage. Krewl has an idea: why not “freeze her heart” so her love for Pon is extinguished? He turns to Mombi for help.

Here’s how Mombi does it. She captures Gloria and ties her to pillar. With an incantation she summons three other witches (one in full demonic garb) and combines their powers with her own to create a cauldron-full of magic potion. Then, in a pretty sexy close up, Mombi pours a ladel-full of the stuff over Gloria’s blouse. Mombi now cups her empty hand just below Gloria’s breasts. A heart (imagine a stuffed heart in the shape of a real one) appears in her hand, and ices over. The now-frozen heart disappears, and Gloria’s capacity for love goes with it.

Wikipedia describes Mombi “pulling out her heart,” but that’s wrong. Nothing is pulled from Gloria’s chest. What we see is a figurative heart appearing, literally, in Mombi’s hand, then being literally frozen, so that Gloria will—figuratively speaking—be incapable of love, since hearts do not, literally, generate it.

Chew on that.

His Majesty holds fast to this hybrid of theatrical and cinematic realities. Giant cartoonish animals spar with humans, with no contradiction, or even a Mary Poppins-style mixture of media, implied. At one point, Dorothy, perplexed at Gloria’s zombiefied state, presses her ear to the princess’s chest, then recoils from the cold. There is no verisimilitude in the film. There’s no sense of a passage of time either, nor geographical position, at least relative to any other position. All things are equivalent, so long as they share the screen.

The actors wear costumes fit for a Halloween party, and perform as though they’re attending one. Imagine a guy dressed up like a king, spooning himself a drink from a punch bowl. You walk up to him and say, “Your Highness! Why are you getting your own drink? Where’s your servant?” And then he says, “We agree!” and puts on royal airs. That’s the level of acting you’ll see in this film.

If the sets, costumes, and events themselves defy reality, why should actors uphold it?

His Majesty isn’t all fun. Mombi rips the Scarecrow apart in one early scene, whipping his head and strawless carcass around like a sandy towel. The Tin Woodman later beheads the witch, though the results are temporary. Both scenes would feel out of place if everything else weren’t out of place in some way too.

At 60 minutes, with little character development and a rigid camera, the film ought to drag. It never does, because both its big scenes and its standalone comedy sequences are brief. In a more logical film, with a more logical world, the latter would be gratuitous and false, but this Oz has no mean; no standard—so everything belongs and nothing is too much.

Late in His Majesty, the heroes must storm Kastle Krewl from the sea. “The Wall of Water,” an intertitle announces. We see the girl from Kansas, and the straw man, the metal man, the lion, and the rest, floating on a raft that gradually tilts upward. The actors cling to the raft in great terror. Then the raft, and even the water, tilt steeply downward. That’s your wall. Just a tilt of the camera. Cheapest effect around. But see if you don’t move your head.

Anything can happen in Oz, perhaps because the creators of Oz didn’t know what they were doing. But the result is still a unique, memorable, and most of all, intriguing place. Sometimes, it even awes.

Where to find His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz:
MGM’s three-disc release of The Wizard of Oz (1939) includes a complete version of His Majesty film, along with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910); The Magic Cloak of Oz; and a 1933 animated short, The Wizard of Oz. The set also includes the second film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz: Larry Semon’s 1925 version.

The Kiss (1929)

2011-08-19T00:16:00.000-04:00

The Kiss opens with an art gallery tour guide running comically fast past a row of paintings while the camera pans right to keep pace—then slows, and dips down, to Greta Garbo.

And Conrad Nagel, but who cares?

Garbo. Revealed in the opening minute of a film. Not for us, this time, the glory of a Garbo reveal, such as the one in Flesh and the Devil (1926) that shuddered my breastbone. Here we have the Sphinx from the start, upfront and kind of stressed, once again the object of a man’s obsession, but, in this case, well along in a sexless tryst behind the back of her older husband. Garbo is Irene Guarry, a French woman of means; Nagel is Ardré, a notable defense lawyer. Their love is real. This gallery is where they rendezvous, but now, Irene feels, they must stop.

And for a while, they do. That The Kiss doesn’t really involve Nagel is another of maybe a dozen things that make it strange, and strangely compelling, to anyone used to the Garbo boilerplate. I got the feeling that The Kiss, Garbo’s last silent film, was acted on the sly, as though everyone knew the Temptress had run its course and wanted to see how little they could build around the character and still make it work. For The Kiss is short: 62 minutes; without a subplot of any kind, one scant scene of comic relief; a barely resolved second act and no real third act at all. Garbo’s Irene is benign by her standards; a nice lady whose magnetism is unweaponized and who tries, earnestly, to spare Ardré further torment. Compare it to the emotional destruction she deals Nagel’s character in The Mysterious Lady (1928): If you’ve seen both films, the difference is striking. And The Kiss presumes you have seen it, along with a lot of other Garbo films.

Called upon to deliver, any great performer falls back on the stocks-in-trade that brought her to the fore, and so it is here. Absent a real story or much of anything else, Garbo gives us Garbo, and of course, it works. What set Greta Garbo apart from other actresses of the silent period was not simply her looks; there were others as beautiful, including Louise Brooks and Dolores Costello. What made Garbo special was her ability to invest moments with an extreme and urgent sexual tension, vastly beyond attraction or even lust. Garbo’s acting, across near a century of time, can still put a tingle in your gut; making you wonder if her hitch of breath or the tiny incline of her face toward her man are the last falterings of conscience before she’ll tear off her clothes and dive into him. I know it’s the 1920s, and rationally, it cannot happen. But Garbo makes you suspend disbelief.

Another thing: she could tell a story in gestures. People grant that talent to every silent actor, but most of them weren’t that great at it; they just had to be competent, because otherwise, they’d have no job. Garbo though? Watch her in The Kiss, reclining on her husband’s couch while he’s away, sitting behind the totally besotted Pierre (Lew Ayres, all of 20-years old), glancing at the back of his neck. Irene has, for the bulk of the film, treated Pierre as a silly but lovable child, and here too; but though Garbo’s mouth remains fixed in a smug grin, her eyes dance. He is handsome, and eager, and she’s a deprived wife. If she doesn’t act on her impulse, she can still enjoy the fantasy.

Ayres, most famous for his role as Dr. Kildare, is better known to me as the actor who ruined All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Here, at least, we’re spared his wooden delivery, and he’s believable enough as a wide-eyed, striking goof, a bit over his head with Irene and way, way over it once Irene’s husband shows up. Monsieur Guarry finds the two of them lip-locked (it’s less scandalous than it looks) and sets about to beat the boy to death. He just about does it too, before a door closes and shuts us out. Behind it, we’re told, Monsieur Guarry is shot.

Who killed the old man? Irene is interrogated by cop after cop, her story held up to the light to expose its holes. This affords director Jacques Feyder (who has little else to do) the chance to toy with some pretty interesting sequences. For example, when Irene stumbles over a policeman’s questions re: the time of night, Feyder shows us the face of a clock: its arms moving forward and backward on their own to reflect her shifting memory. All this is in Irene’s mind, but it’s given directly to the viewer—the clock is a showed object, without visual context, which is something you rarely see in the Sound Era.

From Rashomon-Lite, The Kiss now morphs to Pandora’s Box Extra-Lean, with Irene taking the stand in court, garbed in black; accused of murder and defended by the only man/lawyer whose faith in her is unbowed. Of course you know who that is. All this is rather heavy, or it could have been, had it lasted more than 20 minutes.

If you’ve never seen a Garbo silent, by god don’t let this one be your first. The Kiss is not a bad film at all, but its charm lies in its oddness, and in the way it flings the Garbo mystique at you like an old sock. You have to know, going in, why that mystique matters; because The Kiss has neither the time, nor the inclination, to fill you in.

Where to find The Kiss:

My copy of The Kiss is a made-to-order DVD, purchased online from the Warner Archive Collection.

Umberto D. (1952)

2011-07-28T16:50:00.000-04:00

Umberto D. is about suicide.

Maybe you disagree. Or if you agree, perhaps you’d qualify it: pointing out that Umberto D. is about a great many other things too. Poverty, for example; the dismissal of the elderly before their time; the callowness of modern life; the value of a loyal dog. I admit my view is minimalist. Umberto D., to me, is about a man on a path to personal extinguishment, and everything in the film either propels him toward that end or slows him down. It is their purpose. Even the director’s an accomplice.

Umberto D., like Vittorio De Sico’s earlier film, Bicycle Thieves (1948), centres on a once-useful man who is marginalized because he cannot earn his keep. Both films present society as unreasonably hostile: through one-on-one interactions, but also through brutish crowds and indifferent labour laws that let decent men starve. Their protagonists are both desperate to survive, not only for their own sakes, but for the sake of those they support. The difference, for me, was the strength of the hold each man’s dependents had upon him. In Bicycle Thieves, there is a little son, with a voice, who can use it to plead and reason; in Umberto D., there is only a dog, ‘Flike’, with no voice. Umberto loves that dog, but that dog’s best argument for keeping Umberto around hasn’t evolved since the day they met.

Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti) is an elderly bachelor living alone in a Roman flat. He is a pensioner who can barely afford to eat, yet you wouldn’t know it if you met him: he’s also well-groomed with a silver moustache, a proper-fitting three-piece suit, and an energetic pet. Only if you followed him home would you realize his situation. There you’d see the tiny space he lives in and meet his tyrannical landlady Antonia (Lina Gennari), who’d rather evict him than take his money. Umberto’s only friend, besides Flike, is Maria (Maria Pia Casilio), the building’s teenage maid. Maria didn’t seem very bright, to me. She likes the old man, but she has her own problems.

De Sica suggests a whole city turning on, and turning out, Umberto. Driven from the public square along with hundreds of other old pensioner-protesters, he soon discovers he’s the only one (of those he’s speaking with) who is actually destitute. Later, he’s told not to return to a café after feeding Flike from his plate. And later still he’s released from a hospital after only a week, which is a double joke, since he faked sick to get there in the first place.

Nobody wants, or needs, Umberto for anything. Except the dog. It becomes clear that caring for Flike is the only task Umberto simply has to do in his entire life. Nothing else is necessary, leading him to believe, naturally, that life itself is not necessary. I’m reminded of stories my parents told about people their age who ‘retired to their armchairs’ and soon seemed years older. One must have something to live for.

But even the film itself; even its tone and camera angles make life impossible for Umberto. Antonia pushes things toward farce when she rents out his apartment to couples—by the hour—then knocks a hole in one of his walls. Umberto’s door seems to have no lock, as people open it at will, even at night, and the walls are so thin that Antonia’s opera-singing friends invade his space with every note. Whatever identity he has left is unfixed; it exists in no defined space with true boundaries, physical or otherwise. Meanwhile, De Sica again and again films hallways, alleys and streetscapes as though they’re huge—as though crossing even short distances is, for Umberto, monumental. How can he get anywhere? How can he go on, when even space and time seem to thwart him?

