Director: Federico Fellini
Stars: Pupella Maggio, Armando Brancia, Magali Noel and Ciccio Ingrassia
Anyone who's seen a late film by Federico Fellini knows that they're in for a riot of visuals and this is no exception, beginning with a bonfire in the city square to celebrate the arrival of spring. Winter is gone, as the locals can tell because the puffballs are soaring, so they burn a witch that represents the passing season. It's a ritual, a tradition, and this film is full of them, so much so that it's a dedicated Italian equivalent of a John Ford movie. Made in 1973 but set during the 1930s in Rimini in which Fellini was born in 1920. He's said that it isn't autobiographical but does bear similarities with his childhood. The film's title should really be 'A m'arcord', or 'I remember' in the Rimini dialect.
There's no real plot, merely a year-long slice of Rimini life as defined by its traditions and the characters who populate it, as well as its myths and lies. With the vaguaries of memory, it makes no distinction between what actually happened, the spirit of what actually happened or what people might pretend or want to believe actually happened, because all these things add up into the legend. Going back to John Ford again, when there's a choice between the truth and the legend, print the legend. What this gives us is so much flavour and character that it washes over us like a wave.
If there's a focus it's the Biondi family, complete with their mad uncle Teo who looks like Frank Zappa with a hint of Ron Perlman. We follow a whole slew of family members wherever they go. Titta is the schoolboy, getting up to all sorts of mischief in class and elsewhere. He lusts after Gradisca, the town's hairdresser; he takes part in mutual masturbation sessions in a parked car in a garage and lies to the priest during confession. He's blissfully unaware of so much while becoming aware of so much more. He talks to his mother in hospital completely oblivious that she's about to die.
It isn't just Titto though, presumably the character most closely based on Fellini himself. His father Aurelio gets hauled in and abused by the fascists after a celebration for El Duce is interrupted by someone playing the revolutionaries hymn on a gramaphone from the bell tower. They all pick up Teo from the asylum for a day out at a farm, only for him to climb a tree and cry out for a woman for five hours, refusing every attempt to bring him back down. And as Titto is part of a family, so the Biondi family is part of Rimini.
Many of the memories aren't really specific to one family but belong to the town of Rimini itself, and many are as often utterly generic as they are specific. One of the most memorable scenes takes place in the fog where dead trees morph into other shapes and a white bull to appear out of nowhere. The schoolkids dance to imaginary music outside the closed Grand Hotel or turn out for the blessing of the animals on St Anthony's Day to see all the women sit on bicycles, full of the Italian obsession for a full figure.
Everyone in town turns out for the bonfire or the fascist rally or the arrival of snow. They all watch the arrival of new prostitutes for the brothel driving through the town square or head out to sea to watch a huge cruise liner called the Rex pass in the night. These scenes have so many little stories in wrapped up within them, like the school photograph. Boys scare girls with frogs, other boys smile at girls who in turn smile at other boys. Such are the memories that Fellini conjures up, as full of detail as Biscein's tall tales and as full of visual magic as the tobacconist's huge breasts or the arrival of the Count's peacock during a snowstorm. What a magical film, utterly free of narrative structure, merely a collection of images that combine to tell the biggest story of them all: life itself.
Sunday, 13 September 2009
Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)
Director: Luis Buñuel
Star: Jeanne Moreau
It's far too long since I've seen a Buñuel film, unless you count his contributions to Johnny Got His Gun of the scenes that involved Jesus. Buñuel, the Spaniard who pioneered surrealism on film, made movies across the globe, beginning in Spain and ending in Mexico, but including multinational productions like Belle de Jour and this film, starring French actresses like Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau. Moreau is still making films today, but was well established by the time she made Diary of a Chambermaid, having already made Elevator to the Gallows and The Lovers for Louis Malle, La Notte for Michaelangelo Antonioni, The Trial for Orson Welles and, perhaps most notably of all, Jules and Jim for Francois Truffaut.
She's the chambermaid of the title, Céléstine by name, who has come from Paris to the countryside to take up a position in the house of the Monteils. Mme Monteil is decent enough though with a predilection towards petty tyranny, always finding fault and suggesting new things that could be done wrong if there isn't any to find. M Monteil is decent enough too, though his a bit of a hound dog. They have a strange relationship, with her not jealous of his knocking up previous maids but unhappy about what it costs her. Then again, apparently she can't have sex because, as she tells the priest, he's too vigorous and she's sick and it hurts her. Everything we see though suggests that he just does whatever she tells him to.
The grandfather of the house, M Rabour, is a little strange himself, deciding to call Céléstine Marie, as its shorter, wanting her to read to him aloud while he feels up her calves and puts her in leather boots to parade around in for him. Downstairs Joseph rules the roost though nobody else seems to like him and given that he likes torturing animals, that's hardly surprising. Only the sexton gets on with him because they share a racist agenda of purifying France of the wops and the Jews. He's also the informer of the house, passing on anything anyone does to the masters. He's been there fifteen years, he says, and they trust him, though nobody downstairs does. They clam up whenever he walks into the kitchen.
The one everyone really trusts is Céléstine, because she keeps herself to herself and does her job. The men all lust after her in their own way, Joseph vigorously, M Rabour politely according to his fetish, M Monteil surreptitiously. Even Capt Mauger, the next door neighbour, pursues her in an offhand way, even though the two families are effectively at war, fighting petty battles about throwing trash over the fence and cutting tree branches when they protrude into the each other's gardens. Céléstine is the only person that both sides talk to.
She's also apparently the catalyst for pretty much anything happens in the film, making us wonder quite what Buñuel had in mind. How much of it, for instance, is deliberate action on her part and how much by merely being who she is? She's certainly the heroine, the most decent and caring character in the film, but her actions aren't always as appropriate as they might be, and she pulls her own shenanigans too. We never find out whether Joseph really does rape and murder young Claire in the woods, though it's heavily suggested, but we do know that Céléstine believes it absolutely and ingratiates herself into his good graces so as to set him up for the crime she thinks he committed. In the end she reduces herself to the same level as the class she works for by becoming one of them, apparently no longer any different.
Really this isn't a film driven by plot, instead it's a portrait of the classes that's driven by character. The source novel by Octave Mirbeau, written in 1900, is apparently even more overt than this adaptation about suggesting not just that servitude is slavery but that when those in service gain power they continue the same abuse. Mirbeau apparently decries both what he sees as the exploiters and the exploited and doesn't come out on either side. Buñuel's version does the same, by setting up the standard barbs against the upper classes but countering them with barbs against the lower classes too. Nobody really comes out as good or bad, merely somewhere amongst the grey shades and where depends on perspective. As such it's hardly a film to leap out at us and one that seems to just end, but it resonates with us and makes us think.
Star: Jeanne Moreau
It's far too long since I've seen a Buñuel film, unless you count his contributions to Johnny Got His Gun of the scenes that involved Jesus. Buñuel, the Spaniard who pioneered surrealism on film, made movies across the globe, beginning in Spain and ending in Mexico, but including multinational productions like Belle de Jour and this film, starring French actresses like Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau. Moreau is still making films today, but was well established by the time she made Diary of a Chambermaid, having already made Elevator to the Gallows and The Lovers for Louis Malle, La Notte for Michaelangelo Antonioni, The Trial for Orson Welles and, perhaps most notably of all, Jules and Jim for Francois Truffaut.
She's the chambermaid of the title, Céléstine by name, who has come from Paris to the countryside to take up a position in the house of the Monteils. Mme Monteil is decent enough though with a predilection towards petty tyranny, always finding fault and suggesting new things that could be done wrong if there isn't any to find. M Monteil is decent enough too, though his a bit of a hound dog. They have a strange relationship, with her not jealous of his knocking up previous maids but unhappy about what it costs her. Then again, apparently she can't have sex because, as she tells the priest, he's too vigorous and she's sick and it hurts her. Everything we see though suggests that he just does whatever she tells him to.
