This one ought to be a pretty realistic love story, given that the two leads, John Barrymore and Dolores Costello were busy falling in love when making it. Their son, John Drew Barrymore, is the father of today's star Drew Barrymore, making this a major entry in her family history. It also reteams Barrymore with director Alan Crosland, a year after they made Don Juan together, the first film to synchronise sound with speech, and which was notable for the number of kisses in the movie and for Barrymore's outrageous trousers which left precisely nothing to the imagination.
We're in Amiens, a French town during the reign of Louis XV. Dolores Costello's character is really the lead, because she plays Manon Lescaut, whose name was given to the many ballets and operas based on the original source novel. Manon is a young lady who thinks she's about to go into a convent, but who is really being sold by her greedy brother to some lech from Paris who looks like a scary version of Robin Williams. Meanwhile, the Chevalier Fabien des Grieux, played by John Barrymore, is joining the priesthood. Regardless of their circumstances, the two see each other and obviously fall in love at first sight. As the Chevalier has overheard her brother's plans, he leaps up to her balcony to rescue her. The church is forgotten and they run off to Paris together.
The Chevalier is a little effete and Manon a little useless, as befits the fashions of the times, both the period in which the story was set and the time at which it was made, and needless to say they don't manage to stay together for long. Manon is manipulated away by her brother, played by a twisted Warner Oland, after Don Juan and Tell It to the Marines but before Old San Francisco, The Jazz Singer and lasting fame as Dr Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. They're almost reunited but not quite, and the Chevalier, left with only her kitten for company, must search on. Anyway, they find each other, lose each other, find each other... you can picture the rest.
The film is well done but its fundamental problem is that, a couple of scenes notwithstanding, it's hard to root for Fabien and Manon. It's not how they're played, rather who they are. They were sympathetic for the first twenty minutes but then I began to feel that they deserved all they got, all the way to the end. Sure, they're not despicable like the Comte de Morfontaine, but they ceased to be people I cared about. By the tail end of the movie I was far more interested in catching a glimpse of Myrna Loy as the prisoner behind Manon on her way to deportation. I wonder what Drew thought.
Incidentally the last fifteen or so minutes seems like an entirely different movie. We're on a prison boat bound for Louisiana and suddenly we're out of the period romance and into a pulp swashbuckler. Barrymore demonstrates that he's fully up to any challenge laid down by a Douglas Fairbanks Sr, clad in tattered clothing but leaping around inside cages gesticulating wildly, exhorting his fellows to break out and escaping to save his girl. If only the whole movie could have been a pulp swashbuckler!
Monday, 22 January 2007
The Wages of Fear (1953) Henri-Georges Clouzot
Life in the Venezuelan village of Las Piedras seems to be pretty quiet. The heat is excessive so while local kids dance in the streams of water, everyone else lounges in the sun, casually throwing stones at dogs, lusting after the local waitress or pouring water over themselves. In fact everything is casual: the local immigration clerk lounges around with no shoes on; the driver of the water truck seems to be asleep; people steal, love, do precisely nothing with the quiet air of the siesta. It's pretty obvious that those Europeans who have found their way here have done so through some dubious means, probably because they shouldn't be anywhere else. However they're stuck there because there's no work, thus no money and it's too expensive to get out. Only the oil company has money and they aren't hiring lowlife westerners.
Or at least they aren't hiring until a bad accident kills five people, and they need to transport a ton of nitroglycerin to derrick 16. Bill O'Brien, the man in charge, will pay good money to Europeans to do the job , in order to avoid paying off the families of local labourers who while exploited are still union workers. The big problem is that the nitro is volatile, the roads in terrible condition and the trucks not equipped with necessary safety equipment, so O'Brien sends four men in two trucks, both loaded with enough nitro to do the job just in case the other truck doesn't get through.
Director Henri-Georges Clouzot builds his story wonderfully, so the four are well defined characters before they ever set off, even though we aren't filled in on their reasons for being in Las Piedras. There's Mario, played by the singer/actor Yves Montand in his first major dramatic role; the dangerous yet cowardly Jo with a huge chin, played by Charles Venal, who had one of the longest careers of any actor: from 1910 to 1988, three more even than Lillian Gish and second only to German Curt Bois; Folco Lulli as the hard working Luigi, with perhaps only six months to live; and Peter van Eyck as a very capable Dutchman called Bimba.
The village reeks of authenticity even though it's really in southern France and was specifically constructed for this film. We can feel the mud and the sun and the lethargy, let alone the danger and the tension and the insane rivalry between the drivers of the two trucks. The ending is a good one, though I saw it coming, but all in all Henri-George Clouzot does a marvellous job, and I'm intrigued to see the later version of the same source novel, filmed as Sorcerer by William Friedkin in 1977. I'm also even more intrigued to see Les Diaboliques, Clouzot's other Top 250 film, made two years after this one, which shook up everything and led to the birth of Psycho.
Or at least they aren't hiring until a bad accident kills five people, and they need to transport a ton of nitroglycerin to derrick 16. Bill O'Brien, the man in charge, will pay good money to Europeans to do the job , in order to avoid paying off the families of local labourers who while exploited are still union workers. The big problem is that the nitro is volatile, the roads in terrible condition and the trucks not equipped with necessary safety equipment, so O'Brien sends four men in two trucks, both loaded with enough nitro to do the job just in case the other truck doesn't get through.