Umberto struck me as somebody who’d normally be the running gag in a true comedy or the comic relief in something dramatic—not the star. That’s important. Consider this scene, perhaps his moment of truth: Umberto, reduced to begging, extends his hand on the sidewalk—only to shake it suddenly when someone approaches with change, as though he were checking for rain the whole time. Afterward, he has the dog hold an upturned hat in its jaws, while he hides nearby. This scene, which is thick with pathos, has all the trappings of slapstick, too; with a few tweaks, that’s what it would be.

Now it’s commonly said that we laugh at, not with, comedic characters. But what if one died? The fact of mortality often brings us together. In Umberto D., the doom is all-too impending to let you forget what the old man is going through; you cannot suspend your sympathy for him, even if he is a bit silly. And Flike remains the ultimate magnet for sentiment; a loyal, unjudging friend to the end, like all good dogs. Without Flike in the world, Umberto might be better off dead. The only problem is that Flike needs to be fed. There’s more than one way to deal with that, once Umberto accepts it.

Where to find Umberto D.:

Umberto D. screens at 6:30pm on August 1st, 2011, at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox—part of Days of Glory, Masterworks of Italian Neorealism, a retrospective running from July 28th to August 28th.

Click here to read my reviews of Il Posto (1961) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), also part of the retrospective.

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

2011-07-21T23:11:00.000-04:00

For whom do you have more sympathy: the born fool, or the capable man reduced to foolishness? The first is to be pitied, for he was given no chance to be great; while the latter, you might say, squandered his. And yet, there’s something more pitiable about a man whose dignity is stripped from him. If we’re honest, we’ll admit it could happen to us too, no matter the strength of our character.

Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) is an average man in post-war Rome; a married father of two small children, one a baby, the other, a boy under ten. He aspires to no more than his family’s comfort, it seems: like many Roman tradesmen, he’s struggling to keep his loved ones fed, and so, when he wins a job placing posters—beating out dozens and dozens of other desperate men—he’s ecstatic. It’s a lousy job, really; you ride from corner to corner through busy streets, a ladder slung over your arm and a paste bucket in-hand, and you have to provide your own bicycle. But it’s a job, and Antonio needs a job more than anything.

And so, he needs a bike more than anything. Antonio and his wife, Maria (Lianella Carrell) pawned his bicycle for food some time before this, and now they must get it out of hock. Maria, in a remarkable scene of deliberate action—of raw practicality over sentiment—rips the sheets from their marriage bed, in hopes of making up the difference to the pawnbroker. She’s a sweet little thing, but she’s hungry. Soon, Antonio is biking his way to profit, smoothing out the bumps and wrinkles in posters of Rita Hayworth, while his bicycle rests nearby. And then it is stolen. He doesn’t quite see the face of the man who rides off.

This theft was inevitable, I think. It’s impossible for Antonio to watch his bike while he works—he has to face the wall when he puts up his posters. Which makes Antonio’s continued employment dependent on the good will of his fellow human beings—and that, in this film, is a maddening prospect. Over the course of Bicycle Thieves, poor Antonio will be embarrassed, demoralized, even roughed up, but no one will save him. Some will try, and prove useless at it; most will be part of the mob that always seems to oppose him—against which he is the ultimate individual.

Antonio vows to regain the bicycle before his next day of work—I remind you, they’re in a large city. With the loyal Bruno (Enzo Staiola) in tow, he sets off through the streets to find it. He enlists the help of another labourer, a hefty garbageman named Baciocco (Gino Saltamerenda), who rounds up another two guys and suggests they all visit Piazza Vittorio: an open-air market and possible bicycle chop-shop, where bikes can be found by the hundreds, and bike parts by the thousands. Baciocco’s plan: each of the searchers, including the boy, will look for a certain kind of part, unique to Antonio’s bike. When they find it, they’ll rejoin the group. When everyone returns, they’ll reassemble the bike.

Scenes like these almost make Bicycle Thieves a comedy. Director Vittorio De Sica gives it a further nudge in that direction by avoiding close-ups of the protagonist (it’s always easier to laugh at a man from a comfortable distance). But the film remains serious for three reasons, the first being the soundtrack, which is imminent, persistent and loudly ominous; and the second being that we know, from the opening minutes, how desperate Antonio’s situation really is. His obsessive, eventually deranged quest to regain his bike is disturbingly pragmatic, because he lives in a society that would let him starve, and works for an employer too cheap to buy him a bike lock, much less a bike. Getting that stupid bike back is a life-or-death matter for him, and that’s what makes him act the fool.

The third serious matter is Bruno. I never doubted that Antonio loved his son, who is a cheerful and rather mature little man, but the longer Dad’s odds got, the more quickly he seemed to forget his son was running behind him, struggling to keep up. Count how many times Antonio barrels after some half-baked ‘lead’, leaving Bruno in the dust. Were something to happen to Bruno, he would be devastated, but one might argue, at least in the heat of the moment, that the theft of the bike already ‘happened to Bruno,’ because if Dad has no job, Bruno won’t eat.

No one can help. The police give Antonio polished speeches about lack of evidence, while a Catholic seer proclaims: “Either you find it right away or you never will,” offering no clues as to where the bike might be. Antonio, meanwhile, breaks one cultural taboo after the next: barging into a church, for example, to interrogate an old man who might know something (but probably doesn’t); then doing much the same thing to the residents of a whorehouse. He throttles a teenager who may be the thief—who then drops to the ground in an epileptic seizure—and Antonio is surrounded by a crowd of angry men, not much different from the crowd that cursed him when he won the job they all wanted. He is alone, but for Bruno, who witnesses his every personal failure and absorbs the example they set. The film ends as it must, for Antonio can only follow one trajectory, dictated from the start by his miserable situation.

Bicycle Thieves is no more than a movie about a man with a simple problem, which he attempts to solve in a straightforward way. His challenge is to persist, and so he hasn’t the luxury to ask why such a problem exists in the first place, or what options he really ought to have. There is no thought given to his ‘rights.’ But what of Bruno’s rights? Sharp, honest, earnest Bruno: his Dad makes mistakes, and Bruno has to live with them. I couldn’t help but think, as I watched them both, if we were really seeing the story of how Bruno Ricci grew up.

Where to find Bicycle Thieves:
Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette), also known as The Bicycle Thief, screens at 6:30pm on July 28th, 2011 at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox—part of Days of Glory, Masterworks of Italian Neorealism, a retrospective running from July 28th to August 28th.

Read my review of Il Posto (1961), also part of the retrospective, right here.

Packaged Goods, part 2 (2011)

2011-07-19T19:11:00.001-04:00

A little more than two months ago I was invited to a screening of Packaged Goods, a selection of international short films, music videos and TV spots produced by commercial directors. The whole thing was programmed by Rae Ann Fera, former editor of Boards Magazine, and it included content I’ve remembered ever since. For her second installment, press-screened yesterday, Fera gave herself a more serious challenge. She explains:

3-D is in the midst of a renaissance, with Hollywood banking on the trend and consumer electronics bringing the format into the home. The second installment of Packaged Goods looks at works that have experimented with the 3-D format in creative ways.

Ah, 3-D: The technology that turns critics into shortsighted snobs and defenders into dreck-merchants. Don’t look for me to attack the process here; regarding the destiny of 3-D I have no insight and frankly, nothing invested. However the movies evolve, I’ll still go to them. I love them too much to give up. As a fan of silent films, I could hardly draw the line at something as pointless as depth.

What I will say about Packaged Goods, part 2 is that Packaged Goods, part 1 is better, partly due to the limitations of 3-D, though not necessarily the limitations we see on-screen. Three-dimensionality brings with it certain baggage that I believe handicapped Fera’s programming. While all the pieces were filmed in 3-D, some were filmed via the traditional process, meaning—and this is a definite first for me—we were given two sets of glasses: the current, shades-like pair you get at any googleplex, plus a pair of old-school red-and blues. This effectively split the program into two halves, and they do not balance well.

The first half includes some predictably slick productions. Fera wisely opens with The Foundling (2010), the program’s only real narrative: a lush-looking, live-action short about a unicorn-horned infant who grows up in a travelling circus. The Foundling lacks drama, but its opening sequence, following the infant’s mother as she first enters the circus grounds, is transformative. The feeling of depth is palpable: the woman seems both more real and more kinetic than her surroundings, which seem to scroll by as she walks, as though it were all a modern videogame introduction. But, being a circus filmed in 3-D, we’re soon reduced to knives and juggling balls thrown at our heads. Aside from the projectiles, The Foundling could have been a 2-D film (a problem shared by several of Fera’s selections), and moreover, it could have been silent.

Another standout is “A Day In The Life,” (2011) an extended commercial spot for Audi. Only two minutes, 30 seconds, it feels longer in a good way, using 3-D graphics to immerse you in the experience of driving a race car through the hell that is Le Mans. We see the components of the car as if on a schematic, but the components do not simply ‘jump out at us’—instead, the schematic itself seems to have depth, and that depth is used to better explain how the car is constructed and the driver, imperiled. The effect was almost holographic. No gimmicks here.

As if to defy such inspiration, we have Unbeleafable (2011)—an obnoxious mess of a film that is also, regrettably, the program’s longest. Unbeleafable stars a group of happy-go-lucky skateboarders who venture into the woods to chainsaw several healthy trees to the ground, build ramps, and do unremarkable tricks on them in slow-motion. 3-D leaves cascade all the while. I thought the pain was over after seven minutes or so, but then came the credits—waves of them, due to the time, money, and machinery required to make this thing—and at the same time, outtakes. Outtakes! Were Unbeleafable more entertaining, I’d have assumed it satirical.

The bulk of the old-school 3-D entries were music videos, several produced by Pitchfork. I didn’t enjoy them, except for Deerhunter’s “Primitive 3-D” (2011), which embraced the limitations of the paper glasses and took visual cues, it seems, from Night of the Living Dead. Deeper than the video itself is its suggestion of ‘retro 3-D’—not something I’d expect people to pine for just yet. Then again, everything old can be new, all at once, in the YouTube era.

Too many music videos in a row is tiresome, and Pitchfork’s work takes up too much of Packaged Goods’ second half—a problem Fera couldn’t really avoid, since asking the audience to switch back and forth between sets of glasses would have been aggravating. Worse, the rest of Pitchfork’s entries aren’t that sharp; the 3-D's a pointless add-on. Better (perhaps only because it is different), is “Wanderlust,” (2008) a lengthy Björk video that seems inspired by the art of Maurice Sendak. Again the 3-D adds little here. You’ll like it or you won’t.

Packaged Goods, part 2 seems to sum up the best and worst of 3-D. I’m willing to give Fera the benefit of the doubt and suggest that she knows it. There’s some shallow work here: material undeserving of the spotlight and receiving it only because of 3-D content, which is a fair criticism of immense blockbusters just as much as of measly music videos. There are the clunky glasses, and the options they eliminate.