The grandfather of the house, M Rabour, is a little strange himself, deciding to call Céléstine Marie, as its shorter, wanting her to read to him aloud while he feels up her calves and puts her in leather boots to parade around in for him. Downstairs Joseph rules the roost though nobody else seems to like him and given that he likes torturing animals, that's hardly surprising. Only the sexton gets on with him because they share a racist agenda of purifying France of the wops and the Jews. He's also the informer of the house, passing on anything anyone does to the masters. He's been there fifteen years, he says, and they trust him, though nobody downstairs does. They clam up whenever he walks into the kitchen.
The one everyone really trusts is Céléstine, because she keeps herself to herself and does her job. The men all lust after her in their own way, Joseph vigorously, M Rabour politely according to his fetish, M Monteil surreptitiously. Even Capt Mauger, the next door neighbour, pursues her in an offhand way, even though the two families are effectively at war, fighting petty battles about throwing trash over the fence and cutting tree branches when they protrude into the each other's gardens. Céléstine is the only person that both sides talk to.
She's also apparently the catalyst for pretty much anything happens in the film, making us wonder quite what Buñuel had in mind. How much of it, for instance, is deliberate action on her part and how much by merely being who she is? She's certainly the heroine, the most decent and caring character in the film, but her actions aren't always as appropriate as they might be, and she pulls her own shenanigans too. We never find out whether Joseph really does rape and murder young Claire in the woods, though it's heavily suggested, but we do know that Céléstine believes it absolutely and ingratiates herself into his good graces so as to set him up for the crime she thinks he committed. In the end she reduces herself to the same level as the class she works for by becoming one of them, apparently no longer any different.
Really this isn't a film driven by plot, instead it's a portrait of the classes that's driven by character. The source novel by Octave Mirbeau, written in 1900, is apparently even more overt than this adaptation about suggesting not just that servitude is slavery but that when those in service gain power they continue the same abuse. Mirbeau apparently decries both what he sees as the exploiters and the exploited and doesn't come out on either side. Buñuel's version does the same, by setting up the standard barbs against the upper classes but countering them with barbs against the lower classes too. Nobody really comes out as good or bad, merely somewhere amongst the grey shades and where depends on perspective. As such it's hardly a film to leap out at us and one that seems to just end, but it resonates with us and makes us think.
Deception (1946)
Director: Irving Rapper
Stars: Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains
Opening a Hollywood movie with a cello solo would seem to be a strange thing to do, but it serves to show us how dynamic Paul Henreid can be, even when he's not playing for real, and how devastating his performance is on Bette Davis, who sneaks in and finds herself in tears. She now calls herself Christine Radcliffe and she knows him, Karel Novak, though he has no idea that she's there. In fact they're deeply in love with each other though they were separated back in Europe by the war, the one she thought he'd died in. No wonder she's in tears. She's rediscovered the love of her life and now gets to plan the future that she thought she'd lost forever.
Except here's where our real story kicks in. She gets him back to her place where she floats the idea of marriage, only to back off when he accepts. That's when he really realises there's something else going on. There aren't many coats in the closet but some of them are mink. The knick knacks dotted around her apartment are museum pieces, the paintings originals. He's bright enough to know that when things seem too good to be true, they usually are, and he's only temporarily assuaged by the revelation that she's taken pupils, rich ones who give presents. Only at the party after their wedding does he find out that this was a lie and she'd kept her vow to never do so.
Really she's been both pupil and mistress to Alexander Hollenius, a famous composer who Novak much admires and who flies from California to New York to make a dynamic entrance at their party. After all he's paid for everything there, down to the expensive champagne they're drinking. Given that Hollenius is played by Claude Rains, in his sixth and last pairing with Bette Davis, it's a powerful demonstration of jealousy. It continues on just as powerfully, Rains stealing this entire film, even from Bette Davis which is an amazingly rare trick if you can pull it off. Not many could but Rains was one of the few. Bette always called him her favourite actor.
We find ourselves watching a bizarre love triangle. Christine and Karel love each other, that's obvious, but Hollenius is a serious pull to both of them. Christine was his mistress who owes so much to him and still cares a good deal for him, while still fearing every word and action he might conjure up. To Novak, he's a musical pull, a noted composer who understands what a talent he is and gives him the opportunity to prove it to the world by playing the lead in his new cello concerto. We've already seen plenty of deception, Christine not willing or able to quite tell all the truth about her past, but it's an open question as to how much we're going to witness. How much destruction can be wrought? With these actors, plenty, that's for sure.
Claude Rains had a great year in 1946 with three great performances, this very possibly being the most memorable of the three. Then again, it's up against some serious competition, given that he received his fourth and final Academy Award nomination for his superb portrayal of a South American Nazi in Hitchcock's Notorious. The third of his films was Angel on My Shoulder in which he plays no less a character than the Devil who sends gangster Paul Muni back from Hell to be a tough as nails judge. The annoying thing is that Rains was the perennial supporting actor who was never nominated as Best Actor. That would have been a worthy accolade for at least two of his films in this year alone. After all both gave him more screen time than Anthony Hopkins got in The Silence of the Lambs.
Davis is excellent but it's strange to see her overshadowed, especially as the real orchestrator of most of what happens in this film. Deception is stuck in and amongst a string of her movies that I've never even heard of, a five year run between Mr Skeffington and All About Eve of presumably lesser films coming so soon after her famous five year run of gems with a Best Actress nomination every year. Perhaps this was partly due to this being her last film for Warner Brothers. I'm happily filling in my gaps in her filmography though and finding that even where the films were lesser, like Return from Witch Mountain, her performances were not. Paul Henreid is decent as Karel Novak but with Davis and Rains leading the cast, he does well to even be noticed.
Interestingly, this is the second of two films that Bette Davis made that were remakes of films starring the great stage actress Jeanne Eagels, who only made nine pictures for the screen. In fact the source films were the only two sound films Eagels made before dying of an overdose in 1929, both being released that same year. The first was The Letter, which made Eagels the first actor to be nominated for an Oscar posthumously. Davis remade that in 1940 and was Oscar-nominated herself. The second was Jealousy, apparently lesser material according to her co-star Fredric March, which became Deception in this remake. The obvious connection between these two actresses was firmed up in All About Eve when Addison DeWitt lists Eagels and Davis's character Margo Channing as the greatest actresses to ever set foot on a stage.
Stars: Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains
Opening a Hollywood movie with a cello solo would seem to be a strange thing to do, but it serves to show us how dynamic Paul Henreid can be, even when he's not playing for real, and how devastating his performance is on Bette Davis, who sneaks in and finds herself in tears. She now calls herself Christine Radcliffe and she knows him, Karel Novak, though he has no idea that she's there. In fact they're deeply in love with each other though they were separated back in Europe by the war, the one she thought he'd died in. No wonder she's in tears. She's rediscovered the love of her life and now gets to plan the future that she thought she'd lost forever.
Except here's where our real story kicks in. She gets him back to her place where she floats the idea of marriage, only to back off when he accepts. That's when he really realises there's something else going on. There aren't many coats in the closet but some of them are mink. The knick knacks dotted around her apartment are museum pieces, the paintings originals. He's bright enough to know that when things seem too good to be true, they usually are, and he's only temporarily assuaged by the revelation that she's taken pupils, rich ones who give presents. Only at the party after their wedding does he find out that this was a lie and she'd kept her vow to never do so.
Really she's been both pupil and mistress to Alexander Hollenius, a famous composer who Novak much admires and who flies from California to New York to make a dynamic entrance at their party. After all he's paid for everything there, down to the expensive champagne they're drinking. Given that Hollenius is played by Claude Rains, in his sixth and last pairing with Bette Davis, it's a powerful demonstration of jealousy. It continues on just as powerfully, Rains stealing this entire film, even from Bette Davis which is an amazingly rare trick if you can pull it off. Not many could but Rains was one of the few. Bette always called him her favourite actor.
We find ourselves watching a bizarre love triangle. Christine and Karel love each other, that's obvious, but Hollenius is a serious pull to both of them. Christine was his mistress who owes so much to him and still cares a good deal for him, while still fearing every word and action he might conjure up. To Novak, he's a musical pull, a noted composer who understands what a talent he is and gives him the opportunity to prove it to the world by playing the lead in his new cello concerto. We've already seen plenty of deception, Christine not willing or able to quite tell all the truth about her past, but it's an open question as to how much we're going to witness. How much destruction can be wrought? With these actors, plenty, that's for sure.