Director Henri-Georges Clouzot builds his story wonderfully, so the four are well defined characters before they ever set off, even though we aren't filled in on their reasons for being in Las Piedras. There's Mario, played by the singer/actor Yves Montand in his first major dramatic role; the dangerous yet cowardly Jo with a huge chin, played by Charles Venal, who had one of the longest careers of any actor: from 1910 to 1988, three more even than Lillian Gish and second only to German Curt Bois; Folco Lulli as the hard working Luigi, with perhaps only six months to live; and Peter van Eyck as a very capable Dutchman called Bimba.
The village reeks of authenticity even though it's really in southern France and was specifically constructed for this film. We can feel the mud and the sun and the lethargy, let alone the danger and the tension and the insane rivalry between the drivers of the two trucks. The ending is a good one, though I saw it coming, but all in all Henri-George Clouzot does a marvellous job, and I'm intrigued to see the later version of the same source novel, filmed as Sorcerer by William Friedkin in 1977. I'm also even more intrigued to see Les Diaboliques, Clouzot's other Top 250 film, made two years after this one, which shook up everything and led to the birth of Psycho.
Sunday, 21 January 2007
Portrait of Jennie (1948) William Dieterle
Kicking off with a speech about the eternal questions and accompanied by a quotation from Euripedes and another from Keats, this really ought to be a deep and meaningful work of art. However while it's certainly full of substance, it's far more approachable than it would at first seem.
Joseph Cotten is his usual hardboiled self, but this time round he's a struggling New York painter called Eben Adams. He's not bad, it seems, but he can't sell much of his work. He does sell one to wonderfully crisp gallery owner Ethel Barrymore but she's more interested in him than his paintings. She sees something in him that he doesn't even see himself. One thing he sees that nobody else does is Jennie, a young schoolgirl played by Jennifer Jones who he meets in the park. She's also a ghost. As you'd expect from the title, he draws her portrait and it's the one piece of work that changes everything for him. After all what could be more timeless than the face of a ghost?
There's some glory here and not just in the main focus of the film. Maybe that's partly due to Joseph Cotten, who like William Holden, has a marvellous habit of seeping into his films like dye. Both of them are integral parts of all of their movies but they never seem to be the focus. They just provide the canvas for others to dance life onto. Here it's Jennifer Jones, who is a delight, so delightful it seems that producer David O Selznick fell in love with her. He married her a year after this film and they remained married until his death in 1965. She ages here notably but superbly, better than most such instances I've seen from this era, making the Oscar the film won for special effects justified.
It's not just her though. It's also Ethel Barrymore, one of the greatest stage actors to make her mark on the film industry too. She was such a great actor that very few others could ever hold a candle to her work, but she must have been on top form in Portrait of Jennie because she knew that one of those few was here too: Lillian Gish, who has stunned me more than any other actor, male or female, since I started exploring the history of cinema. Every time I've seen her I've been literally humbled by her talent and here was no exception: it's a small part and she seems to do so little yet I was immensely touched by it. I admired every movement Ethel Barrymore made but I was touched by every movement Lillian Gish didn't. Just looking at her eyes made me almost want to cry.
There are other odd merits, such as the great scene of blarney between two Irishmen, one finding a way to persuade the other into what he wants. It's magic writing and magic performing, that's for sure. Much of the rest of the script is a little talky and overly poetic but it fits the great sweep of things. It's a strange romance but then the strangest ones are usually the most intriguing.
Joseph Cotten is his usual hardboiled self, but this time round he's a struggling New York painter called Eben Adams. He's not bad, it seems, but he can't sell much of his work. He does sell one to wonderfully crisp gallery owner Ethel Barrymore but she's more interested in him than his paintings. She sees something in him that he doesn't even see himself. One thing he sees that nobody else does is Jennie, a young schoolgirl played by Jennifer Jones who he meets in the park. She's also a ghost. As you'd expect from the title, he draws her portrait and it's the one piece of work that changes everything for him. After all what could be more timeless than the face of a ghost?
There's some glory here and not just in the main focus of the film. Maybe that's partly due to Joseph Cotten, who like William Holden, has a marvellous habit of seeping into his films like dye. Both of them are integral parts of all of their movies but they never seem to be the focus. They just provide the canvas for others to dance life onto. Here it's Jennifer Jones, who is a delight, so delightful it seems that producer David O Selznick fell in love with her. He married her a year after this film and they remained married until his death in 1965. She ages here notably but superbly, better than most such instances I've seen from this era, making the Oscar the film won for special effects justified.
It's not just her though. It's also Ethel Barrymore, one of the greatest stage actors to make her mark on the film industry too. She was such a great actor that very few others could ever hold a candle to her work, but she must have been on top form in Portrait of Jennie because she knew that one of those few was here too: Lillian Gish, who has stunned me more than any other actor, male or female, since I started exploring the history of cinema. Every time I've seen her I've been literally humbled by her talent and here was no exception: it's a small part and she seems to do so little yet I was immensely touched by it. I admired every movement Ethel Barrymore made but I was touched by every movement Lillian Gish didn't. Just looking at her eyes made me almost want to cry.