There are also hints of what could be. I argue that the best of all shorts in Packaged Goods, part 2 is “Wimbledon 3D” (2011)—an brief ad for Sony, featuring some up-close shots of a tennis ball. Like Unbeleafable, “Wimbledon 3D” has a lot of slow-mo, but the results are different. Unbeleafable uses the effect for self-congratulation, while “Wimbledon,” by suspending the ball in ‘mid-air’—really, a faux-middle ground between screen and viewer—succeeds in transferring the viewer’s sense of self to the ball. And since the ball is about to be struck, we tense up. A lot. I thought it was a tremendous moment. And yes: it could only happen in 3-D.

Where to find Packaged Goods, part 2:
The second installment of Packaged Goods screens Thursday, July 21, 2011, at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox. In attendance will be director Arev Manoukian of Spy Films, who will discuss the 3-D filmmaking process and how his short film, Nuit Blanche, became a global 3-D spot.

The Phantom Carriage (1921)

2011-07-18T13:07:00.001-04:00

Each day is like a century for the driver of the Phantom Carriage. Literally. For three-hundred and sixty-five of our days he travels the world, harvesting the souls of dead sinners, taking them to a place we never see, for reasons we’re never told. But whatever his purpose, the year he spends at his gruesome task is spent alone, and that amounts to 36,500 years of introspection. If that’s punishment, it’s not the worst kind.

The Phantom Carriage enticed me with particulars like this; perhaps that’s part of its spell. Victor Sjöström’s film is all atmosphere anyway: a moody morality play that hollows out space for its characters amid surroundings so black that you question what is truly the negative space. It’s not boring, but it is mannered and slow—I had time to wonder about the carriage rider’s job and the consequences of the math and had little trouble keeping up with the plot in the meantime.

The plot is this: a rotten piece of dirt named David Holm (played by the director) is called to the deathbed of Salvation Army worker Sister Edit (Astrid Holm) on New Year’s Eve. Edit has devoted the last year of her life to reforming Holm, a violent drunk, who’d devoted much of his own time to tracking down his wife and children, who had quite reasonably abandoned him. He remained the same rotten piece of dirt after he found them. He also gave Sister Edit tuberculosis. She longs to see him one more time, and he says no. David does not deserve a happy new year.

That same night, David tells his fellow good-for-nothings about a legend he’s heard, which goes like this: The last person to die on New Year’s Eve—the one who expires closest to the stroke of midnight, is cursed to become the driver of the Phantom Carriage for the entirety of the following year. David learned this tale from a friend name Georges (Tore Svennberg), who believed it wholeheartedly, and supposedly died exactly one year ago. In fact, Georges has spent the last 365 days (36,500 of his own years) as the Phantom Carriage driver, and when David is accidentally killed in a brawl moments later, he appears before his former drinking buddy, Jacob Marley-like, and fills in the blanks.

Sjöström isn’t too creative with the look of his carriage driver: Svennberg is garbed in a black cloak and hood, carrying a scythe; he rides a ramshackle cart pulled by one horse (lanky, but not skeletal). However, the major technical achievement here is to make the whole package transparent, and it is well done. Svennberg passes through doors like a convincing ghost; in one early scene he scoops the soul-body of a fallen suicide up from his physical one in a seamless motion that no one could do any better today. Even more unnerving is his retrieval of a drowned sailor’s soul, because the effect of carriage on the ocean waves is not convincing—the carriage seems to ride against the waves, rather than over or through them, making it seem otherworldly by distancing it from the reality of the film itself.

Georges, with his centuries of time to think, has become a somber, sober truthsayer. His heart-to-heart talks—first with David, then with Edit, turn The Phantom Carriage into a succession of extended flashbacks. I admit I was disappointed by this. I wanted more about the carriage itself, and the details of drivership. Where does the driver take the souls? If the driver only harvests the souls of the wicked (as is implied), who does he really work for? Is next year’s driver simply the last man to die on New Year’s Eve, or the last wicked man? If the latter, is the role akin to purgatory? If so, what happens to him when purgatory ends?

Alas, Georges’ last night of work (and apparently, David’s first), occupies only a narrow sliver of the present in Sjöström’s film, being little more than a vehicle through which to recount David’s dissipated life. The Phantom Carriage is a plain tale of a sinner’s redemption, classic in every sense but one: the overwhelming scumminess of its sinner. At least Faust was an educated man gone bad; at least Scrooge had a head for business. David Holm? He’s a consumptive slime who can’t even be bothered to cough sideways in front of his kids. His life-story is one of steep and rapid decline, barely slowed by Sister Edit and her hopeless acts of charity.

Do I recommend this film to you or not? The Phantom Carriage is well-loved, but I suspect most people love it for the same scenes I loved, which make up but a shred of the whole. Not that the rest is bad, but if the theme of the film is reliving the moments that count, well, I can do that too, and there aren’t that many. Ask me in a year’s time if I remember Sister Edit’s benevolent coat-mending as well as the carriage driver… pressing his two-dimensional, transparent horse onward against a three-dimensional sea. I can predict my answer. The coat is pathos, but that scene in the water? It has everything.

My thanks to Allen Shugar, who was generous enough to lend me a videotape of The Phantom Carriage, and patient enough to wait the many months it took me to watch it.

Il Posto (1961)

2011-07-12T22:12:00.000-04:00

A talkie, courtesy TIFF Bell Lightbox.

As a title, ‘Il Posto’ plays lightly against my ear. Not speaking Italian myself, I hear the words first as sounds, and as sounds, they seem upbeat. But the movie’s English title is “The Job,” which seems like something else. My English, a southern Ontario-version that swallows vowels, drops those words with a thud—there’s a lot of ‘aw’ in my ‘job’, followed by a heavy ‘buh.’ The Italian sounds better. However, the English captures Il Posto best.

Director Ermanno Olmi’s 1961 masterpiece is about a serious young man who goes to work for a ridiculous company that doesn’t know it is ridiculous. If Olmi ever tells us what the company does, I have forgotten. What I remember is the plain, shy, floor-studying face of Domenico Cantoni (Sandro Panseri): a boy beginning to flower but pushed, too soon, into the deadening world of the company, with its self-justifying protocols and rows of desks. Domenico is not a labourer, and this is not the 19th Century—the issue is not slavery of the body, but of the mind. He wanted to be a surveyor, he explains to his department head, but with a younger brother still in school, it was decided he should start working. And besides: “My father says these big companies don’t pay much, but you have a secure job for life.” What Domenico really wants is his student’s book-strap, which now belongs to his brother.

Olmi devotes a substantial chunk of Il Posto to the job application process itself—a sensible storytelling choice, because at this company, applying for a job is as complex as joining the army. We begin with Domenico’s trip to company HQ—what will end up being his daily commute—depicted in a serious of longshots, many of them with the sort of deliberate feel more associated with still photographs than movies. Strong contrasts of light and shadow emphasize perceived barriers as well as real ones; lines of streetlamps and the length of a train suggest both expansion and contraction: coming and going perpetually, if one chooses to look at it that way.

The whole process is a howler, because the persons involved take it deadly seriously, and because Olmi’s long takes give the actors ample time to stew in their own juices. The applicants, men and women both, are mostly unimpressive: mousy, overweight, shambling. Many seem years older than Domenico. The standout is a pretty young thing named Antonietta (Loredana Detto); Domenico is in love immediately, and so are we.

Applicants are screened for physical weakness, nearsightedness, deafness, moral rectitude, asexuality and/or homosexuality, and depression; the militaristic procedures made absurd by the pitiful specimens subjected to it. “Does the future seem hopeless to you?” a man in a coat asks Domenico. That’s the whole movie right there. Anyone who answered ‘yes’ would likely be rejected by the company, for it would betray too keen an awareness of what’s coming.

Il Posto deftly balances the farcical and the familiar in these early scenes—enough that the farcical becomes familiar, which may mean it isn’t farce anymore, or alternatively, that the familiar is farcical. The applicants have to write an exam in a drab room, but to get there, they have to pass through another room—an antechamber?—so opulent that it seems worthy of Versailles. There are two ways to read this: either the test carries with it the promise of glory, or glory is merely something these men and women pass by on their way to preordained drudgery. The exam itself is a single, but byzantine question, requiring foreknowledge of a formula. A great shot ensues: the beaming but slightly smug face of the Early Finisher, disrupting everyone else in a million little ways. There’s no better feeling than relaxing in a room filled with tense people. It makes you feel very superior.

Domenico is tense; he’s a worrier. But Antonietta seems effortless, confident in everything she does. At first I thought she wasn’t interested in Domenico, but no; she just walks with him as though they’d been together for years, feeling no need to pay him close attention like some new acquaintance. Antonietta glides through a crowd of people while Domenico stumbles. He follows her lead in things—buys the coat she likes; starts sipping coffee the way she does—not because she demands it, but because her natural authority and beauty inspire him equally.

Domenico and Antonietta don’t work in the same building, but Domenico negotiates their break-times as best he can. (I did the same thing at an office job I once had, making sure I took lunch an hour before the beautiful girl in Accounting did, so I could bring a green tea frappuccino to her desk on my way back). Meanwhile, he bides his time as a messenger, waiting for a desk to become available in a row of desks in a dismal room. He receives his best advice from a senior messenger, a sort of middle-management philosopher who only receives kisses from his wife on payday. He smiles gently when he says these things. This kind of man has the emotional strength to survive such a place.

The desk jockeys are a sorrier bunch: they sit, fiddling away at loose lightbulbs, combing their sideburns, cutting cigarettes precisely in two so each half fits in a narrow case—all logical, doable, defensible tasks, but puny and piddly, just like them. One’s a hopeful writer, but we don’t see much of him. The two old goats in the back row do nothing but bitch, which is probably why they’re still in the back row. Does Domenico aspire to be one of them, or is it simply his fate?

Il Posto ends with a strong and rather brutal scene I won’t reveal, except to say that it takes the concept of ‘job for life’ to its logical conclusion and asks more questions than it answers. I think the real ending is the previous scene: the long, simultaneously painful and funny, company New Year’s Eve Party, which Domenico goes to alone. Rule #1 of parties like this: if dateless, never show up on time. Defeated by geography for much of the party, it is only when Domenico hits the bottle that his existential angst is obliterated.

That euphoria will pass, of course. What may never pass is the fear he’ll have, day after day at his new desk, year after year at his job-for-life: that the last time he saw that beautiful girl was the last time he ever will. He needs to keep that fear. If it ever leaves him, the best part of Domenico will be dead.

Where to find Il Posto:
Il Posto is part of Days of Glory, Masterworks of Italian Neorealism, a retrospective running from July 28th to August 28th at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox. Il Posto screens at 6:30 pm on Friday, August 5th, 2011.

Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925)

2011-06-30T13:13:00.002-04:00

Ninety years later, it’s still easy to see why Douglas Fairbanks’ adventure films made the money they did. Fairbanks was the lighthearted trickster onscreen; a man who dispatched all manner of threats with total confidence; won the pretty girl with a combination of charm and skill, and did it in exotic places.