Claude Rains had a great year in 1946 with three great performances, this very possibly being the most memorable of the three. Then again, it's up against some serious competition, given that he received his fourth and final Academy Award nomination for his superb portrayal of a South American Nazi in Hitchcock's Notorious. The third of his films was Angel on My Shoulder in which he plays no less a character than the Devil who sends gangster Paul Muni back from Hell to be a tough as nails judge. The annoying thing is that Rains was the perennial supporting actor who was never nominated as Best Actor. That would have been a worthy accolade for at least two of his films in this year alone. After all both gave him more screen time than Anthony Hopkins got in The Silence of the Lambs.
Davis is excellent but it's strange to see her overshadowed, especially as the real orchestrator of most of what happens in this film. Deception is stuck in and amongst a string of her movies that I've never even heard of, a five year run between Mr Skeffington and All About Eve of presumably lesser films coming so soon after her famous five year run of gems with a Best Actress nomination every year. Perhaps this was partly due to this being her last film for Warner Brothers. I'm happily filling in my gaps in her filmography though and finding that even where the films were lesser, like Return from Witch Mountain, her performances were not. Paul Henreid is decent as Karel Novak but with Davis and Rains leading the cast, he does well to even be noticed.
Interestingly, this is the second of two films that Bette Davis made that were remakes of films starring the great stage actress Jeanne Eagels, who only made nine pictures for the screen. In fact the source films were the only two sound films Eagels made before dying of an overdose in 1929, both being released that same year. The first was The Letter, which made Eagels the first actor to be nominated for an Oscar posthumously. Davis remade that in 1940 and was Oscar-nominated herself. The second was Jealousy, apparently lesser material according to her co-star Fredric March, which became Deception in this remake. The obvious connection between these two actresses was firmed up in All About Eve when Addison DeWitt lists Eagels and Davis's character Margo Channing as the greatest actresses to ever set foot on a stage.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
La Ronde (1950)
Director: Max Ophüls
Stars: Anton Walbrook, Simone Signoret, Serge Reggiani, Simone Simon, Daniel Gelin, Danielle Darrieux, Fernand Gravey, Odette Joyeux, Jean-Louis Barrault, Isa Miranda and Gerard Philipe
As much as I've come to admire French cinema, I've never seen a Max Ophüls movie. He was born and died in Germany, but made his name and spent most of his career in France, hardly surprising given that Germany was hardly a good place for a Jew in 1933. Of course France wasn't much better before long, so after a few French movies in the thirties he found his way west to Hollywood. His best known American film is Letter from an Unknown Woman, with Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan. La Ronde was the first film he made back in France and it was followed by a few films that have all gone on to be highly regarded and featured heavily in various Top 100 lists.
The opening shot is blissful, as Anton Walbrook walks us through a masterpiece of choreography, full of the tracking shots that Ophüls is apparently well known for. It begins in the present day and ends up in Vienna in 1900, via a city, a stage, film set, a street, a carousel and a costume change. Through the power of cinema, we change from night to day to night, the seasons turn to Spring and there's even time for a song before we're introduced to Simone Signoret. Yet, amazingly, this is all one single shot. If this is what Ophüls does, then I've been seriously missing out.
Walbrook is our host, who doesn't really take part in our story, but guides it like God or Death or the Devil through its circle, which is what La Ronde means. It's a dance of love somewhat like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and he calls the dance as our storyteller. The story begins with the girl and the soldier, the girl being a prostitute called Leocadie, who entices a soldier called Franz down to a spot under the bridge, giving it away for free because he's in the forces. Come Saturday night though, he romances a maid called Marie at a dance and the circle begins. All too soon, Viennese soldiers obviously not being much to write home about, Walbrook explains to Marie that she's lost her job for sneaking out and promptly guides her to a new one two months later where she'll delight Alfred, the young man of the house, after his parents leave for the country.
Time means nothing in this film and neither does anything else except the circle. It's a pleasant tale, all about love and sex and pleasure, but in other hands it could be something utterly different. It reminds me of the beginning of Stephen King's The Stand in which character A infects character B who then infects character C and so on, until there aren't any letters left in this or any other alphabet. Of course, the connection here being sex, this would make La Ronde something of an STD. It's all in the perspective, of course, the French seeing it as love and the Americans as a disease.
The cast is as star studded as anything I know, but being a French film from 1950 I don't recognise many of the names. Leocadie is Simone Signoret, the beginning and end of the circle, who is probably the biggest name in the film. She didn't arrive in the west until 1959 when she won the Best Actress Oscar for an English film, Room at the Top, though people like Alfred Hitchcock were well aware of her achievements in films like Les Diaboliques. I know Marie the maid too, as she's Simone Simon from Cat People and Mademoiselle Fifi, but this marks the first time I've seen her in anything not produced by Val Lewton.
Everyone else is new to me. Franz is Serge Raggiani, an Italian who became a well known chanson singer in France in addition to his acting. He became a lifelong friend of Signoret's and I'll see them both again in Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows. Alfred is Daniel Gélin, who would soon become Maria Schneider's father, but at this point had a decade behind him in film. His best roles would come in the fifties, it seems, though I've only seen him in Hitchcock's remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart.
Best of all the cast may be Danielle Darrieux as Emma Breitkopf, the married woman that Alfred seduces, though perhaps that's partly because she seems to have the most screen time. She's still acting today at the age of 92 with three films in the works, but found her way to the screen as far back as 1931 when she was 14. I'm now looking forward even more to another acclaimed Max Ophüls film, The Earrings of Madame de... which TCM are screening next week, which sees her in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. Emma's husband Charles is Fernand Gravey, the only liaison in this film that takes place within the bounds of matrimony. Gravey had been in film since 1913 but this is my first of his 71 films.
After La Ronde, Odette Joyeux, who plays Anna, Charles Breitkopf's mistress, would only appear once more on the big screen, after an acclaimed career, but her son Claude Brasseur would become a great actor in his own right with two Césars to his name. Anna quickly moves onto a wannabe poet called Robert Kuhlenkampf. He's Jean-Louis Barrault, who had already played the lead in Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise but preferred the stage, going on to found numerous theatres throughout France. Robert pursues Charlotte, an actress played by Isa Miranda, who I know only as the Countess in Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood. Perhaps that started here as she seduces a Count, played by Gérard Philipe, who I don't know at all but who died less than a decade later. Of course the Count drunkenly finds his way to Leocadie the prostitute, thus completing la ronde.
So many names, all of which I'm sure I'll soon see much more of and some of whom I'm very much looking forward to revisiting, Danielle Darrieux especially. The glue between all these little dalliances is Anton Walbrook, the only name I know really well, having seen him in many films. He was born in Austria and died in Germany but made his name in England, after he moved west to avoid the Nazis. He was the lead in the original English version of Gaslight, which was even better than the excellent American remake four years later, then played in a string of Powell & Pressburger movies, from the lesser known 49th Parallel to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and especially The Red Shoes. All these came before La Ronde, which was his first film back across the Channel to be followed by a number of others, including what seems to be regarded as the best Max Ophüls of them all, Lola Montès.
The story is charming and engages at many points, though some parts are notably more engaging than others. Some are dwelt on while others zip on by while we're busy blinking. It was the first film version of a play by Arthur Schnitzler, written over half a century earlier in 1897, one has gone on to be remade a number of times on stage and screen in a number of countries. Roger Vadim made his own version in 1964 with his wife Jane Fonda. The Germans restored the original title for their 1973 version, Reigen (with Maria Schneider playing the mistress of the husband of the wife that her father Daniel Gélin seduces in this film 23 years earlier). Hollywood took note with 1992's Chain of Desire and even the Iranians made a version in 2000 called Dayereh.