There are other odd merits, such as the great scene of blarney between two Irishmen, one finding a way to persuade the other into what he wants. It's magic writing and magic performing, that's for sure. Much of the rest of the script is a little talky and overly poetic but it fits the great sweep of things. It's a strange romance but then the strangest ones are usually the most intriguing.
Closely Watched Trains (1966) Jiří Menzel
The French New Wave, that shook up how film was used in the early sixties, was run by names I'd heard of even before I'd ever seen anything they made: François Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. After them came the Czech New Wave, which apparently was pretty influential on its own, but this time I'd only heard of one of them, Miloš Forman, and then only because of work he did after fleeing to the States after the Soviets ended the Prague Spring, such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus. There are others and this is one of the major films from one of them, Jiří Menzel, major enough to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar for 1966.
We're in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II and we focus on Milos Herma, a young man who has followed in his father's footsteps by landing a prestigious job as a train dispatcher at the local station, Kostomlaty. It's important, as he tells us at the beginning of the film, because he won't have to do anything. It seems that avoiding hard work is the primary function of his family, including his father who is the envy of the locals because he retired early and will collect a pension for decades for doing precisely nothing at all.
Herma can enjoy standing on the platform saluting passing trains, changing the signals and doing not much else except learning about life from his puritanical boss, his lech of a supervisor and those characters who pass through his station: the local Countess, retreating soldiers, a train car load of nurses, SS officers and victims of partisan bullets. It's Milos's coming of age that is our real story.
The film is based on a novel by Bohumil Hrabal, which (and who) I haven't even heard of, let alone read, so I have no idea how faithful an adaptation it is. If it's faithful then I'm sure the author got into trouble with the Communists too, for all the insight into the mindset of the idle sex crazed youth who like the protagonists of other Czech New Wave movies care far more about their own immediate problems than any grand ideological crusade. Propaganda posters of taloned Soviet hands descending on Czech towns don't help either, of course. Even when something does happen for what might seem to outsider's eyes like a cause, it's really just a reassurance of masculinity and nothing ostensibly ideological at all.
Jiří Menzel has a poet's eye for composition but a filmmaker's eye for budget, and this is a real treatise on how to make things happen without spending huge amounts of money on them. There are scenes of blissful tenderness between lovers, deep sadness when things don't work out and wry humour like the scenes where the telegraphist's mother shows off her backside covered in railroad stamps to everyone she can find to complain to. There are beautiful images conjured out of steam and motion.
Most refreshing to my mind is the fact that all these are real and believable people. Just like in Forman's Loves of a Blonde, the characters are no great beauties in any traditional supermodel sense, but they carry a real beauty that transcends that sort of fakery. Jitka Bendová, unfortunate surname notwithstanding, and Jitka Zelenohorská, the young ladies who play Milos's girlfriend and the stamped telegraphist respectively, are far more sensual in my eyes than any random handful of Hollywood starlets.
We're in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II and we focus on Milos Herma, a young man who has followed in his father's footsteps by landing a prestigious job as a train dispatcher at the local station, Kostomlaty. It's important, as he tells us at the beginning of the film, because he won't have to do anything. It seems that avoiding hard work is the primary function of his family, including his father who is the envy of the locals because he retired early and will collect a pension for decades for doing precisely nothing at all.
Herma can enjoy standing on the platform saluting passing trains, changing the signals and doing not much else except learning about life from his puritanical boss, his lech of a supervisor and those characters who pass through his station: the local Countess, retreating soldiers, a train car load of nurses, SS officers and victims of partisan bullets. It's Milos's coming of age that is our real story.
The film is based on a novel by Bohumil Hrabal, which (and who) I haven't even heard of, let alone read, so I have no idea how faithful an adaptation it is. If it's faithful then I'm sure the author got into trouble with the Communists too, for all the insight into the mindset of the idle sex crazed youth who like the protagonists of other Czech New Wave movies care far more about their own immediate problems than any grand ideological crusade. Propaganda posters of taloned Soviet hands descending on Czech towns don't help either, of course. Even when something does happen for what might seem to outsider's eyes like a cause, it's really just a reassurance of masculinity and nothing ostensibly ideological at all.
Jiří Menzel has a poet's eye for composition but a filmmaker's eye for budget, and this is a real treatise on how to make things happen without spending huge amounts of money on them. There are scenes of blissful tenderness between lovers, deep sadness when things don't work out and wry humour like the scenes where the telegraphist's mother shows off her backside covered in railroad stamps to everyone she can find to complain to. There are beautiful images conjured out of steam and motion.
Most refreshing to my mind is the fact that all these are real and believable people. Just like in Forman's Loves of a Blonde, the characters are no great beauties in any traditional supermodel sense, but they carry a real beauty that transcends that sort of fakery. Jitka Bendová, unfortunate surname notwithstanding, and Jitka Zelenohorská, the young ladies who play Milos's girlfriend and the stamped telegraphist respectively, are far more sensual in my eyes than any random handful of Hollywood starlets.