For the factory worker, the desk jockey or the housewife, this was escapism; and a safe investment, too. Fairbanks’ ‘big’ productions, like The Mark of Zorro (1920), Robin Hood (1922), and The Black Pirate (1926), were of a type: reliable mixes of drama, action, romance and laughs that you could count on when handing over your cash.

This makes them predictable, but not necessarily good. I’ve often found Fairbanks’ work hokey and formulaic; his stock character, while charmingly upbeat, is so many steps ahead of his enemies that he rarely seems imperiled. No peril, no drama. Joie de vivre gives way to mere silliness, and I begin to feel overtaxed, since his films aren’t particularly short, either.

Don Q, Son of Zorro has these same flaws, but I liked it alright. Maybe because it maintains a balance some of the others don’t—allowing a talented supporting cast to carry more of the relevant screen time. Or maybe because it feels more… brisk? Sure. Don Q is brisk, and Fairbanks’ eponymous character moves through it briskly. And how Don Q moves is, I think, the thing I want focus on most.

Re: Don Q, I’d like to see the ratio of scenes that cut with Fairbanks still in them to those from which Fairbanks is seen to exit. And of the latter, a second ratio: exits stage-left and -right versus exits straight up. The vertical always seems to be an option for Don Q—always there’s a ledge or a haycart or something like that upon which he can leap to escape danger, cut down his commute, or conclude a conversation. That’s how the Son of Zorro bids goodbye to Dorlores de Muro (Mary Astor), the lovely noblewoman he meets on his Spanish tour.

This is not his attempt to impress her; it’s simply who and what he is. For Don Q, the world is full of multi-directional pathways: the type you and I can imagine, perhaps, but lack the wit and athletic prowess to find and exploit. A comparison might be the early work of Fairbanks’ friend and business partner, Charlie Chaplin. The greatest appeal of Chaplin’s early shorts is the not-knowing—the sense of the pregnancy of every situation the Tramp is in, no matter how mundane. The Tramp can make something out of anything. That’s why great slapstick, contrary to its image, is the most profound comedy: because it demands that we view everyday objects and situations as triggerpoints for creative action. It frees one’s emotions, and I find it innately hopeful about the human condition.

What Chaplin did with props, I believe Fairbanks accomplished with sets and space. To make a modern comparison: watching Don Q for the first time is a bit like the moment many gamers of my generation had when the arena-style games we played began featuring truly interactive environments. There was still a goal to achieve, but if you wished to hop on a ledge, or sidestep left and look at your reflection in a puddle, you could do that, and you might even be rewarded for it. To be freed from the strict boundaries of the quest: that was exhilarating.

Regardless, one of strengths of Don Q is that Fairbanks doesn’t have to shoulder the whole load. Astor delivers more than is required of her, which is more than you can say for some of his leading ladies (see The Black Pirate); while Donald Crisp suitably glowers as Don Sebastian, a Spaniard who secretly murders the visiting Austrian Archduke, then has Don Q framed for it. Crisp doesn’t exude charisma in his role, but that’s the point: to be a sullen bore is to be the antithesis of Douglas Fairbanks.

Noteworthy, too, is Jean Hersholt, playing degenerate social climber Don Fabrique Borusta. Borusta is a small man on the periphery of big things; his one talent is listening and he soon hears enough to blackmail Don Sebastian and secure himself a governor-style position. Hersholt played a lot of scumbags in the 1920s, and had a gift for elevating them as characters. In every way but the most bluntly physical, his Borusta is a greater threat to Don Q than Sebastian is. Were he the main villain, rather than an irritant, Don Q would have been a more compelling film, though not a better action film, I guess.

Fairbanks himself plays a duel role: both Don Q and Don Q’s father, Zorro. (Fairbanks’ then-wife, Mary Pickford, achieved a similar trick back in 1921, playing a mother and son in Little Lord Fauntleroy). Father and son are identical but for aging makeup, and the makeup’s so good you can imagine what Fairbanks would have looked like, had he lived into his sixties. The action sequence shared by Don Q and his dad was my favourite in the film.

Like many of Fairbanks’ blockbuster features, Don Q isn’t about very much. The film’s pleasure is found in watching the kinds of events you were hoping to watch, and its quality is measured in its capacity to deliver those events, one after the next, without a stutter. If you stopped to think about Don Q, then suddenly, it might not be your cup of tea.

Where to find Don Q, Son of Zorro:

Don Q is available on DVD (packaged with Fairbanks’ The Mark of Zorro), courtesy Kino International.

I saw the film live, this past Sunday, at Toronto’s Revue Cinema, where it appeared as part of programmer Eric Veillette’s ‘Silent Sundays’ series, now celebrating its second anniversary. Piano accompaniment was provided by William O’Meara. You can read more about Silent Sundays and the Revue here. Veillette’s website is Silent Toronto.

Prior to the screening, we were treated to a short talk and slide-presentation by my friend Alicia Fletcher, a Masters student in the joint George Eastman House-Ryerson University program in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management. Alicia has been interning with George Eastman House’s Motion Picture Department since June 2010. Here’s a sampling of her remarks. (I’m sorry I don’t have the pictures, too):

A year ago I had the privilege of working on the Douglas Fairbanks Nitrate Stills collection, housed at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. While completing my degree in Photographic Preservation at the museum, I interned in the Motion Pictures Department, where I was introduced to the collection and put in charge of cataloguing its contents and ensuring its safe storage.

The role of the still photographer in the silent era is an under-researched area of silent film history. More than simply producing publicity materials, the photographer aided the production in establishing a mood or capturing a character’s disposition. Without dialogue, the silent film actor conveyed emotion through the face and the body, and photography was often used as a testing ground for this.

Over 10,000 negatives make up this collection. They were compiled by Fairbanks and donated to GEH in the late 1950s by his son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Today, they are part of the Department’s Motion Picture Stills, Posters, and Paper collection, headed by archivist Nancy Kauffman. The collection documents almost every aspect of Fairbanks’s career.

There are some 1,500 negatives from The Thief of Bagdad alone, portraying every aspect of the film’s meticulous production design. It would seem that a photograph of every urn, every Persian carpet and every jewel was necessary. The same could be said for Robin Hood, with its 1,200 negatives. Fairbanks was his own producer, which partially explains the enormity of the collection—he exercised control over almost every aspect of his films, including Don Q.

In digitizing and rehousing these negatives, I gained a new understanding of not only the films of Douglas Fairbanks, but what went into the production of films from the silent era. Often I stumbled across the most iconic of Fairbanks images, noting how meticulously retouched they were to make him appear youthful. And, how Fairbanks’s dark skin was lightened when he was photographed with Mary Pickford.

Among these iconic photographs, there would be accompanying images; similar but not the same: often with a head turned, a slight change in the muscles of the eyebrow or a shift in the weight of the body—seemingly meaningless differences that actually altered the effect of the photograph. Knowing the control Fairbanks exerted over his own image, it’s hard to believe that he didn’t have some say in what photographs were published and which poses were utilized as emblems of his larger-than-life characters.

The Unholy Three (1925)

2011-06-22T21:03:00.001-04:00

I’ve seen Lon Chaney look plenty ugly on the silent screen: a Hunchback, a Phantom, a ghoulish take on Dickens’ Fagan—and by that standard, his cross-dressing turn in The Unholy Three doesn’t even rank. It occurred to me, as I watched him play the role of a ventriloquist playing the role of a jewel-thief disguised as a grandmother, that Chaney’s face seemed rather appealing. Not lovely or anything, just believably, warmly, grandmotherly. Maybe there’s a point in that: for all the accolades I’ve read of Chaney and his ‘thousand faces,’ I don’t remember any that called it androgynous. There’s femininity in those lines and creases, I think. See if you can find it.

Tod Browning’s The Unholy Three, in which Chaney stars as sideshow performer Professor Echo, is not the actor’s most memorable part, nor is it the director’s most memorable movie (Browning directed both Dracula and Freaks a few years later, and Freaks, in particular, is a film you can’t review so much as recount). It is, however, light entertainment, and that’s precisely what it’s trying to be, so it is good. I believe that if you described the plot of this film to someone else, they’d sit down next to you and watch it.

The ‘unholy three’ are a criminal gang—and actually there’s four of them, or even five, if you count the giant chimpanzee. They are: Professor Echo, who performs to full rooms (though maybe the rooms are small), selling joke books when his shows are through; Hercules (Victor McLaglen), a strongman who bends horseshoes; Tweedledee (Harry Earles), an ill-tempered little person; and Rosie (Mae Busch) an exotic dancer and pickpocket loved by the Professor. These four collude on a scheme to rob the rich, using their unique skills both to achieve the crimes and, I suppose, to evade suspicion—because the scheme is so outlandish that no lawman would dream of it.

The crooks buy a birdshop. Echo poses as ‘Granny O’Grady’, the owner; Rosie, her granddaughter; Tweedledee, an infant in her care; Hercules appears to be the hired help, but I’m not sure. The shop specializes in expensive parrots, which, apparently, are mute. When Echo sells a parrot to a wealthy customer, he throws his own voice so it seems to come from the bird. When the patron takes the bird home, it will appear to cease talking. The purchaser then calls the store; Granny takes the call, suggests that the bird needs one more visit from her to acclimate to its surroundings; brings the ‘baby’ with her when she comes, and Tweedledee cases the joint.

Browning et al are well aware of how silly this is. There’s a lot of laughs in The Unholy Three, courtesy Tweedledee, mostly, who chomps on cigars and swears like a thug even while wearing his bonnet ("If you tip that boob off to who we are, I'll lay some lilies under your chin.") Think Baby Herman from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—in fact, I’d be surprised if Tweedledee didn't inspire that bit. Matt Moore provides a few more laughs as Hector Macdonald, a store clerk hired to provide a legitimate face for the operation, and, if need be, a scapegoat, since he suspects nothing. Hector also longs for Rosie, but he’s as much a tool of the plot as anything else—the film’s emotional weight is carried entirely by Chaney and Busch, playing a pair of people who aren’t that bad, really.

I enjoyed The Unholy Three. It’s a quick-moving film with a sense of humour, and the jokes are made with an awareness that the movie is just one big joke itself. My take may differ from yours though, because I saw The Unholy Three in a way you likely won’t: in total silence.

Well, not total. There were sounds drifting in through an open window in our apartment. We live near a ball diamond and it’s summertime. But the disc itself had no score, nor even sound effects. It was a review copy, provided to me in advance of a screening of The Unholy Three scheduled for next week here in Toronto. That screening will feature live accompaniment, and so the print I watched was accompanied by nothing, unless you counted the baseball game.

Watching silents in silence is not something I usually recommend. It can be smothering, particularly if the film has relatively long shot lengths, a lot of medium shots and minimal camera movement, as many silents do. You couldn’t pay me to watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari this way. Dead silence is also challenging in a public environment—for reasons I detailed long ago.