I think what will stay with me most is that opening scene, which is five full minutes of magical choreography and cinematography all wrapped up in one amazing shot. The carousel that introduces us to Simone Signoret is obviously another take on the circle, but I think the way this scene was shot is another. It feels like the camera was mounted in the middle of a set and merely rotated as Anton Walbrook moves through this introductory city that becomes Vienna. That puts us in the middle watching the circle, just as Walbrook himself does as the raconteur watching his circle progress from character to character. The film is great, this opening sequence is greater.
Stars: Anton Walbrook, Simone Signoret, Serge Reggiani, Simone Simon, Daniel Gelin, Danielle Darrieux, Fernand Gravey, Odette Joyeux, Jean-Louis Barrault, Isa Miranda and Gerard Philipe
As much as I've come to admire French cinema, I've never seen a Max Ophüls movie. He was born and died in Germany, but made his name and spent most of his career in France, hardly surprising given that Germany was hardly a good place for a Jew in 1933. Of course France wasn't much better before long, so after a few French movies in the thirties he found his way west to Hollywood. His best known American film is Letter from an Unknown Woman, with Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan. La Ronde was the first film he made back in France and it was followed by a few films that have all gone on to be highly regarded and featured heavily in various Top 100 lists.
The opening shot is blissful, as Anton Walbrook walks us through a masterpiece of choreography, full of the tracking shots that Ophüls is apparently well known for. It begins in the present day and ends up in Vienna in 1900, via a city, a stage, film set, a street, a carousel and a costume change. Through the power of cinema, we change from night to day to night, the seasons turn to Spring and there's even time for a song before we're introduced to Simone Signoret. Yet, amazingly, this is all one single shot. If this is what Ophüls does, then I've been seriously missing out.
Walbrook is our host, who doesn't really take part in our story, but guides it like God or Death or the Devil through its circle, which is what La Ronde means. It's a dance of love somewhat like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and he calls the dance as our storyteller. The story begins with the girl and the soldier, the girl being a prostitute called Leocadie, who entices a soldier called Franz down to a spot under the bridge, giving it away for free because he's in the forces. Come Saturday night though, he romances a maid called Marie at a dance and the circle begins. All too soon, Viennese soldiers obviously not being much to write home about, Walbrook explains to Marie that she's lost her job for sneaking out and promptly guides her to a new one two months later where she'll delight Alfred, the young man of the house, after his parents leave for the country.
Time means nothing in this film and neither does anything else except the circle. It's a pleasant tale, all about love and sex and pleasure, but in other hands it could be something utterly different. It reminds me of the beginning of Stephen King's The Stand in which character A infects character B who then infects character C and so on, until there aren't any letters left in this or any other alphabet. Of course, the connection here being sex, this would make La Ronde something of an STD. It's all in the perspective, of course, the French seeing it as love and the Americans as a disease.
The cast is as star studded as anything I know, but being a French film from 1950 I don't recognise many of the names. Leocadie is Simone Signoret, the beginning and end of the circle, who is probably the biggest name in the film. She didn't arrive in the west until 1959 when she won the Best Actress Oscar for an English film, Room at the Top, though people like Alfred Hitchcock were well aware of her achievements in films like Les Diaboliques. I know Marie the maid too, as she's Simone Simon from Cat People and Mademoiselle Fifi, but this marks the first time I've seen her in anything not produced by Val Lewton.
Everyone else is new to me. Franz is Serge Raggiani, an Italian who became a well known chanson singer in France in addition to his acting. He became a lifelong friend of Signoret's and I'll see them both again in Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows. Alfred is Daniel Gélin, who would soon become Maria Schneider's father, but at this point had a decade behind him in film. His best roles would come in the fifties, it seems, though I've only seen him in Hitchcock's remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart.
Best of all the cast may be Danielle Darrieux as Emma Breitkopf, the married woman that Alfred seduces, though perhaps that's partly because she seems to have the most screen time. She's still acting today at the age of 92 with three films in the works, but found her way to the screen as far back as 1931 when she was 14. I'm now looking forward even more to another acclaimed Max Ophüls film, The Earrings of Madame de... which TCM are screening next week, which sees her in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. Emma's husband Charles is Fernand Gravey, the only liaison in this film that takes place within the bounds of matrimony. Gravey had been in film since 1913 but this is my first of his 71 films.
After La Ronde, Odette Joyeux, who plays Anna, Charles Breitkopf's mistress, would only appear once more on the big screen, after an acclaimed career, but her son Claude Brasseur would become a great actor in his own right with two Césars to his name. Anna quickly moves onto a wannabe poet called Robert Kuhlenkampf. He's Jean-Louis Barrault, who had already played the lead in Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise but preferred the stage, going on to found numerous theatres throughout France. Robert pursues Charlotte, an actress played by Isa Miranda, who I know only as the Countess in Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood. Perhaps that started here as she seduces a Count, played by Gérard Philipe, who I don't know at all but who died less than a decade later. Of course the Count drunkenly finds his way to Leocadie the prostitute, thus completing la ronde.
So many names, all of which I'm sure I'll soon see much more of and some of whom I'm very much looking forward to revisiting, Danielle Darrieux especially. The glue between all these little dalliances is Anton Walbrook, the only name I know really well, having seen him in many films. He was born in Austria and died in Germany but made his name in England, after he moved west to avoid the Nazis. He was the lead in the original English version of Gaslight, which was even better than the excellent American remake four years later, then played in a string of Powell & Pressburger movies, from the lesser known 49th Parallel to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and especially The Red Shoes. All these came before La Ronde, which was his first film back across the Channel to be followed by a number of others, including what seems to be regarded as the best Max Ophüls of them all, Lola Montès.
The story is charming and engages at many points, though some parts are notably more engaging than others. Some are dwelt on while others zip on by while we're busy blinking. It was the first film version of a play by Arthur Schnitzler, written over half a century earlier in 1897, one has gone on to be remade a number of times on stage and screen in a number of countries. Roger Vadim made his own version in 1964 with his wife Jane Fonda. The Germans restored the original title for their 1973 version, Reigen (with Maria Schneider playing the mistress of the husband of the wife that her father Daniel Gélin seduces in this film 23 years earlier). Hollywood took note with 1992's Chain of Desire and even the Iranians made a version in 2000 called Dayereh.
I think what will stay with me most is that opening scene, which is five full minutes of magical choreography and cinematography all wrapped up in one amazing shot. The carousel that introduces us to Simone Signoret is obviously another take on the circle, but I think the way this scene was shot is another. It feels like the camera was mounted in the middle of a set and merely rotated as Anton Walbrook moves through this introductory city that becomes Vienna. That puts us in the middle watching the circle, just as Walbrook himself does as the raconteur watching his circle progress from character to character. The film is great, this opening sequence is greater.
The Man from Down Under (1943)
Director: Robert Z Leonard
Star: Charles Laughton
The First World War is over and the Aussies are going home. We first meet them at a French port of embarkation getting drunk and singing Mademoiselle from Armentiers, Jocko Wilson lead among them. He's very much the American vision of what Aussies are, full of character and trouble, with fast fists and a quick mouth, and no end of colourful and exotic slang. In the hands of Charles Laughton, he even sounds like an Aussie, at least to Americans. To anyone who's actually heard real Australians, he doesn't do that great a job. Anyway, he's a character, that's for sure, and while Elsa Lanchester isn't here to play opposite him, there's a decent substitute in Binnie Barnes.
She plays Aggie Dawlins, a singer and dancer, who Jocko has already left behind a few times before he does it again when he gets on the boat back home. Unfortunately for him he's left his last 300 francs with her to buy a wedding dress so they can get married before he leaves, only to get himself right in trouble and gets driven straight past her on the way to the boat by the authorities. So that's it for Aggie, at least for a while. She'll be back, because she's too good a character to leave entirely behind. Instead we have the kids to focus on. They're Mary and Albert Benoit, a couple of young Belgian orphans, who Jocko befriends because of Albert's ability to fight. He calls him Nipper and smuggles the pair of them onto the boat in his kit bag.