Dirigible (1931) Frank R Capra
Made a year before Forbidden, here's another Frank Capra movie that doesn't seem like a Frank Capra movie. It's an adventure story, full of the old Jules Verne school of adventure: tackling what hasn't been done purely because it hasn't been done. It's dedicated the US Navy, which makes complete sense given the subject matter and the obvious help the filmmakers were given, but at the same time it's thankfully no cheesy piece of propaganda. Propaganda maybe, but without much of the usual cheese, which instead is reserved for the love triangle.
Commander Braden has been summoned to Washington DC to see Rear Admiral John Martin. A French explorer named Rondelle wants to fly to the South Pole and for some reason he's asking for US Navy assistance. Rather than sail down and then fly to the pole from Antarctica, Martin's idea is to use a dirigible, still well in fashion given that this is 1931 and the Hindenberg wouldn't explode until 1937 in Lakehurst, NJ, which just by coincidence seems to be where Martin sells his idea to Rondelle on Navy Day.
Braden, as portrayed by Jack Holt, is the reliable, serious yet still romantic officer who counterbalances Lt Frisky Pierce well. Pierce is a hotshot grandstander who has already won a huge amount of glory reaching no end of artificial milestones, like bringing a newspaper from the west coast to the east coast of the States in one day. He's played by Ralph Graves, who does his job very well indeed but who also looks for posterity like a cheap version of Pat O'Brien, who did this sort of thing perfectly. The thing is that O'Brien was busy arriving in 1931 in The Front Page, but Graves had been in movies since 1918 and had already made over seventy of them. The two are friends but have also both been rivals for Helen, Frisky's wife, played with no shortage of melodrama by Fay Wray, who knew aviation well through being married to John Monk Saunders, who wrote many of these sorts of films at this time, including Wings, which won the first Best Picture Oscar.
The love triangle is too melodramatic, but that's not Fay's fault, and there are apparently a bunch of technical mistakes, not errors as such but blatant changes in reality. Luckily I don't know enough about this sort of thing for it to make a difference for me. What this is really about is the adventure and the conquest of the air. It's fascinating to watch these huge dirigibles manoeuvre around the sky, and all the more powerful knowing that six years later in the same place, Lakehurst, NJ, they'd be effectively wiped out by one spectacular explosion that killed 36 people. The flying scenes are spectacular, especially those over Antarctic landscape, and they're all the more so for not being CGI. I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff and I really appreciate it when it's done well. These really early Capras have been real eyeopeners for me. They're solid films, especially so for the era, but they're also solidly not Capra-corn.
Commander Braden has been summoned to Washington DC to see Rear Admiral John Martin. A French explorer named Rondelle wants to fly to the South Pole and for some reason he's asking for US Navy assistance. Rather than sail down and then fly to the pole from Antarctica, Martin's idea is to use a dirigible, still well in fashion given that this is 1931 and the Hindenberg wouldn't explode until 1937 in Lakehurst, NJ, which just by coincidence seems to be where Martin sells his idea to Rondelle on Navy Day.
Braden, as portrayed by Jack Holt, is the reliable, serious yet still romantic officer who counterbalances Lt Frisky Pierce well. Pierce is a hotshot grandstander who has already won a huge amount of glory reaching no end of artificial milestones, like bringing a newspaper from the west coast to the east coast of the States in one day. He's played by Ralph Graves, who does his job very well indeed but who also looks for posterity like a cheap version of Pat O'Brien, who did this sort of thing perfectly. The thing is that O'Brien was busy arriving in 1931 in The Front Page, but Graves had been in movies since 1918 and had already made over seventy of them. The two are friends but have also both been rivals for Helen, Frisky's wife, played with no shortage of melodrama by Fay Wray, who knew aviation well through being married to John Monk Saunders, who wrote many of these sorts of films at this time, including Wings, which won the first Best Picture Oscar.
The love triangle is too melodramatic, but that's not Fay's fault, and there are apparently a bunch of technical mistakes, not errors as such but blatant changes in reality. Luckily I don't know enough about this sort of thing for it to make a difference for me. What this is really about is the adventure and the conquest of the air. It's fascinating to watch these huge dirigibles manoeuvre around the sky, and all the more powerful knowing that six years later in the same place, Lakehurst, NJ, they'd be effectively wiped out by one spectacular explosion that killed 36 people. The flying scenes are spectacular, especially those over Antarctic landscape, and they're all the more so for not being CGI. I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff and I really appreciate it when it's done well. These really early Capras have been real eyeopeners for me. They're solid films, especially so for the era, but they're also solidly not Capra-corn.
The Return of the Vampire (1944) Lew Landers
On the outskirts of London in 1918, Andreas the wolfman whose hair only goes as far south as his chin visits the vaults of the Priory Cemetery to awaken his master, the vampire Armand Tesla, thus leading to the first return of the title. Then we switch to his first victim, the young daughter of Dr Walter Saunders, who he bits but doesn't get the chance to kill. Saunders has been investigating a patient and has got stumped, so naturally assumes that it's the work of vampires and werewolves and the such and equally naturally reads up on the work of a Romanian writer two hundred years ago. Yes, you've guessed it: Armand Tesla. And he tracks him down that very night and hammers a stake into his heart. I lost count of the scary number of coincidences I came across here.