In your own home, though, on your own time, it can be a rewarding experience. In this case, I found myself imagining more of the dialogue than usual—or at least the representative gibberish you hear in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Sound effects, too, seemed to come from within: I remember the sound of Tweedledee pounding on a toy drum beneath Granny O’Grady’s Christmas tree, though in fact there was no such sound, not even an accompanist’s conveyance of chaos—only the visual of a little man doing it. I bet, in a few years, I’ll forget that I saw the film in silence at all, and recall a drumming sound that never was.

Watching The Unholy Three this way reminds me of the rich potential every silent film possesses. There is not one viewing experience, but near infinite possibilities—as many interpretations as there are interpreters, and those interpreters are not just audience members, but musicians as well. I see what I see, but I hear what they see—will the result be enlightenment? Dissonance? Both? This Saturday, TIFF Bell Lightbox will screen The Unholy Three with live accompaniment by the talented pianist, Laura Silberberg. How will she approach the drumming scene? Will she reproduce the sound on her keyboard? Will she, instead, evoke the unease each character feels in the scene, which is a tense one? Perhaps she’ll let it run silent. That too could be effective. The choice is hers.

*****
I’ve reviewed Lon Chaney’s work in the past. Read up on The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), and Oliver Twist (1922).

Where to find The Unholy Three:
An archival print of The Unholy Three screens on June 25th, 2011, at TIFF Bell Lightbox—part of The New Auteurs: João Pedro Rodrigues’ Outlaws of Desire. Rodrigues will be in attendance, along with João Rui Guerra da Mata. Live piano accompaniment will be provided by Laura Silberberg. You can read my review of Rodrigues’ To Die Like A Man (2009) here.

The Iron Horse (1924)

2011-06-19T17:33:00.000-04:00

I can imagine the toils of the men who built the Overland Route: sweat beading, muscles straining, hammers arching high and falling sharp with a metal-on-metal clang, driving spikes into the dirt. Again and again—so many times that they sang songs of it as they worked. And month after month—for so long that their wives and children and indeed their whole towns moved along with them across the miles. Home was where the work was.

John Ford’s The Iron Horse is about this story, and it will sweep you up in its greatness, given time—the greatness of the story, I mean. As for the greatness of the movie, that depends on your taste. For the first hour or so it feels like something you’ve seen a million times, and I think, for some viewers, it will never be more than that. It is formulaic, populated with vaudevillian archetypes, and frankly, could have used sound. But The Iron Horse also escapes its trappings. It makes you care about the people in it, by acknowledging that even archetypal characters in classic straits face real consequences, perhaps as a result of the roles they must play. There is real tragedy and real conflict here. And if that doesn’t win you over, there’s still the pleasure of witnessing genius in development: the work of a young John Ford, who already knew how to make simple gestures into huge moments.

The basics: in the early-1850s, a boy named Davy Brandon leaves town with his father, in search a shorter passage for the (still-theoretical) Overland Route. Mr. Brandon’s just a dreamer, says his friend, Thomas Marsh (Will Walling); but he’ll miss the man. Marsh’s daughter, Miriam, will miss Davy far more. Davy’s dad indeed does discover a shorter route, through a gorge, but before he can pass this information along he’s attacked by a band of rogue Cheyenne, led by a white man with missing fingers, who murders him in front of his son.

Two things will strike you about this scene: first, the acting job delivered by Winston Miller as Young Davy, a performance so horrible you’ll wish he’d taken the axe instead of his dad. Second, the muddled racial politics behind the Cheyenne leader, a man later identified as ‘Bauman’ (Fred Kohler); whose bone structure is Caucasian but who seems darker than the Native American extras flanking him. The implication, I think, is that Bauman’s mixed-race, which means a lot in a silent film, since mixed-race people were often portrayed as diabolical, as were non-whites, of whatever race, who blended into white society. Bauman manages to be both in The Iron Horse.

Characters like Bauman provided racist writers with an out. It’s difficult to simultaneously degrade a race of people and present them as a threat, so we’re given these biological intermediaries, who provide credible amounts of brain to lead the brawn. It is Bauman, therefore, who must incite a perfectly capable Cheyenne chief to attack the train, even though there’s no suggestion the Cheyenne were passive before. The Native Americans in this film are not independent thinkers, but something to be influenced, directed; like diverting a river to flood a town. They are bit players in their own story.

Years pass. The goal of linking East and West by rail becomes U.S. government policy. Davy grows into a solid-looking Pony Express rider (now played by George O’Brien); Miriam is now a lovely young woman (Madge Bellamy) engaged to Union Pacific Railroad’s chief engineer, Peter Jesson (Cyril Chadwick). Miriam’s father now backs the project with substantial cash, but he can’t continue unless he finds a shorter route than the one through Cheyenne country that Jesson favours. If the railroad continues as planned, it will benefit only the chief landowner in that area—Bauman. Bauman has long since traded his Native garb for a fur coat, and keeps his right hand in his pocket at all times.

Between these serious moments we see glimpses of the labourers: Chinese, Irish, Italian, and so on, building the railroad and lightening the mood. ‘Diversity’ in The Iron Horse means jumbling all these stock characters together and letting them fight amongst themselves, but the results can be funny, especially when they involve ‘Judge’ Haller (James A. Marcus), a blusterer with dubious credentials, whose mobile saloon also serves as the town’s court of law, wherever the town happens to be at the time.

George O’Brien plays a variation of his Sunrise (1927) character here—another brawny, unusually handsome young man who’s aware of the right thing to do. In this case, though, he’s inclined to actually do it. And he faces a comparable temptation in Miriam, who, for all her exhortations of destiny and the greater good, pretty shamelessly falls for him the moment they’re reunited. Though her fiancé does stray, there is no doubt that Miriam would do the same, given time. And this makes Jesson a lot more interesting, especially when Bauman, another alpha-male, demands that he not find the shortcut Davy’s sure he remembers.

You have to wonder how Jesson landed Miriam in the first place. He’s older than she is, shy and stern, bookish… was it his money? Was he judged a ‘good match’ by her father? Jesson is a man buffeted by fate—pressured and bullied into being an attempted murderer; cuckolded by a relationship that predates him; an accomplished man whose career achievements do nothing to eliminate his sense of personal worthlessness. In a simpler film, his visit to the town prostitute would have been designed to obliterate our sympathy for him, but here, I think it’s meant to show us his insecurity about almost everything.

The Iron Horse feels like a transitional film in some ways. It shows us the limitations of the silent aesthetic when telling this kind of story: without the sound of hooves clopping, birds singing, wagon wheels rumbling and gunshots cracking, you simply aren’t there, no matter how well Ford shoots the rugged American terrain. It doesn’t help that The Iron Horse brims with caricatures, many of them in heavy makeup, acting in a pose-heavy silent style, highly symbolic and unavoidably artificial. I’ve never seen a Western I’d call truly abstract, and perhaps this is why.

There are also moments that seem downright theatrical—old-fashioned even for 1924—like one scene set in Judge Haller’s courtroom-bar, shot wholly at medium range with obvious choreography; or another involving three Irishmen paying a visit to the local barber-dentist, which could have been a standalone comedy short of the 1910s or even earlier. And yet, some scenes incorporate the silent feel to great effect, notably those of the workmen robotically laying-down track ahead of the ever-advancing train. This scene didn’t look real to me, but I believe I’d have felt the same way even if I witnessed it happen. In that moment, the men, the machines, the tools and the job—and the drive, the purpose and the destiny behind it—blur into one compound act, and since the result must be ever more, ever faster, and always the same, it is toward the machine that the men cleave, not the other way around. Such a moment, I believe, benefits more from musical accompaniment than sound. There’s a reason those men sung as they worked.

Where to find The Iron Horse:
The Iron Horse is available as part of the massive Ford at Fox box set. Only a fraction of John Ford’s silent films still exist. I consider that one of film history’s greater tragedies.

To Die Like Man (2009)

2011-06-09T22:03:00.000-04:00

All great art is in dialogue with its audience. But film, by virtue of its reach, and sheer volume and range of material (high and low, big and small), is the medium most in dialogue with itself; its artists constantly challenging its purpose and definition.

So directors: take risks. Please take risks; I watch a lot of movies and I remember the risky ones best. Just remember that there’s a line—not even a fine one, really—between taking risks and simply indulging yourself at the audience’s expense. A line João Pedro Rodrigues crosses with To Die Like a Man: a film seemingly in dialogue with no one; made for an audience of empty chairs.

This one gave me hope, early on. To Die Like a Man opens not with the main character, aging drag queen Tonia (Fernando Santos), but with his son, Zé Maria (Chandra Malatich), a soldier on night patrol. Camouflaged, and blanketed by the dark, he engages in sudden sex with another male soldier. The scene itself isn’t shocking; what I liked about it was the way Rodrigues filmed the two men: in shadow, one bareheaded, the other wearing his helmet covered with branches, forming a compound shape that could have been a man kissing a woman in a hat. We’re reminded that eroticism is universal; that it’s only when we have the luxury to focus on details that we start splitting hairs, and judging right from wrong. Rodrigues can really compose a shot. Characters though?

Rodrigues’ Tonia is a person in crisis; an old face in a Portuguese drag scene yearning for something new. She’s estranged from her son and threatened by Jenny, a striking new star with uninterrupted confidence. She has a jagged, perhaps asexual relationship with Rosário (Alexander David), a young junkie and dressmaker, who regards her with contempt. Tonia’s all contradictions: too strong and burly to fool anyone; religious, despite her line of work; bitter and a little racist toward Jenny (who is black), but enthralled by her beauty. Most of this is established in the first half-hour, and from then on, we’re left to reflect upon it, as is she.

There’s a difference between lingering on your pain, and lingering on the profundity of your pain. The former is pitiable, which isn’t a bad thing in the movies. The latter is obnoxious. It shows no interest in how the audience ought to feel, based on what they’ve been shown. It’s easy to feel pity for Tonia, and I did, up to a point. But the film’s momentum disappears when we stop and focus, again and again, on the continuity of that pain, rather than incidences of it. Yes, many bad things happen to Tonia, mostly undeserved, but they’re all of a type—all part of one big mope that never really stops, only ebbs, and not too often, and when it does, Rodrigues takes Tonia away from us altogether.

There’s the scene, for example, where Tonia sits outdoors with Rosário and a friend, enjoying the sunshine while having her wig trimmed. It’s a rare moment of relative happiness for Tonia; even joy. And then Rodrigues steps into the middle of it, flooding the frame with white light, as though evoking a waking dream. It works on that level, but the effect, also, is to force us to focus on the image of these characters, rather than the characters themselves. This dissociating quality is constant in the film; it manifests itself in many forms, with almost no relief.

You’ll see it too in the performances, which seem designed to remind us that performing is going on, even if the characters themselves aren’t flamboyant. Zé Maria’s the worst for this: a remorseless, stupidly homophobic robot who nevertheless tips his scenes toward comedy because he’s so hard to take seriously. What more is he than an embodied threat? Both Zé Maria and Rosário are capable of terrible violence, enough that we realize how much danger Tonia’s in, but they have no more depth or humanity than a speeding car. Meanwhile, Tonia suffers on, taking care of her dog, and adopting a second stray dog, just in case we don’t get the point.