We whistle through the years watching the kids quickly grow up and they do pretty well too, turning into Richard Carlson and Donna Reed. Jocko has his own tavern that does pretty well for itself and he trains up Nipper to become the champion of the Empire. Just in time to see it, Mary comes back from boarding school where she's been sequestered for years because, after all, Jocko really doesn't have the faintest clue about women and he knows it. The three of them move up to a posh country hotel in Queensland on the proceeds he makes from taking bets on Nipper's fights, but there's always Aggie to wait for.
There are a bunch of stories going on here, not least the fact that Mary and Nipper fall in love, not having a clue that they aren't even related. We find that out from Ian Wolfe in a bit part early on before we even leave France, but Jocko and the kids don't, which causes no end of heartache and some strangely disturbing scenes in front of the local priest, Father Polycarp. There's Nipper's shoulder, which is severely damaged when he wins the championship, threatening his career and the promised next bout for the world title.
There's even the fact that the film is bookended by war, beginning at the end of the first great one and ending at the beginning of the second, which Jocko can't get into after failing his medical, not least because of the jaw he broke at Gallipoli. This was 1943 so it's a little late to be a propaganda movie and it forgets about the war for the longest time. When it arrives it feels a little out of place, the rambling but congenial mess of subplots turning into an unfortunate war story that is little more than a desperate excuse for every plot thread to get conveniently wrapped up in five minutes flat.
The real success of the film is in the way Laughton and Barnes play off each other, Barnes being a pretty able substitute for Laughton's wife Elsa Lanchester. She knew him well, having made her stage debut opposite him in 1929 in Silver Tassie and then playing one of his six wives in The Private Life of Henry VIII. In fact she took over as wife number five after Lanchester as number four. I'd have watched for double the time just to see the two of them bounce characters off each other, even if it isn't a patch on Laughton's previous film, This Land is Mine.
Star: Charles Laughton
The First World War is over and the Aussies are going home. We first meet them at a French port of embarkation getting drunk and singing Mademoiselle from Armentiers, Jocko Wilson lead among them. He's very much the American vision of what Aussies are, full of character and trouble, with fast fists and a quick mouth, and no end of colourful and exotic slang. In the hands of Charles Laughton, he even sounds like an Aussie, at least to Americans. To anyone who's actually heard real Australians, he doesn't do that great a job. Anyway, he's a character, that's for sure, and while Elsa Lanchester isn't here to play opposite him, there's a decent substitute in Binnie Barnes.
She plays Aggie Dawlins, a singer and dancer, who Jocko has already left behind a few times before he does it again when he gets on the boat back home. Unfortunately for him he's left his last 300 francs with her to buy a wedding dress so they can get married before he leaves, only to get himself right in trouble and gets driven straight past her on the way to the boat by the authorities. So that's it for Aggie, at least for a while. She'll be back, because she's too good a character to leave entirely behind. Instead we have the kids to focus on. They're Mary and Albert Benoit, a couple of young Belgian orphans, who Jocko befriends because of Albert's ability to fight. He calls him Nipper and smuggles the pair of them onto the boat in his kit bag.
We whistle through the years watching the kids quickly grow up and they do pretty well too, turning into Richard Carlson and Donna Reed. Jocko has his own tavern that does pretty well for itself and he trains up Nipper to become the champion of the Empire. Just in time to see it, Mary comes back from boarding school where she's been sequestered for years because, after all, Jocko really doesn't have the faintest clue about women and he knows it. The three of them move up to a posh country hotel in Queensland on the proceeds he makes from taking bets on Nipper's fights, but there's always Aggie to wait for.
There are a bunch of stories going on here, not least the fact that Mary and Nipper fall in love, not having a clue that they aren't even related. We find that out from Ian Wolfe in a bit part early on before we even leave France, but Jocko and the kids don't, which causes no end of heartache and some strangely disturbing scenes in front of the local priest, Father Polycarp. There's Nipper's shoulder, which is severely damaged when he wins the championship, threatening his career and the promised next bout for the world title.
There's even the fact that the film is bookended by war, beginning at the end of the first great one and ending at the beginning of the second, which Jocko can't get into after failing his medical, not least because of the jaw he broke at Gallipoli. This was 1943 so it's a little late to be a propaganda movie and it forgets about the war for the longest time. When it arrives it feels a little out of place, the rambling but congenial mess of subplots turning into an unfortunate war story that is little more than a desperate excuse for every plot thread to get conveniently wrapped up in five minutes flat.
The real success of the film is in the way Laughton and Barnes play off each other, Barnes being a pretty able substitute for Laughton's wife Elsa Lanchester. She knew him well, having made her stage debut opposite him in 1929 in Silver Tassie and then playing one of his six wives in The Private Life of Henry VIII. In fact she took over as wife number five after Lanchester as number four. I'd have watched for double the time just to see the two of them bounce characters off each other, even if it isn't a patch on Laughton's previous film, This Land is Mine.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Daughters Courageous (1939)
Director: Michael Curtiz
Stars: John Garfield, Claude Rains, Jeffrey Lynn, Fay Bainter, Donald Crisp, May Robson, Frank McHugh, Dick Foran, Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, Lola Lane and Gale Page
The four daughters, who are apparently not the four daughters in Four Daughters because they all now belong to the Masters family instead of the Lemps. They're just as much of a handful though, a very pleasant handful that anyone would be happy to have, but a handful nonetheless. Linda is rearranging the furniture every day, Tinka is rescuing the lifeguard from drowning and Buff is having accidents with the back end of her swimsuit. If only this wasn't 1939, or we could see even more of Priscilla Lane than we do here. They're living together in a holiday home that they're already overstayed at, but the owner doesn't want them to leave. He's known them for twelve years and wants to know them better: he's just proposed to mom.
Mom is Fay Bainter, who's one of only two actors here not to have played in Four Daughters. The daughters are the same four daughters (the three Lane sisters, along with Gale Page) and the same folks are hanging around (John Garfield, Jeffrey Lynn, May Robson, Frank McHugh and Dick Foran). They even the same father, Claude Rains, though his character is more than a little different here. While Adam Lemp is the lynchpin of his musical family, Jim Masters wandered off twenty years earlier and hasn't even sent a postcard. Naturally he breezes in just as Sam Sloane is sitting down at the head of the table for the first time, easy as you please but inevitably the third wheel, or really the twelfth wheel, as it works out. This isn't a small family.
Of course, while this is as much of a pleasant and subtly witty soap opera as Four Daughters, the real story is how he fits back into the family, or how he expects to fit in after such a long time. We're never told how old the four daughters are but they were all small kids when he left. The only character he seems to connect with is the one who isn't really family: Gabriel Lopez. He's John Garfield, seventh on the credits a year earlier but top this time after becoming a star in They Made Me a Criminal. He's a contrary character here, Lopez being in trouble all the time through making plenty of effort not to make any effort, but he has a character that's dynamic enough to get him out of it and right back in again. He's contrary enough to hook Buff, who already has a boyfriend in Johnny Heming, playwright.
I wonder who came up with the concept for this one. Four Daughters was a hit, one successful enough to prompt not one but two sequels, Four Wives and Four Mothers, plus this oddity. The cast are generally the same: all the top ten names from Four Daughters return, with Fay Bainter added as the previously missing mother and Donald Crisp to play Sam Sloane. Even the director was the same: Michael Curtiz directed both. Most of these people continued on, gradually dropping off by the last in the series as after all, people like John Garfield must have been getting expensive. It still stuns me that Claude Rains wasn't. Yet everyone plays someone else, this being utterly unrelated in every fictional way and as film two of four, the other three being direct sequels, that seems completely bizarre.
Rains is amazing here, an utter rogue in a quiet and knowing way, who in the hands of anyone else couldn't possibly charm us and everyone else given what he's done. Jim Masters makes himself out to be a wanderer who's been everywhere and done everything, though we can't ever be sure if we can believe a single word he says. Whatever else he is, he's fascinating to watch, and given that John Garfield plays a more obvious version of the same character and there are four lovely young ladies who can't help but steal our attention whenever they're on screen, it's a testament to the talent of Claude Rains that he remains the focus of this film throughout. He has a lot of talented colleagues here, but he's really what makes the whole thing work, that and the sharp script that lets him.