It's obvious that this is a cheap run of the mill production from the very beginning, but it rapidly degenerates into something truly awful. Gilbert Emery can take heart from the fact that his performance here is uncredited. As Dr Saunders, he has the most outrageous and cliched lines you can comfortably imagine and throws them out completely deadpan. Needless to say there's a second return, courtesy of the Germans who wreck the cemetery, and so Armand Tesla gets to have another go at Nikki Saunders, this time a little older. More coincidences, of course, but they continue. Tesla's coffin gets knocked up onto the surface and the top removed, so that the wardens pull it out. All this of course comes on the day before his coffin is going to be opened anyway by Scotland Yard.
Yep, this one's painful. It possibly wasn't quite as bad in 1944 as it is now, but that doesn't mean it wasn't really awful. Bela is Bela and Nina Foch, who plays Nikki, is cute. There isn't anything else here. Incidentally I recently saw Nina Foch no less than 61 years later, playing David McCallum's delightfully crazy mother in NCIS. Somehow she survived this early entry on her resume.
It's obvious that this is a cheap run of the mill production from the very beginning, but it rapidly degenerates into something truly awful. Gilbert Emery can take heart from the fact that his performance here is uncredited. As Dr Saunders, he has the most outrageous and cliched lines you can comfortably imagine and throws them out completely deadpan. Needless to say there's a second return, courtesy of the Germans who wreck the cemetery, and so Armand Tesla gets to have another go at Nikki Saunders, this time a little older. More coincidences, of course, but they continue. Tesla's coffin gets knocked up onto the surface and the top removed, so that the wardens pull it out. All this of course comes on the day before his coffin is going to be opened anyway by Scotland Yard.
Yep, this one's painful. It possibly wasn't quite as bad in 1944 as it is now, but that doesn't mean it wasn't really awful. Bela is Bela and Nina Foch, who plays Nikki, is cute. There isn't anything else here. Incidentally I recently saw Nina Foch no less than 61 years later, playing David McCallum's delightfully crazy mother in NCIS. Somehow she survived this early entry on her resume.
Saturday, 20 January 2007
The Women (1939) George Cukor
The title card adds, 'As presented for 666 performances in its triumphant run at the Ethel Barrmore Theatre, New York', which would seem to be a superstitious number, but maybe that's only because I've just watched Night of the Demon. The play was by Clare Boothe, and adapted for the screen by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin. Loos, of course, wrote the screenplays for a number of great films, including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes from her own novel.
This film stands unique on a number of fronts. For a start, the title is more apt than we'd usually expect: while there's a cast of what seems like hundreds (really only 130 or so), they're all women. That's not just the leading cast either, as even the kids are are girls and apparently all the many pets are female too. No wonder the director is George Cukor, famously described as 'the women's director'. I guess that works with a capital letter too. Apparently the only female MGM stars who didn't appear in this one were Greta Garbo and Myrna Loy. Also, I've never seen credits like these before. Warner Brothers movies in the thirties tended to have photos or video clips to accompany the actors' names, but here we see not just the actresses but also their characters through animals. Beyond the cats and tigers you'd expect in an all-woman cast, Joan Fontaine plays a sheep, apparently, and Marjorie Main a horse. I wonder what they felt about that.
The lead is played by an excellent Norma Shearer, in what is apparently the last great performance of her career. This is 1939, so it's late for her, with only three further films left to come. Her talent grew over time and eventually outstripped the well publicised fact that she was married to MGM Irving Thalberg, for whom the word 'wunderkind' seems to have been invented, and thus highly likely to get the great parts anyway, with due merit or not. She's Mary Haines, who believes that she's happily married to Stephen Haines, but has an eyeopening due. He's a huge McGuffin, because we never see him but the entire plot stems from the fact that on the sly he's seeing a girl who works behind the perfume counter at Black's on Fifth Avenue, and Mary finds out.
This perfume girl is Crystal Allen,a manipulative little scamp able to conjure up any lie necessary to get her way, as depicted with feeling by Joan Crawford. I'm a guy, and a straight one at that, so naturally I have no clue about any of this but I have a feeling that the film works as an opening into another world. Watching Crystal twisting her boyfriend Stephen round her little finger over the phone is like watching a living textbook, and from then on everything seems like documentary footage. Most telling are Mary's faces and tones of voice and the dangerous prodding and bitchy asides of friend Sylvia, courtesy of actress Rosalind Russell.
Russell is a riot, and she's far from the only notable character here. It often feels like if I blinked, I'd miss someone new. She may be the most obvious but there's also Lucile Watson as Mary's wise mother, Virginia Grey at the perfume counter, Ruth Hussey as Stephen's secretary, Muriel Hutchison as Mary's maid, Mary Boland as a much-married and much-divorced countess, Marjorie Main as a worldly Nevada cook, even thirteen year old Virginia Weidler as Mary and Stephen's daughter, among many others, and they all help to build the background to what appears to be the story that goes on behind all those other MGM films of the second half of the thirties, the ones where the men run the show and the women are just there as ornaments. Very eye-opening indeed!