The last straw comes late in the film, though not nearly late enough. It is a scene in a forest, with Tonia, Rosário, the dog, and a pair of transvestites they meet and befriend (Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida and Miguel Loureiro—by far the film’s highlight.) The hikers stop and point to the moon, which turns a deep orange, bathing them in orange too. Then they sit and listen to a song, which plays in its entirety (a good four minutes). And while it plays, they do nothing. And the camera does nothing. Consider that.

It’s absurd, really, to occupy a theatre seat, watching this. The song they’re ‘listening’ to is not played within the universe of the film—they hear it the way we do, as though it were part of a soundtrack of a movie they’re… well, sitting in. Two minutes in, I wondered when the scene would end. Four minutes in, I wondered when the movie would. I never thought about Tonia.

If Rodrigues staged a photo exhibition, I’d buy a ticket. I mean it—if you see To Die Like a Man, you’ll walk away with some fine memories like that. Photos, though, are standalone images; they must convey their full power at once, even in isolation. This movie tries to do that not just with images, but with whole scenes, events, even performances; and the result is vain. Perhaps that’s appropriate, given the subject matter, but would Tonia settle for it? A great drag queen never forgets her audience.

Where to find To Die Like a Man:
To Die Like a Man (Morrer como un homen) plays at 8:45 pm on June 24th, 27th, and 28th at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox.

It's the Old Army Game (1926)

2011-06-08T00:29:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the paucity of content here lately. I’ve had a lot of freelance work on my plate; some of it challenging but most of it just really, really time-consuming. It’s kept me in front of Ol’ Trusty (my laptop) for enough hours that I don’t want to spend my leisure time there too.

I like to be busy though. When you work for yourself, you feel guilty if you’re anything less than grateful for work. It’s not free time you long for, but balance, because, in my field anyway, your work isn’t what drives you so much as the lifestyle it allows you to maintain. Things like this blog, and the anywhere-from-ten-minutes-to-three-hours of film watching that proceed every post, are possible because I can carve out a pocket of time for them. If I was nine-to-five, it would be harder. I know, because it was.

There are times, then—times lately—when one or two of the elements that compose my life rise up, tide-like, and swamp the rest. And so you wish for a pocket of time, where you could nestle yourself, to work on the things that matter most; or even, just, to get enough rest—just, to do what you want, when you want.

I write this in self-pity, perhaps, but also in sympathy. Elmer Prettywillie, the main character, hero, anti-hero and sometimes villain of It’s The Old Army Game, feels a similar pain to mine. He’s the town druggist, back when that meant you sold all kinds of things, and did a little surgery after-hours too, and he’s addled by a life full of people who will not let him alone. If he were a better man, it would be a tragedy.

I haven’t seen a lot of W.C. Fields’ films, silent or sound. It’s not a deliberate thing; Fields is one of many film stars who reached their peak in the 30s and 40s, and I’ve long sacrificed the goat of the 30s and 40s to the graven image of the ’teens and 20s. (A fair trade, though it gets a bit lonely.) My image of Fields is a squinting, ponderous man in a hat; overweight; in the end-stages of serious alcoholism. I take it from cartoons, mostly: parodies of him from the artists at Warner Brothers, which taught me his face long before I knew who he was; and from The Bank Dick (1940). I remember almost nothing of The Bank Dick’s plot except that it barely had one, and that its protagonist seemed to have no interest in doing much of anything but drinking, and no more willingness to take the bizarre events around him seriously than I did. What happened, happened.

Fields’ Bank Dick persona, Egbert Sousé, is more Zen, or at least a lot more drunk, than Elmer Prettywillie. Maybe Elmer will age into Egbert, if he survives. This is not assured. His world is a very dangerous one. Elmer shares the space above his store with his sister (Mary Foy), and her son (Mickey Bennett). Neither has much use for him, though he does pay their bills, so I suppose they appreciate him for that. Elmer doesn’t much like them either, and the best (worst?) gags in the film involve him trying, passively but repeatedly, to murder the child.

Work is better. There, sometimes, Elmer’s the boss; selling all manner of goods and services to people who may not like him either, but still need all manner of goods and services. (Watch for a pretty funny running gag about Prohibition.) The best thing about work, by far, is Elmer’s assistant, Marilyn (Louise Brooks). Anyone who looks like Louise Brooks is worth hiring.

It’s the Old Army Game is presented in semi-standalone episodes, a dream-film for DVD track-selection, if nothing else. Several exist solely as gag sequences for Fields, in a film that could survive without some of them, but maybe this isn’t a criticism, since structure wasn’t something you sought from a Fields film, even in the 1920s. As gags go in this one, I liked best the scenes on Elmer’s balcony—an incredibly dangerous place for him to nap, since it’s missing a chunk of railing, and just as deadly to the various passers-by who disturb him, since he’s got a shotgun and the high ground.

Prettywillie’s not just unstable in the script; he seems unstable as a concept. How smart is he, for example? One early scene, where he tries to douse a fire in the drugstore with a spoonful of water, crosses the line from Keaton-esque misdirected obsession to Langdon-esque mental retardation. Other times he’s cagey, as when he outwits a grafter at his own shell game. Elmer’s morally ambiguous: neither the best nor the worst man in town, someone interested in number one and prepared to deal under the table, but not dishonest in a predatory way (he’s smart enough get involved in a lot-selling scheme, for example, but I don’t think he knows it’s a fraud…but, that’s not due to stupidity, or he wouldn’t have been smart enough to get involved. Get it? ). He’s a fairly honest businessman, but on the other hand, he’s prepared to ruin a rich man’s lawn in the course of a family picnic, which he does about two-thirds of the way through the film. It’s pure vandalism; remorseless destruction without a hint of Robin-Hood-style payback to be found.

As for Louise, she’s not at her best here, not even physically, with Pandora’s Box another three years away, but her role isn’t much either: she’s the pretty girl everyone likes—apparently the only pretty girl in town—maybe the only girl. If I find her glances a little too knowing for the supposed total sweetheart she plays, well, maybe I’m guilty of looking ahead. Her love interest, William (William Gaxton), is a good-looking, semi-serious flim-flam man and I can’t think of a more thankless part in a W.C. Fields film. He’s not there, even when he is.

Elmer’s charm is that he has none; no tact either; no filter—he’s a cross between Rodney Dangerfield and Larry David. He’s constantly hectored and annoyed by things and if he were in a sound film, it might be enough for him to say aloud what most of us would be thinking: about his would-be girlfriend; sister; nephew; the town, etc. But this is a silent film; so, for the most part, he actually does, or tries to do, what he dreams of doing. This is more transgressive, since the line between Elmer the anti-hero and Elmer the sociopath is sometimes drawn by his failures to do wrong, and those failures are caused less by changes of heart than by incompetence.

It’s the Old Army Game was less funny to me than it was startling: A movie filled with the kind of gags you remember so you can tell someone else about them, not because you necessarily laughed. At least it gives you moments to ponder. Fire shows up a lot, and I wondered about that: the threat of it, the promise of it; the uncontrollability of it; the urgency of it. Why? Maybe because it can’t be put off or ignored by a man who likes things simple and just so; maybe because it makes things high-stakes for a man who would prefer it if nothing were high-stakes. A man who needs time, and bit of control… that, I can understand.

Where to find It’s the Old Army Game:
It’s the Old Army Game was screened by the Toronto Silent Film Festival on April 6, 2011. It is also available on DVD.

Hot Water (1924)

2011-05-26T00:19:00.000-04:00

If ‘Harold’ was a real guy, I’d want to know him. I’d want to know the man behind him, Harold Lloyd, too; but for different reasons. Harold Lloyd, comedy megastar of the silent era, was one of the few to survive it with career and lifestyle intact; he’d have a lot of good stories to tell. But ‘Harold,’ his character in Hot Water, is someone I’d want for a friend even if he amounted to nothing. He’s a simple, gentle, genuine man I could trust.

A flawed man, though. Here’s the best example: Near the end of Hot Water’s first sequence of gags, Harold is flung out of a moving streetcar, into the middle of a fairly busy road. He was ejected because he’d made himself an irritant onboard the car—overloaded with groceries and a live turkey he just won in a raffle. Now he’s sitting on the road, parcels strewn around him, half dazed. Cars bearing down on him. And the first thing he does is pin the turkey between his legs to keep it from wandering away while he fixes his necktie. Harold’s not a practical man, but he always wants to do the proper thing, and he’s earnest about it.

Almost all of Lloyd’s characters are variants of this Harold: normal guys, dreaming of making good by being good. This one’s modest, but admirable goal is to please ‘Wifey’ (Jobyna Ralston), the sweet woman he fell in love with on sight. The grocery-thing’s a pain, the turkey-thing too, the streetcar most of all, but Harold’s still giddy because he’s coming home to her. Plus, he’s got a surprise: a brand-new car. It’ll be there by the time he arrives. Only 59 more payments and it’s theirs.

All Harold wants to do at that moment is take Wifey for a drive. Maybe a picnic too—some modest celebration of their domestic achievement. But when he arrives home and embraces her, he sees his pipe in the wastebasket; sees a plume of cigar smoke forming over the back of an armchair; feels a spitball connect with the back of his head. His mother-in-law and brothers-in-law (one adult, one a child) have shown up. These are the tell-tale signs, and so Harold resigns himself, because all three of them are just awful.

If the scene on the road best illustrates Harold, this scene, in the livingroom, best illustrates Hot Water’s comic philosophy. Harold navigates his world by means of the clues it provides—the spitball implies the boy, for example—but he’s a linear thinker, uncreative and too naïve, and it gets him into trouble. In the film’s second, longest, and best gag sequence, he takes the four relatives for a joy ride in the new car, slowing down initially when he hears the sound of a motorcycle behind him. When it pulls up alongside, Harold sees it’s a civilian, not a cop, and so he speeds again. You can guess what happens next.

Harold’s literalism contributes to another odd joke I kind of liked. Up ahead, five WWI vets, probably tipsy, are headed to a benefit. One of them loses his doughboy-style helmet, which lands on the road. Moments before, Harold was scolded by a traffic cop to always drive around traffic buttons: metal knobs on the road, like speed bumps, that look like the soldier’s helmet. Predictably, the helmet falls in an awkward spot, forcing Harold to drive around it and on to someone’s lawn. Which is stupid, but—I can see someone doing this, especially behind the wheel. Traffic is all about rules, and sensible drivers do silly things when forced to adapt.