Stars: John Garfield, Claude Rains, Jeffrey Lynn, Fay Bainter, Donald Crisp, May Robson, Frank McHugh, Dick Foran, Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, Lola Lane and Gale Page
The four daughters, who are apparently not the four daughters in Four Daughters because they all now belong to the Masters family instead of the Lemps. They're just as much of a handful though, a very pleasant handful that anyone would be happy to have, but a handful nonetheless. Linda is rearranging the furniture every day, Tinka is rescuing the lifeguard from drowning and Buff is having accidents with the back end of her swimsuit. If only this wasn't 1939, or we could see even more of Priscilla Lane than we do here. They're living together in a holiday home that they're already overstayed at, but the owner doesn't want them to leave. He's known them for twelve years and wants to know them better: he's just proposed to mom.
Mom is Fay Bainter, who's one of only two actors here not to have played in Four Daughters. The daughters are the same four daughters (the three Lane sisters, along with Gale Page) and the same folks are hanging around (John Garfield, Jeffrey Lynn, May Robson, Frank McHugh and Dick Foran). They even the same father, Claude Rains, though his character is more than a little different here. While Adam Lemp is the lynchpin of his musical family, Jim Masters wandered off twenty years earlier and hasn't even sent a postcard. Naturally he breezes in just as Sam Sloane is sitting down at the head of the table for the first time, easy as you please but inevitably the third wheel, or really the twelfth wheel, as it works out. This isn't a small family.
Of course, while this is as much of a pleasant and subtly witty soap opera as Four Daughters, the real story is how he fits back into the family, or how he expects to fit in after such a long time. We're never told how old the four daughters are but they were all small kids when he left. The only character he seems to connect with is the one who isn't really family: Gabriel Lopez. He's John Garfield, seventh on the credits a year earlier but top this time after becoming a star in They Made Me a Criminal. He's a contrary character here, Lopez being in trouble all the time through making plenty of effort not to make any effort, but he has a character that's dynamic enough to get him out of it and right back in again. He's contrary enough to hook Buff, who already has a boyfriend in Johnny Heming, playwright.
I wonder who came up with the concept for this one. Four Daughters was a hit, one successful enough to prompt not one but two sequels, Four Wives and Four Mothers, plus this oddity. The cast are generally the same: all the top ten names from Four Daughters return, with Fay Bainter added as the previously missing mother and Donald Crisp to play Sam Sloane. Even the director was the same: Michael Curtiz directed both. Most of these people continued on, gradually dropping off by the last in the series as after all, people like John Garfield must have been getting expensive. It still stuns me that Claude Rains wasn't. Yet everyone plays someone else, this being utterly unrelated in every fictional way and as film two of four, the other three being direct sequels, that seems completely bizarre.
Rains is amazing here, an utter rogue in a quiet and knowing way, who in the hands of anyone else couldn't possibly charm us and everyone else given what he's done. Jim Masters makes himself out to be a wanderer who's been everywhere and done everything, though we can't ever be sure if we can believe a single word he says. Whatever else he is, he's fascinating to watch, and given that John Garfield plays a more obvious version of the same character and there are four lovely young ladies who can't help but steal our attention whenever they're on screen, it's a testament to the talent of Claude Rains that he remains the focus of this film throughout. He has a lot of talented colleagues here, but he's really what makes the whole thing work, that and the sharp script that lets him.
Monday, 7 September 2009
The Long Ships (1964)
Director: Jack Cardiff
Stars: Richard Widmark, Sidney Poitier, Russ Tamblyn and Rosanna Schiaffino
The storm rages and the waves crash and the nonsense begins. A Viking longboat is destroyed with all hands with it except for one, who is washed ashore and rescued by monks of Byzantium. The monks, presumably silent, make mosaics to tell their stories, including one about a bell. Apparently they made this particular mosaic first, then gathered gold by hook and by crook from around the world to cast into the great golden bell they call the Mother of Voices, as tall as three tall men. Of course they hit the bell, but its noise sent them all aquiver because the monks are all silhouette figures in the animated story of Rolfe, a Circassian in Muslim lands trying to earn his way home by telling stories.
No, it doesn't excuse this beginning, but perhaps this is just set up as a response to No Way Out in which Sidney Poitier is abused in his film debut by Richard Widmark. They became firm friends on that film, so much so that Widmark even apologised after some racist outbursts the script called upon him to spout. Here the roles are reversed, with Widmark as Rolfe and Poitier as Aly Mansuh, the only villain he ever played in his distinguished career. He looks more like a cross between James Brown and Samuel L Jackson and his wife looks like Princess Leia in her slave outfit. It's a surreal scene for sure.
Aly Mansuh is a dreamer who believes the old legends about great golden bells and he wants to know what lies beyond the horizon. While the folk listening to Rolfe in the marketplace don't believe a word he says, Aly Mansuh believes all of them. In fact he wants him to take him there and he's well prepared to use every means of torture to persuade him to do so. He's forced to mount a terrible fight to take down his Muslim barbarian torturers and escape into the sea through a window that is a conveniently huge hole in the wall, whereupon he promptly arrives home, apparently swimming all the way and swallowing most of the ocean in the process.
It turns out that the boat he lost in the storm cost his father, Krok the Thane the two years of tribute he owes Harald, the King of Northland, so he's in more than a little trouble. He can't even afford to pay the merchants who provide the ale for the drunken Viking revelry that accompanies Harald's taking ownership of a funeral ship Krok has had built for him. Rolfe arrives home just as Harald pays him the pathetic sum of two gold pieces, having deducted the tribute money first.
I should add that these Vikings are a stunning miscast bunch. Widmark is a fine actor but he's hardly the epitome of a wild fighting man of the north, fair hair or not. Then again, given that his father is played by Oskar Homolka, suitably raw and visceral but coming off as some sort of Russian Jew rather than a Viking Thane, he's about as good as we get. His brother is played by Russ Tamblyn of West Side Story, tom thumb and High School Confidential! Everyone else appears to be British, played by actors of the calibre of David Lodge, Colin Blakely and Gordon Jackson, except the King's daughter who's Yugoslavian. The only things remotely approaching authenticity are the Thane's bed and the drunken Viking brawling.
Unfortunately for these English Vikings, it's 1964 and so none of them ever watched An American Werewolf in London. If they had they may have paid heed to Brian Glover's advice to 'beware the Moors' and stay home, but no, off they trot in the King's funeral ship to search for the bell in Moorish Barbary. Stunningly, even though Rolfe really has no clue where it is, they stumble on the bell tolling for them a few days in to their voyage, only to be shipwrecked by the maelstrom right in front of the troops of Aly Mansuh. Remember him?
Well given that the twisted laws of geography used in this film, he returns as if he'd never left. Then again, in this film Rolfe can swim home from Moorish Barbary to the northlands. History is as poorly observed given that the whole premise has Vikings against Moors, and these are pretty pathetic Vikings given that they surrender in the face of superior numbers and give in under torture. The laws of physics don't fare much better as Vikings can throw spears twenty yards and they take down horses a thousand yards away. Aly Mansuh has a gigantic razor sharp method of execution called the steel horse that's as pointless and wasteful as it is cool.
It's really difficult to work out just what the filmmakers were thinking. The source novels the film is based on were written by the Swedish writer Frans Gunnar Bengtsson in the forties and were widely popular. They followed the adventures of Orm rather than Rolfe, who wasn't even in the book, thus epitomising how mangled this attempt at translation to the screen this film is. Al-Mansur isn't even a villain in the books, which were apparently pretty tolerant of the many cultures involved rather than just polarising two of them. As a story this makes next to no sense and would appear to insult its source material.
It's not all bad. The cinematography is solid, hardly surprising given that the film was directed by a cinematographer, Jack Cardiff, far better known for his cinematography than his directorial skills. The costumes are decent too, though they suffer from the same abuse of logic as everything else in the film: all those white Moorish costumes stay very white, even when dragged through the dirt, just as Gerda's hair is always perfectly coiffured even after a violent shipwreck and Aly Mansuh's chief eunuch can stay dry even after he's been utterly submerged in a harem bath. The costumes won a BAFTA Award for Anthony Mendleson, the only award the film received. It's hard to even imagine where another award could have come from, given that the Razzies weren't founded until 1980.