This film stands unique on a number of fronts. For a start, the title is more apt than we'd usually expect: while there's a cast of what seems like hundreds (really only 130 or so), they're all women. That's not just the leading cast either, as even the kids are are girls and apparently all the many pets are female too. No wonder the director is George Cukor, famously described as 'the women's director'. I guess that works with a capital letter too. Apparently the only female MGM stars who didn't appear in this one were Greta Garbo and Myrna Loy. Also, I've never seen credits like these before. Warner Brothers movies in the thirties tended to have photos or video clips to accompany the actors' names, but here we see not just the actresses but also their characters through animals. Beyond the cats and tigers you'd expect in an all-woman cast, Joan Fontaine plays a sheep, apparently, and Marjorie Main a horse. I wonder what they felt about that.
The lead is played by an excellent Norma Shearer, in what is apparently the last great performance of her career. This is 1939, so it's late for her, with only three further films left to come. Her talent grew over time and eventually outstripped the well publicised fact that she was married to MGM Irving Thalberg, for whom the word 'wunderkind' seems to have been invented, and thus highly likely to get the great parts anyway, with due merit or not. She's Mary Haines, who believes that she's happily married to Stephen Haines, but has an eyeopening due. He's a huge McGuffin, because we never see him but the entire plot stems from the fact that on the sly he's seeing a girl who works behind the perfume counter at Black's on Fifth Avenue, and Mary finds out.
This perfume girl is Crystal Allen,a manipulative little scamp able to conjure up any lie necessary to get her way, as depicted with feeling by Joan Crawford. I'm a guy, and a straight one at that, so naturally I have no clue about any of this but I have a feeling that the film works as an opening into another world. Watching Crystal twisting her boyfriend Stephen round her little finger over the phone is like watching a living textbook, and from then on everything seems like documentary footage. Most telling are Mary's faces and tones of voice and the dangerous prodding and bitchy asides of friend Sylvia, courtesy of actress Rosalind Russell.
Russell is a riot, and she's far from the only notable character here. It often feels like if I blinked, I'd miss someone new. She may be the most obvious but there's also Lucile Watson as Mary's wise mother, Virginia Grey at the perfume counter, Ruth Hussey as Stephen's secretary, Muriel Hutchison as Mary's maid, Mary Boland as a much-married and much-divorced countess, Marjorie Main as a worldly Nevada cook, even thirteen year old Virginia Weidler as Mary and Stephen's daughter, among many others, and they all help to build the background to what appears to be the story that goes on behind all those other MGM films of the second half of the thirties, the ones where the men run the show and the women are just there as ornaments. Very eye-opening indeed!
Night of the Demon (1957) Jacques Tourneur
Back in the days before the eighties slasher boom, horror movies were based on work from the classics, not just the really obvious ones by Edgar Allan Poe but other great works seemingly known only to those connossieurs of the genre, like in this case, Casting the Runes by classic ghost story writer M R James. When not just based on great material but made by great filmmakers like Jacques Tourneur, who has a few classics on his resume: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man, all for producer Val Lewton; The Comedy of Terrors for Roger Corman; and even non-genre greats like the film noir Out of the Past, which now has a firm spot on the Top 250.
Professor Harrington finds his way at a rapid pace to Lufford Hall to talk Dr Karswell out of doing something dangerous with the supernatural. Karswell doesn't oblige and Harrington heads home only to find himself confronted by a hideous demon and a quick death. Flying in from America to investigate all of this sort of thing is Dr John Holden, played with crusading skepticism by Dana Andrews. He finds himself battling Karswell, who has predicted his death on an exact date, the same prediction he had given to Harrington.
This film works on plenty of levels. It's an intelligent treatment of the source material made by a superb cast led by Andrews and Niall MacGinnis, as Karswell, but continuing all the way down to the supporting actors like Reginald Beckwith, Liam Redmond and Peter Elliott; a thrilling and tense journey into the supernatural, complete with a wicked and memorable demon; and battles between light and dark, skepticism and belief and two individual people. Films like this are rare, because genre filmmakers generally don't have the talent for art and composition, and especially the power of shadow, that Tourneur has, and they're either too afraid or too stupid to value the intelligence of their viewers by showing something of quality.
When writing my IMDb Project review for The Great Escape, I realised just how much has changed in the last few decades, by noticing how many cool things were just there on the screen. They didn't do anything dynamic, other than just be there where they ought to be, to look realistic and make the scene right. Nowadays everything on screen has to be a prop and props have to be used. It means that we can write many modern film scripts in our head a couple of minutes ahead of the real ones, while watching, and be spot on more often than not. This, thankfully, comes from the days where that wasn't the case.
Incidentally, I saw this film, usually titled Night of the Demon, under the American title of Curse of the Demon, which was originally cut by twelve minutes, presumably to dumb it down, but later restored to its full length. I'm thankful for that too, because like most people that modern filmmakers ignore, I'm not afraid to see films that contain talk and intelligence as well as action. This is all the more tense for its background and it's mastery at work.
Professor Harrington finds his way at a rapid pace to Lufford Hall to talk Dr Karswell out of doing something dangerous with the supernatural. Karswell doesn't oblige and Harrington heads home only to find himself confronted by a hideous demon and a quick death. Flying in from America to investigate all of this sort of thing is Dr John Holden, played with crusading skepticism by Dana Andrews. He finds himself battling Karswell, who has predicted his death on an exact date, the same prediction he had given to Harrington.