Harold is an average an facing fairly plausible obstacles, which is what makes Hot Water is so charming. It’s also why the third gag sequence, in which Harold gets drunk, chloroforms his mother-in-law, believes her dead from it, then spends the last 20 minutes of the film running from the police (who aren’t after him) and the woman’s ghost (she sleepwalks actually, which he should know), doesn’t entirely work. Oh, it’s funny enough; especially Lloyd’s understated routine of a drunken man who knows he’s drunk and desperately wants to hide it, lurching toward the dinner table like his legs are braced and fumbling with the mashed potatoes. And Josephine Crowell’s awfully game as the mother-in-law—almost 80-years old and still willing to be dragged across a room by her foot.

Funny, yes, but I couldn’t see it happening to me. And the genius of Lloyd’s comedy was that you could. After all, you’re just trying to do the right thing too, most of the time, in a world filled with expectations and obligations. You don’t want to hurt anybody, or overturn the order of things—you just want to understand them, and maybe fit in. And every once in a while, just like Harold, you have an incredibly unlucky day: so unlucky that it’s almost a joke; so ridiculous that the joke’s worth telling. Well, Hot Water, at one hour, is a movie worth seeing, and for the same reasons. For the first 40 minutes, it may even be one you can’t miss.

Where to find Hot Water:
Hot Water was screened as part of the Toronto Silent Film Festival on April 6, 2011. The film is also available on Disc Three of the Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, distributed by New Line Home Video.

The Princess of Montpensier (2010)

2011-05-19T16:21:00.000-04:00

A talkie, courtesy TIFF Bell Lightbox, in Toronto.

The ones you love are never far from your thoughts, even when they’re far away.

I think that sentiment’s universal. I think that, if you said it to someone centuries ago, they’d nod their head, a little sadly, just the same. But they might see irony in it that we don’t. We’re a society that travels fast and communicates even faster, and for whom boundaries like marriage are fluid and frankly, not that strong. In other societies, in other times, ‘goodbye’ might have been the last words a loved one heard from you for years. Or there might be no goodbye at all: just the long torture of close proximity between you and your beloved… betrothed to another by unbreakable bonds.

Proximity is one of many themes in Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier: a bulky, moody, but mostly very good historical drama; a film at its best when revealing the consequences of expressing human feelings in circumstances indifferent to them. The setting is 16th Century France; the circumstances: the renewed Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots. The players: the French aristocracy and their attendants. In this unstable period, love was a luxury that had little, if anything to do with one’s decision to get married.

Even ‘decision’ is the wrong word. The future Princess of Montpensier, Marie de Mézières (Mélanie Thierry) explodes when her father informs her of an arranged marriage to Phillippe, Prince of Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), a decent young man whom she does not love. Marie runs hot for Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel): a handsome, arrogant war hero and rival of Philippe’s.

Marie’s feelings are real, but not realistic. Philippe is her father’s choice, for his own reasons; even if he favoured the Guise family, it would be Henri’s brother Marie would have to marry. Accepting the news, she skulks to a nearby room, where Henri and his brother share a bed. The lovers grieve. Marie worries Henri’s brother will wake up. “He sleeps soundly,” says Henri, the smooth-talker. “Because he doesn’t think of you.” Can you imagine such intimate talk with so little privacy?

An extra-marital affair between nobles of equal rank could be, in this era, politically disastrous. That doesn’t stop Henri from trying it. He takes many stupid risks. But such is Marie’s appeal that he is but one of four men who desire her. She’s loved equally by her cuckholded husband; lusted after by the Duke d’Anjou (Raphaël Personnaz), son of the Queen; and longed for, most purely, by her own tutor, Franҫois, the Count de Chabannes. The fact that Henri is the one she desires means nothing, since he cannot have her. Tensions mount, especially when events place them within love-making distance of one another.

Tavernier centres his film around Marie, showing her development from teenager to young adult; her strong will expressed first through petulance, then rebellion, and finally bitterness. That she could cause men to risk their lives in pursuit of her is believable enough: Theirry is an astounding beauty, and Tavernier gives us every bit of her, head to toe, clothed and nude. As a man, I enjoyed it. As a reviewer, though, it made me question my gaze.

Take Marie and Philippe’s wedding night, for example. Marie stands naked in her bed chamber, attended by her maids. Phillippe waits at the bedside. The bride’s father inspects her, before leaving the room to play chess with the father-in-law. Later, a servant interrupts the chess game with news. “We didn’t hear anything,” one of the old men complains. “There was just a little squeak,” the servant replies, “but there was blood.” The dads are pleased.

This is all grotesque. Yet, in this period, Marie’s beauty would be a commodity second only to her station; if her father was willing to sacrifice her happiness for political gain, is it such a rational leap for him to want proof of his investment? In a sense, he’s already violated her once. And Phillippe, handsome but socially awkward, must have been giddy at the sight before him, semi-public or otherwise. A man’s a man.

But then, that’s no excuse for how they behave. Marie’s not a seductress—that requires intent. For the most part she simply attracts, though she learns to act strategically to get what, or who, she wants. Of the four men, it is only Franҫois (Lambert Wilson) who has the maturity to resist her. He’s in the thrall of Marie’s body as much as the rest (and sees it in full glory at least once, thanks to the lack of privacy in the household), but does nothing to threaten her marriage oath.

Later, in a letter to Marie, Franҫois describes his love for her as “…the perfect friendship.” Maybe it is. Certainly, the learned man teaches her much. She’s a bright student, needing only someone who’ll pay attention to more than her looks to help her achieve intellectual refinement. Franҫois’ love for Marie is controlled, though not extinguished, by prudence. By refusing to act on his impulses, he embodies both the ideals of his time and the minimum standards of ours.

It’s just that he’s not very interesting. I get the point of Franҫois: he’s an ex-soldier, traumatized by an atrocity he was forced to commit in the holy war, unable to murder anymore for either side in the name of God; a man who sees neutrality as noble when any other option is sin. To take Marie—to even try—would be a violation of that same principle. But he has no true arc, and his brooding gets old, fast. He serves the plot as ably and obviously as he does the Montpensiers.

Is The Princess of Montpensier a feminist film? Perhaps. It has a heroine who defines her identity and fate on her own terms, for her own ends; and its villains are men who see her as a possession or a curse, or both. Even Henri, at one point, blames his feelings for Marie on Marie: she’s a catalyst for competition between him and other competitive men, and so he could not help himself. His ego is enormous. Had Franҫois provided a more compelling counterpoint, this would have been more powerful.

Ideological or not, The Princess of Montpensier is exceptionally violent: dirty, bloody in the battle scenes, though Tavernier never makes a spectacle of it. Likewise, his scenes of luxury in the various castles, over various feasts, and at various balls, project wealth and status without sumptuousness—preventing us from focusing only on clothing, jewels or plunging necklines. These people are rich and so are their surroundings, but here it’s an element of realism, not a gateway to fantasy. Many times, the rumble of horses’ hooves brings these privileged people new and awful news.

And anyway, what jewel could match the looks of Mélanie Thierry? Near the end, Tavernier lets the camera linger on her face a moment and we wonder, has she given up on love? ‘If she has,’ I thought, ‘what a waste.’

Where to find The Princess of Montpensier:
The Princess of Montpensier (La princesse de Montpensier) opens at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox on June 3, 2011.

The Invisible Eye (2010)

2011-05-17T15:14:00.000-04:00

A talkie, courtesy of TIFF Bell Lightbox

We don’t meet Marita. Marita meets us. She marches a row of uniformed Argentine students through the halls of her school, toward you and me; stiff in her starched white blouse and black skirt, hair in a bun, face chalky and wiped of emotion. She inspects them. Failure is measured in inches: one student’s hair too short at the back; another’s fingers too far from his classmate’s shoulder in line. These are small things, but that’s the point. Enforcing conformity is Marita’s job.

Marita (Julieta Zylberberg) is a small thing herself; you notice it right away. The teenagers tower over her, even the girls; without her chunk-heels, she’d be under five feet. Her face is unlined. Director Diego Lerman could have credibly cast Zylberberg as one of the students; that’s how young she looks. But instead, she’s an authority figure, and that means everything to The Invisible Eye.

The film is set in 1982: heady times in Argentina. Six years of dictatorship is coming to an end, we’re told—‘crumbling,’ as Lerman puts it in his opening text. We read this, then we see the thickness and polish of the school’s marble exterior. The immensity and age of the place. It never seems full: teachers like Marita walk its corridors looking like rafts adrift in a great grey expanse. If revolution is afoot, this mausoleum will be last to feel it, and that is the educators’ goal.

“Subversion is like cancer,” head professor Biasutto tells Marita. He goes on to explain how cancer spreads. Biasutto (Osmar Núñez) is a patriot, at least currently; he was installed in the school after the coup and sees it as his job—all the teacher’s jobs—to kill the cancer where it’s fresh. He’s enormous before Marita, who fancies him as a man and fears him like a father. She doesn’t speak to her father. “Call me Carlos,” he says.

Biasutto exudes warmth, but he’s a horrible man. Marita, the disciplinarian at work, is like a teenager at home, a virgin living with her mother and grandmother; unable even to have a room of her own. These are people for whom professional exteriors disguise much. I suppose that’s part of being a professional, but it occurred to me that, for Marita, the rigidity was a replacement for strength, not an expression of it. Encouraged by Biasutto to spy on the students (‘The secret of good discipline is surveillance,’), she soon begins hiding in the boys’ lavatory, in one of the stalls, listening to them, and fantasizing.

Marita would be popular with men if she wasn’t so shy. Zylberberg captures the essence of this shyness: the self-loathing, the look of discomfort and irritation that pushes others away even as she longs for friendship. Invited to a party by her colleagues, Marita dresses up in high-80s style (the bulk of the perm on one side—you know), then spends hours in awkward conversation with people she ought to have lots in common with. “Are you having fun?” she asks another guest, blandly. No one asks that but the host.

Marita is nothing without the school system to confer authority upon her, and even that has its limits. Both of her objects of lust: Biasutto and the tallest of the schoolboys, regard her with benign contempt. Neither has the slightest respect for her skills, if indeed she has any. They smell her fear. Marita, in turn, uses her position not to dominate others, but to hollow out an even narrower fantasy space for herself. In one wretched moment she sneaks into the boys’ locker room during swim class. She begins rifling through a gym bag: pulls out a mix-tape and inspects it; pulls out a pair of underwear and smells it. She opens a bottle of perfume she recently bought and applies it, right there. It seemed to me that Marita was constructing a sexual encounter in her head: the music, the smells, the touch of intimate clothing, the sight of the half-naked boy in his swim trunks—all sensory components; everything but the real thing.

This is a terribly vulnerable woman, to whom worse things, we fear, are bound to happen. For the government, too, the worst is coming—The Invisible Eye builds dread as the end of the dictatorship approaches and Marita’s habits are exposed. She collapses in tears, like a child, before Biasutto. Then the pair of them, epitomes of moral rectitude within the school, hide together in the bathroom stall, looking ridiculous. And then, there is no more hiding. Biasutto is a liar and a fraud, but he has the power to get what he wants.

When a system’s this rotten, the only way out is ruin.