Stars: Richard Widmark, Sidney Poitier, Russ Tamblyn and Rosanna Schiaffino
The storm rages and the waves crash and the nonsense begins. A Viking longboat is destroyed with all hands with it except for one, who is washed ashore and rescued by monks of Byzantium. The monks, presumably silent, make mosaics to tell their stories, including one about a bell. Apparently they made this particular mosaic first, then gathered gold by hook and by crook from around the world to cast into the great golden bell they call the Mother of Voices, as tall as three tall men. Of course they hit the bell, but its noise sent them all aquiver because the monks are all silhouette figures in the animated story of Rolfe, a Circassian in Muslim lands trying to earn his way home by telling stories.
No, it doesn't excuse this beginning, but perhaps this is just set up as a response to No Way Out in which Sidney Poitier is abused in his film debut by Richard Widmark. They became firm friends on that film, so much so that Widmark even apologised after some racist outbursts the script called upon him to spout. Here the roles are reversed, with Widmark as Rolfe and Poitier as Aly Mansuh, the only villain he ever played in his distinguished career. He looks more like a cross between James Brown and Samuel L Jackson and his wife looks like Princess Leia in her slave outfit. It's a surreal scene for sure.
Aly Mansuh is a dreamer who believes the old legends about great golden bells and he wants to know what lies beyond the horizon. While the folk listening to Rolfe in the marketplace don't believe a word he says, Aly Mansuh believes all of them. In fact he wants him to take him there and he's well prepared to use every means of torture to persuade him to do so. He's forced to mount a terrible fight to take down his Muslim barbarian torturers and escape into the sea through a window that is a conveniently huge hole in the wall, whereupon he promptly arrives home, apparently swimming all the way and swallowing most of the ocean in the process.
It turns out that the boat he lost in the storm cost his father, Krok the Thane the two years of tribute he owes Harald, the King of Northland, so he's in more than a little trouble. He can't even afford to pay the merchants who provide the ale for the drunken Viking revelry that accompanies Harald's taking ownership of a funeral ship Krok has had built for him. Rolfe arrives home just as Harald pays him the pathetic sum of two gold pieces, having deducted the tribute money first.
I should add that these Vikings are a stunning miscast bunch. Widmark is a fine actor but he's hardly the epitome of a wild fighting man of the north, fair hair or not. Then again, given that his father is played by Oskar Homolka, suitably raw and visceral but coming off as some sort of Russian Jew rather than a Viking Thane, he's about as good as we get. His brother is played by Russ Tamblyn of West Side Story, tom thumb and High School Confidential! Everyone else appears to be British, played by actors of the calibre of David Lodge, Colin Blakely and Gordon Jackson, except the King's daughter who's Yugoslavian. The only things remotely approaching authenticity are the Thane's bed and the drunken Viking brawling.
Unfortunately for these English Vikings, it's 1964 and so none of them ever watched An American Werewolf in London. If they had they may have paid heed to Brian Glover's advice to 'beware the Moors' and stay home, but no, off they trot in the King's funeral ship to search for the bell in Moorish Barbary. Stunningly, even though Rolfe really has no clue where it is, they stumble on the bell tolling for them a few days in to their voyage, only to be shipwrecked by the maelstrom right in front of the troops of Aly Mansuh. Remember him?
Well given that the twisted laws of geography used in this film, he returns as if he'd never left. Then again, in this film Rolfe can swim home from Moorish Barbary to the northlands. History is as poorly observed given that the whole premise has Vikings against Moors, and these are pretty pathetic Vikings given that they surrender in the face of superior numbers and give in under torture. The laws of physics don't fare much better as Vikings can throw spears twenty yards and they take down horses a thousand yards away. Aly Mansuh has a gigantic razor sharp method of execution called the steel horse that's as pointless and wasteful as it is cool.
It's really difficult to work out just what the filmmakers were thinking. The source novels the film is based on were written by the Swedish writer Frans Gunnar Bengtsson in the forties and were widely popular. They followed the adventures of Orm rather than Rolfe, who wasn't even in the book, thus epitomising how mangled this attempt at translation to the screen this film is. Al-Mansur isn't even a villain in the books, which were apparently pretty tolerant of the many cultures involved rather than just polarising two of them. As a story this makes next to no sense and would appear to insult its source material.
It's not all bad. The cinematography is solid, hardly surprising given that the film was directed by a cinematographer, Jack Cardiff, far better known for his cinematography than his directorial skills. The costumes are decent too, though they suffer from the same abuse of logic as everything else in the film: all those white Moorish costumes stay very white, even when dragged through the dirt, just as Gerda's hair is always perfectly coiffured even after a violent shipwreck and Aly Mansuh's chief eunuch can stay dry even after he's been utterly submerged in a harem bath. The costumes won a BAFTA Award for Anthony Mendleson, the only award the film received. It's hard to even imagine where another award could have come from, given that the Razzies weren't founded until 1980.
Sunday, 6 September 2009
Auto Focus (2002)
Director: Paul Schrader
Stars: Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe
Paul Schrader is hardly a minor name in Hollywood, having written Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and written and directed American Gigolo and Cat People. Having written about both celebrities and sex in many of his films, it's hardly surprising that he found his way to a biopic about Bob Crane, a household name through his work on TV in the sixties, a sex addict and the victim of a unsolved murder in Scottsdale in 1978. It's based on the book The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmith.
We begin in 1964, with Crane a DJ for KNX in Los Angeles interviewing celebrities like Clayton Moore on air. Outside of work he's a family man, who goes to church with his family and who's been married to his high school sweetheart for fifteen years. He's a pretty good jazz drummer too who plays on his own show and for fun. He's worked on television, plenty of it, including three years on The Donna Reed Show. Now CBS want him for a new series, a comedy set in a POW camp. It's a Bing Crosby production and they have him in mind for the lead, but there's an obvious problem: as his wife suggests, it's a holocaust comedy. He sees it as a potential career killer, but of course it isn't. It's Hogan's Heroes and it makes him a real star.
This isn't the story of Hogan's Heroes though, it's the story of its star Bob Crane, and on the set he meets a man called John Carpenter, though not the one that we know well as a genre director. This is John Henry Carpenter, who is a salesman and technology expert at Sony and who has access not just to the latest and greatest video gear but even to prototypes. He's what we'd call today an audio and video geek and there's a serious connection here between sex and technology, fetishising it as much as Crash fetished car accidents.
Carpenter is on the set because he knows Richard Dawson, who plays Cpl Newkirk on the show, Dawson being something of a tech nut too, paying Carpenter to install advanced audio gear in his trailer and his car. This piques Crane's interest from moment one and the pair enter into what can only be described as a relationship, if not one that involves sex with each other, a relationship that serves to define who they are as people and where their lives will go. It's through Carpenter that Crane's decline into sex addiction begins. Meeting him for drinks at a strip club, Crane ends up playing the drums for a lark only to become something of a regular there. He also ends up being a regular at Carpenter's pad, the word apartment really not being enough to cut it.
He's already been collecting magazines that upset his wife; now Carpenter is enticing women back to his pad on the basis of Col Hogan's name, not just for sex but to film it too. They film themselves and each other and watch the tapes together. As a photography nut, Crane starts building photo albums of all the girls he's slept with, something that he starts to show other people. His wife leaves him after finding his darkroom so he marries Col Klink's secretary, but that doesn't stay happy for long because it doesn't slow down his obsession a bit. Soon it's not just one woman a night, it's pairs of them or even orgies. He starts following an ethos that 'a day without sex is a day wasted.'
It's an ethos that Carpenter shares and their shared obsession ends up being the driving force in their lives, no pun intended. While both men were married and divorced twice (though we don't see Carpenter's marriages in the film) and Crane is obviously staunchly heterosexual, there's a recurring suggestion that Carpenter may be bisexual, something that he vehemently denies. Their first split (and if that doesn't suggest a relationship, what does?) is over Crane seeing Carpenter's hand creep onto his ass during an orgy they watch together on video. When Crane edits a tape together for him with gay imagery he takes it personally and loses his sense of humour entirely.