This film works on plenty of levels. It's an intelligent treatment of the source material made by a superb cast led by Andrews and Niall MacGinnis, as Karswell, but continuing all the way down to the supporting actors like Reginald Beckwith, Liam Redmond and Peter Elliott; a thrilling and tense journey into the supernatural, complete with a wicked and memorable demon; and battles between light and dark, skepticism and belief and two individual people. Films like this are rare, because genre filmmakers generally don't have the talent for art and composition, and especially the power of shadow, that Tourneur has, and they're either too afraid or too stupid to value the intelligence of their viewers by showing something of quality.
When writing my IMDb Project review for The Great Escape, I realised just how much has changed in the last few decades, by noticing how many cool things were just there on the screen. They didn't do anything dynamic, other than just be there where they ought to be, to look realistic and make the scene right. Nowadays everything on screen has to be a prop and props have to be used. It means that we can write many modern film scripts in our head a couple of minutes ahead of the real ones, while watching, and be spot on more often than not. This, thankfully, comes from the days where that wasn't the case.
Incidentally, I saw this film, usually titled Night of the Demon, under the American title of Curse of the Demon, which was originally cut by twelve minutes, presumably to dumb it down, but later restored to its full length. I'm thankful for that too, because like most people that modern filmmakers ignore, I'm not afraid to see films that contain talk and intelligence as well as action. This is all the more tense for its background and it's mastery at work.
The Bachelor Father (1931) Robert Z Leonard
C Aubrey Smith, that curmudgeonly paragon of Victorian English virtue is hardly a paragon here as Sir Basil Winterton, though he's just as curmudgeonly. He has a whole bunch of honours appearing as initials after his name, but he's also an elderly bachelor with only illegitimate offspring. Given that this is 1931, and thus firmly within the precode era, he's allowed to mention the fact and in fact they're the key focus of the plot! He decides that he wants all these diverse bastard kids summoned to his home, Rooksfold Manor in Surrey, to live with him. They're Toni, a lively American dancer, Maria, an emotional Italian singer, and Geoffrey, an English musician, played respectively by Marion Davies, Nina Quartero and a very young Ray Milland.
Milland and Quartero are not bad but it's hard to even notice them, because this is really all about the connection between Davies and Smith, two very different people and two very different characters who work through complete enmity to find some common ground. Toni doesn't just move in but takes over too, ordering him around for his own benefit and much to his annoyance, becoming in the process as much mother and wife as daughter. Smith came to the part from the stage, having originated it on Broadway three years earlier and Davies has always been great in anything that isn't entirely serious. She has fun here and that's contagious, and she stretches a few boundaries here that would never have been permitted after the code kicked in.
Beyond the two of them there are a couple more characters who are far more noticeable than the other kids. There's Halliwell Hobbes as Larkin, one of the butlers. He obviously paid a lot of attention to Marion Davies, because he obviously enjoys making a fool of himself as much as she does, leaping around to scare off a plane or trying to dynamically explain how Toni plays craps. Then there's the Irish woman who brought up Toni in New York, played with much gusto by Elizabeth Murray. Compared to either of these, Maria and Geoffrey fade into the background completely, and compared to Marion Davies they're more like props.
Watch this for Marion Davies's spontaneity and C Aubrey Smith's fits of apoplexy, and for the fact that 1931 was a year where filmmakers had started to get things right. After the silent era had reached its pinnacle in 1928, the studios had to scramble around learning how to work with sound and there's not a lot worth watching from 1929. Things improved during 1930 until 1931 became a new pinnacle, only for the styles to change completely by 1932. The distinguishable greats from 1931 are ones like this, successful translations of very watchable stage plays onto film, mostly without the benefit of soundtracks and with seriously good actors making themselves known.
Milland and Quartero are not bad but it's hard to even notice them, because this is really all about the connection between Davies and Smith, two very different people and two very different characters who work through complete enmity to find some common ground. Toni doesn't just move in but takes over too, ordering him around for his own benefit and much to his annoyance, becoming in the process as much mother and wife as daughter. Smith came to the part from the stage, having originated it on Broadway three years earlier and Davies has always been great in anything that isn't entirely serious. She has fun here and that's contagious, and she stretches a few boundaries here that would never have been permitted after the code kicked in.
Beyond the two of them there are a couple more characters who are far more noticeable than the other kids. There's Halliwell Hobbes as Larkin, one of the butlers. He obviously paid a lot of attention to Marion Davies, because he obviously enjoys making a fool of himself as much as she does, leaping around to scare off a plane or trying to dynamically explain how Toni plays craps. Then there's the Irish woman who brought up Toni in New York, played with much gusto by Elizabeth Murray. Compared to either of these, Maria and Geoffrey fade into the background completely, and compared to Marion Davies they're more like props.
Watch this for Marion Davies's spontaneity and C Aubrey Smith's fits of apoplexy, and for the fact that 1931 was a year where filmmakers had started to get things right. After the silent era had reached its pinnacle in 1928, the studios had to scramble around learning how to work with sound and there's not a lot worth watching from 1929. Things improved during 1930 until 1931 became a new pinnacle, only for the styles to change completely by 1932. The distinguishable greats from 1931 are ones like this, successful translations of very watchable stage plays onto film, mostly without the benefit of soundtracks and with seriously good actors making themselves known.