Where to find The Invisible Eye:
The Invisible Eye (La miranda invisible) opens at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox on May 26, 2011.

The New York Hat (1912)

2011-05-15T13:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I told a Toronto International Film Festival staffer that this city is one of the best in North America for silent film. Not only do we have TIFF Bell Lightbox, our still-new festival theatre, showing silent films regularly with live accompaniment; we also have smaller theatres showing silents in regular rotating programs, plus the Toronto Silent Film Festival, the Toronto Urban Film Festival, and some truly tricked-out rental stores offering obscurities I’ve never heard of until I start to browse. Yes, we’re lucky here in Toronto. New York and Los Angeles may offer more, but they’re an awful lot bigger too.

I had this chat at the Lightbox, following a very interesting pair of lectures on the career of Mary Pickford. Profs. Charlie Keil and Rob King educated us (a nearly-full auditorium) on the development of both cinematic acting and the movie star-as-public-entity—concepts that could not be seriously discussed without mentioning Pickford. Sandwiched between the lectures were 35-mm prints of three Pickford Biograph shorts: Wilful Peggy; An Arcadian Maid (both 1910); and The New York Hat (1912). The first film was used to demonstrate Pickford’s mastery of the older, ‘histrionic’ style of film acting; the second, her equal mastery of the developing ‘verisimilar’ style, characterized by fewer outsized gestures and channeling of internal conflict through props. Kudos to Prof. Keil for reminding us that histrionic does not equal ‘bad’, even if we laugh at it now.

The New York Hat, a 16-minute film and Pickford’s last for Biograph, shows her embracing verisimilitude as fully as she ever would. She plays Mollie Goodhue, the only child of a just-widowed Calvinist-type (Charles Hill Mailes). Mrs. Goodhue, who expires in the film’s opening scene, leaves Preacher Bolton (Lionel Barrymore) a letter: in it she confides that her husband ‘worked her to death’ and begs the minister to spare Mollie that fate. What she really means is that he allowed his wife not the slightest frivolous pleasure, and her daughter, who loves beautiful clothing but doesn’t own a stitch of it, faces the same joyless, frugal life. Preacher Bolton agrees to take a bit of money the mother stashed away and buy Mollie something she’d like, from time to time. The father is not to know.

You might wonder how he wouldn’t know, since the Goodhues occupy a tiny house in a tiny village. Soon after, Preacher Bolton discovers Mollie with her face pressed to the window of a shop. The window advertises ‘Hats Just From New York.’ In particular one, ‘The Village Sensation’: a wide-brimmed, feathered, ridiculous confection. She departs, depressed; then Bolton enters the store and buys it. The town gossips see him do it, and wonder what he’s up to.

The New York Hat packs considerable tension into a single reel. There are three points of conflict: first, between the preacher and the townspeople, who believe he is carrying on an affair with Mollie; second, between Mollie and her father, who, when he discovers the hat, is enraged; third, between Mollie and her peers, who scorn her for being poor. Were the film longer, I believe there’d be a fourth point, only hinted at here, between Preacher Bolton and Mr. Goodhue. Not only is Bolton usurping Goodhue’s fatherly role; he’s also been privy to the private thoughts of Goodhue’s wife, while the ultra-straight husband likely was not.

As D.W. Griffith made The Mothering Heart a star vehicle for Lillian Gish, so too is The New York Hat one for Pickford: she’s in most scenes, and though her Mollie is mostly reactive, she’s also the only character whose emotions ebb and flow with full humanity. Surrounding her are archetypes: Mr. Goodhue with the thin, pinched face and long chin whiskers of a bible-thumper; the town busybodies, overdressed, sneering, and always moving in a cluster; the gentle minister, radiating stillness and peace. Then Pickford: first miming finery in the mirror with her pathetic poor-girl’s hat, then again with the real thing; her face shifting from giddiness to guilt and grief, and then to pleasure: her true emotion once the rest have been refined and eliminated. I’ve seen a lot of Mary Pickford films, and this rapid shifting of feeling is one of her trademarks. Her expressions flowed like water.

Readers of this blog know how quick I am to defend the archaic in film: fixed-camera work, broadly drawn archetypes, etc. These things come off phony most of the time, but properly handled, they’re capable of dramatic power, and sometimes work as artistic tools in their own right. For example, here. Pickford’s Mollie is an image of pathos, but an emotionally whole being too, negotiating her way between symbols of bigotry, vice, prejudice and stupidity. They are universals; the tiny town in which they live could be the whole planet; and so Mollie, their victim, is both someone and Anyone.

I was moved by The New York Hat. Unlike so many creaky Biograph shorts, it establishes an authentic human character as its centrepoint: didactic, perhaps, but dramatic first, and so we care. Whatever values Mollie Goodhue represents, she also represents Mollie Goodhue, and that little girl deserves to be happy.

***

The New York Hat is one of the most celebrated Biograph shorts. It has also got, arguably, one of the most notable cast and crews of any silent film, short or feature-length. In addition to Pickford and Barrymore, watch for cameos by Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Jack Pickford, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, and Mack Sennett. Directed by Griffith, it was scripted by Anita Loos, with contributions by Frances Marion.

Where to find The New York Hat:
I watched The New York Hat as part of Mary Pickford: From Actress to Icon, a lecture and screening hosted by TIFF Bell Lightbox on May 14, 2011. Accompaniment was provided by Laura Silberberg. The New York Hat is also available on DVD; part of Kino International’s three-disc set, Biograph Shorts.

Convict 13 (1920)

2011-05-13T16:55:00.000-04:00

I’d planned to write about Convict 13 a couple of times before this. It’s a long-time backup choice for me: something short and quick, a film I could watch in a busy week, late at night, in a state of fatigue, when I just, really, needed, new content for the blog. This week was that week.

Convict 13 was never my favourite Buster Keaton short; not even close. By the standards of his later shorts, especially The Playhouse and Cops, it’s crude; a succession, mostly, of vaudeville gags Keaton brought from stage to screen. Compared even to his earlier shorts, One Week and The High Sign, it is uninspired. But one thing about Convict 13 has always, always impressed me: its incredible violence.

We’ll get there in a minute. First, let’s chat a bit about Convict 13’s more traditional Keaton-esque qualities. You can see here, even in 1920, the Keaton character already well-formed. The film opens with him on a golf-course, swinging without skill, while a crowd of wealthy onlookers laughs at him. He launches a ball into a water hazard; then floats into the middle of it on piece of wood, scooping up fish with his hands in hope of finding the one that swallowed his ball. He does, then paddles back to shore using his club.

Most people would have taken the stroke. Here, as in most of his silent work, Keaton plays an obsessive man with limited perspective—one who pours tremendous energy and creativity into achieving a goal, but gives little thought to the worthiness of that goal in the grander scheme. The less tenable a situation becomes, the harder he tries, and from this comes the jokes. The character in Convict 13 will reach his logical conclusion in Johnny Grey: Keaton’s Civil War train conductor who spends half of The General chasing a train and the other half escaping one.

(The General may also be Keaton’s attempt at self-parody. The train-chase actually is limited: one train following another on a single piece of track. It’s the one time Keaton’s quest really is as prescribed as he thinks it is. He solves the problems of the chase imaginatively and unpredictably, as always, but in this case, he’s responding to a real need, not one created by his fixations. His actions are strategic, even heroic; whereas normally, they’re futile and pathetic. Viewed this way, The General seems far less cynical than most of Keaton’s work.) Now back to the subject at hand.

Keaton knocks himself out. He’s discovered, prone, by an escaped con of approximately equal stature, who switches their clothes and runs off. Keaton comes to, fails to notice the wardrobe change (there’s that tunnel-vision again) and returns to his golf-game. He’s happened upon by two policemen, then by several more, who give chase in a sequence Keaton later reworked—and greatly expanded—in Cops. He escapes them by bolting into a gated compound and locking himself in. This is, of course, the prison.

The patch on Keaton’s outfit says ‘13’ and ‘Convict 13’ is to be hanged today. Keaton is dragged to the gallows: “Don’t worry, it’ll work just fine” says the hangman. He’s saved by the warden’s daughter, who switches the rope for a bungee cord, turning Keaton into a yoyo when the trapdoor opens. A crowd of fellow prisoners boos from the stands, throwing popcorn. “Sorry boys,” the warden says. “We’ll fix it and tomorrow we’ll hang two of you to make up for this.”

I’ve always considered this gag atypical of Keaton’s work, because it is rooted in absurdity (convicts enjoying the execution of one of their own, even treating it as a spectator sport), while Keaton’s comedy, as a rule, begins with what’s sensible, then spirals off.

What follows is stranger yet. We’re introduced to another prisoner—a huge, imposing man played by Keaton stock-heavy Joe Roberts—crushing rocks while a guard pokes him in the back with his rifle. Fed up, Roberts hits him with a sledgehammer. Hard. He grabs another guard by the feet, whirling him around and around (in pro wrestling, that’s called a Giant Swing) and releasing him head-first into the prison wall. Then he advances on the fallen guard, and beats his skull against the dirt. Roberts manages to KO nearly every other guard in the joint by hitting them, one at a time, as they emerge from a doorway. The men collapse like dolls. It’s all very Keystone, but not very Keaton.

Our hero, meanwhile, has managed to switch his prison stripes for the uniform of a fallen guard—which seemed like a good idea until Roberts caught sight of him. He manages to capture Roberts anyway, and earns the title of assistant warden from his apparently near-sighted boss. Convict 13 now cuts, suddenly, to some point in the future (really it could be weeks or months later), with Roberts planning another riot.

This time it’s a gunfight, and a pretty serious one; prisoners obtain their own rifles and shoot the guards—not in the bum, but in the chest. One of them twitches when he hits the ground. Keaton saves the day one more time: in the probably the film’s most famous scene, he attaches a speed-bag to a length of rope, then swings it in circles (think of a lasso with a weighted end), clocking the prisoners one by one. The riot is quashed and Keaton’s girl (Sybil Seely: also his girl in One Week, The Boat, The Scarecrow, and The Frozen North) is saved.

For a Keaton film, even an early one, Convict 13 hangs loosely. It’s more a collection of ideas than a whole; both a harbinger of Keaton’s better, future work and an artistic dead-end. It is cynical the way most Keaton-films would be: placing a simplistic, but decent man in a world that seemingly exists to mock him. Convict 13, like Cops, The General, even Sherlock, Jr., questions whether a man’s talent, intentions or character matter half so much in life as the uniform he wears—a theme picked up by dramatic filmmakers like F.W. Murnau as well. But the unbelievable violence of this short, which has no real equivalent in Keaton’s work, suggests a direction Keaton could have gone, but decided, wisely, to avoid. Knockabout comedy has its place, and it can be great, but it doesn’t need a character with Keaton’s depth to make it work. And we need Keaton’s little hero a heck of a lot more than a punch in the face.

Where to find Convict 13:
Kino International’s DVD release of Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) includes both Convict 13 and the surviving footage of Keaton’s 1922 short, Daydreams.