Friday, 19 January 2007
At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964)
We're treated to an interesting opening. A scary gypsy woman wishes us a terrible evening and warns us not to watch the film, or at midnight she'll take our souls. What a way to start! This is a crackly old print of a 1964 Brazilian movie, and it's obvious early on that the acting is not of stellar quality, but the whole thing simply reeks of exotica. It's also highly refreshing because in all my years of watching horror movies I've never seen anything like this.
The film roughly equates to the lead character, because he dominates this film entirely. He is Zé do Caixão, known to Western audiences, or at least those who even know of his existence, as Coffin Joe, and this was the first of many films he made as both actor and director. Unlike any other horror lead I can think of from the sixties, he's not just no hero but he's a complete badass and it's impossible not to watch him. He's the local undertaker and he dominates everyone and everything around him. He swaggers, long before Shaft and the blaxploitation antiheroes, in his black top hat and cape, his ego swaggering alongside him. He seethes, with lust and sadistic desire, and he maims, rapes and kills without any regret or remorse. He also proudly and blatantly proclaims his secular beliefs by breaking religious edicts and superstitious proclamations and flaunting his defiance.
The only thing he seems to honour, except the lust for life, is the preservation of his bloodline. He kills his girlfriend or mistress, whatever she is, because she can't bear children, and he has a go at a father who treats his son badly. That's about the only positive attribute he seems to have, from a standard western moral standpoint, though there are certainly philosophies that include much of what he seems to stand for. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law?
José Mojica Marins obviously has a vision, and that doesn't just involve the intriguing use of negatives and overlaid graphics. For this to come out as it did in 1964 is astounding. I remember the controversy over films like Blood Feast in the States, where a tongue ripping was seen as graphic horror completely beyond the pale. This is only a year later, though without the garish technicolor, but it's just as graphic: corpses teeming with worms or with spiders roaming over them, fingers being cut off with a broken bottle, a whippings, a rape, a bludgenoning, a drowning, the works!
What takes it a step further than its American cousins is its blistering attack on the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil, which Marins lumps in with the ravings of the gypsy witch as superstitious nonsense. He really has a go: not just eating lamb on Holy Friday as an obvious sacrilegious reference to Agnus Dei but stooping so low as to stab a man in the face with a crown of thorns from a statue of Jesus.
The film is a riot, pure and simple, and a cinematic slap in the face that will take a while to really sink in. Now I'm seriously looking forward to the next couple of Coffin Joe movies to be shown on IFC Grindhouse: This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse and Awakening of the Beast. I knew about these from years of reading genre magazines, but I now see at IMDb that there are more than these, and that Marins is even making another Coffin Joe movie in 2007, at 78 years of age!
The film roughly equates to the lead character, because he dominates this film entirely. He is Zé do Caixão, known to Western audiences, or at least those who even know of his existence, as Coffin Joe, and this was the first of many films he made as both actor and director. Unlike any other horror lead I can think of from the sixties, he's not just no hero but he's a complete badass and it's impossible not to watch him. He's the local undertaker and he dominates everyone and everything around him. He swaggers, long before Shaft and the blaxploitation antiheroes, in his black top hat and cape, his ego swaggering alongside him. He seethes, with lust and sadistic desire, and he maims, rapes and kills without any regret or remorse. He also proudly and blatantly proclaims his secular beliefs by breaking religious edicts and superstitious proclamations and flaunting his defiance.
The only thing he seems to honour, except the lust for life, is the preservation of his bloodline. He kills his girlfriend or mistress, whatever she is, because she can't bear children, and he has a go at a father who treats his son badly. That's about the only positive attribute he seems to have, from a standard western moral standpoint, though there are certainly philosophies that include much of what he seems to stand for. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law?
José Mojica Marins obviously has a vision, and that doesn't just involve the intriguing use of negatives and overlaid graphics. For this to come out as it did in 1964 is astounding. I remember the controversy over films like Blood Feast in the States, where a tongue ripping was seen as graphic horror completely beyond the pale. This is only a year later, though without the garish technicolor, but it's just as graphic: corpses teeming with worms or with spiders roaming over them, fingers being cut off with a broken bottle, a whippings, a rape, a bludgenoning, a drowning, the works!
What takes it a step further than its American cousins is its blistering attack on the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil, which Marins lumps in with the ravings of the gypsy witch as superstitious nonsense. He really has a go: not just eating lamb on Holy Friday as an obvious sacrilegious reference to Agnus Dei but stooping so low as to stab a man in the face with a crown of thorns from a statue of Jesus.
The film is a riot, pure and simple, and a cinematic slap in the face that will take a while to really sink in. Now I'm seriously looking forward to the next couple of Coffin Joe movies to be shown on IFC Grindhouse: This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse and Awakening of the Beast. I knew about these from years of reading genre magazines, but I now see at IMDb that there are more than these, and that Marins is even making another Coffin Joe movie in 2007, at 78 years of age!
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