For a film about sex and which has an abundance of nudity, I should emphasise that it is seriously not sexy. It's a disturbing look at how far a man can fall when he lets an obsession take control of his life. It starts nice and fluffy with an all-American family man but bleeds through levels of discomfort as the film goes on. First it gets seedier but stays in control, then becomes progressively creepier as Crane's obsession with sex becomes what defines him. The camera movements mirror his decline, later scenes being shot with a handheld camera which puts us a lot closer to the action. Given how often we watch Crane watching himself on video, it starts to feel like we're with him watching his life collapse, whether it be discussions with his agent or his wives or his sexual encounters with strangers. People around him start getting uncomfortable and we follow them down that road.
Crane gets penile enhancement surgery and the first person he shows it to is Carpenter. There's a bizarre mutual masturbation scene where the pair of them try to identify who's in the video with Crane that they're watching, because they start forgetting who these girls are and where they were at the time. The pair of them talk about making a big budget porn movie, Deep Throat having become so successful and Carpenter having taped it off the screen at a porn theater, only to cancel the idea when Disney call to cast Crane in Superdad, a supreme irony. If we hadn't realised it before, we know Crane has lost all objectivity when, as a guest on a celebrity cooking show, he makes stunningly inappropriate remarks to a lady in the front row of the audience without ever realising he's lost the plot entirely.
By the time we get to the murder scene, which is quick and merciful, the film is a sordid thing, aided to no small degree by great performances by Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe as Crane and Carpenter respectively. Crane has spent a decade using his celebrity to bed women merely to satisfy an urge. There's no feeling involved, the only woman he seems to have cared for being his co-star and second wife, Sigrid Valdis, who he effectively discarded. The suggestion is that to Crane the chase was always better than the catch, the sexual act being far more important in itself than who it was with or any other detail at all.
Given this take on Crane's mentality, we can't help but compare his eventual murder to the act of sex. Just as Crane lost track of who he had sex with, we have no idea who murdered him and it's not really seen as important. Carpenter is suggested, as he was in reality, as a likely suspect with jealousy, potential bisexuality or a loss of fresh meat being the motive. Carpenter was not brought to trial initially, though he was later tried and found innocent, there being little if any evidence. In the end, it doesn't really matter. As Crane discarded his women after sex, the murderer discarded Crane after his obsession. It's the obsession that we're meant to watch not the culmination of it because the murder is just the climax. It's yet another clever way this clever film uses to get us inside Crane's head.
Stars: Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe
Paul Schrader is hardly a minor name in Hollywood, having written Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and written and directed American Gigolo and Cat People. Having written about both celebrities and sex in many of his films, it's hardly surprising that he found his way to a biopic about Bob Crane, a household name through his work on TV in the sixties, a sex addict and the victim of a unsolved murder in Scottsdale in 1978. It's based on the book The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmith.
We begin in 1964, with Crane a DJ for KNX in Los Angeles interviewing celebrities like Clayton Moore on air. Outside of work he's a family man, who goes to church with his family and who's been married to his high school sweetheart for fifteen years. He's a pretty good jazz drummer too who plays on his own show and for fun. He's worked on television, plenty of it, including three years on The Donna Reed Show. Now CBS want him for a new series, a comedy set in a POW camp. It's a Bing Crosby production and they have him in mind for the lead, but there's an obvious problem: as his wife suggests, it's a holocaust comedy. He sees it as a potential career killer, but of course it isn't. It's Hogan's Heroes and it makes him a real star.
This isn't the story of Hogan's Heroes though, it's the story of its star Bob Crane, and on the set he meets a man called John Carpenter, though not the one that we know well as a genre director. This is John Henry Carpenter, who is a salesman and technology expert at Sony and who has access not just to the latest and greatest video gear but even to prototypes. He's what we'd call today an audio and video geek and there's a serious connection here between sex and technology, fetishising it as much as Crash fetished car accidents.
Carpenter is on the set because he knows Richard Dawson, who plays Cpl Newkirk on the show, Dawson being something of a tech nut too, paying Carpenter to install advanced audio gear in his trailer and his car. This piques Crane's interest from moment one and the pair enter into what can only be described as a relationship, if not one that involves sex with each other, a relationship that serves to define who they are as people and where their lives will go. It's through Carpenter that Crane's decline into sex addiction begins. Meeting him for drinks at a strip club, Crane ends up playing the drums for a lark only to become something of a regular there. He also ends up being a regular at Carpenter's pad, the word apartment really not being enough to cut it.
He's already been collecting magazines that upset his wife; now Carpenter is enticing women back to his pad on the basis of Col Hogan's name, not just for sex but to film it too. They film themselves and each other and watch the tapes together. As a photography nut, Crane starts building photo albums of all the girls he's slept with, something that he starts to show other people. His wife leaves him after finding his darkroom so he marries Col Klink's secretary, but that doesn't stay happy for long because it doesn't slow down his obsession a bit. Soon it's not just one woman a night, it's pairs of them or even orgies. He starts following an ethos that 'a day without sex is a day wasted.'
It's an ethos that Carpenter shares and their shared obsession ends up being the driving force in their lives, no pun intended. While both men were married and divorced twice (though we don't see Carpenter's marriages in the film) and Crane is obviously staunchly heterosexual, there's a recurring suggestion that Carpenter may be bisexual, something that he vehemently denies. Their first split (and if that doesn't suggest a relationship, what does?) is over Crane seeing Carpenter's hand creep onto his ass during an orgy they watch together on video. When Crane edits a tape together for him with gay imagery he takes it personally and loses his sense of humour entirely.
For a film about sex and which has an abundance of nudity, I should emphasise that it is seriously not sexy. It's a disturbing look at how far a man can fall when he lets an obsession take control of his life. It starts nice and fluffy with an all-American family man but bleeds through levels of discomfort as the film goes on. First it gets seedier but stays in control, then becomes progressively creepier as Crane's obsession with sex becomes what defines him. The camera movements mirror his decline, later scenes being shot with a handheld camera which puts us a lot closer to the action. Given how often we watch Crane watching himself on video, it starts to feel like we're with him watching his life collapse, whether it be discussions with his agent or his wives or his sexual encounters with strangers. People around him start getting uncomfortable and we follow them down that road.
Crane gets penile enhancement surgery and the first person he shows it to is Carpenter. There's a bizarre mutual masturbation scene where the pair of them try to identify who's in the video with Crane that they're watching, because they start forgetting who these girls are and where they were at the time. The pair of them talk about making a big budget porn movie, Deep Throat having become so successful and Carpenter having taped it off the screen at a porn theater, only to cancel the idea when Disney call to cast Crane in Superdad, a supreme irony. If we hadn't realised it before, we know Crane has lost all objectivity when, as a guest on a celebrity cooking show, he makes stunningly inappropriate remarks to a lady in the front row of the audience without ever realising he's lost the plot entirely.
By the time we get to the murder scene, which is quick and merciful, the film is a sordid thing, aided to no small degree by great performances by Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe as Crane and Carpenter respectively. Crane has spent a decade using his celebrity to bed women merely to satisfy an urge. There's no feeling involved, the only woman he seems to have cared for being his co-star and second wife, Sigrid Valdis, who he effectively discarded. The suggestion is that to Crane the chase was always better than the catch, the sexual act being far more important in itself than who it was with or any other detail at all.
Given this take on Crane's mentality, we can't help but compare his eventual murder to the act of sex. Just as Crane lost track of who he had sex with, we have no idea who murdered him and it's not really seen as important. Carpenter is suggested, as he was in reality, as a likely suspect with jealousy, potential bisexuality or a loss of fresh meat being the motive. Carpenter was not brought to trial initially, though he was later tried and found innocent, there being little if any evidence. In the end, it doesn't really matter. As Crane discarded his women after sex, the murderer discarded Crane after his obsession. It's the obsession that we're meant to watch not the culmination of it because the murder is just the climax. It's yet another clever way this clever film uses to get us inside Crane's head.
Mr Skeffington (1944)
Director: Vincent Sherman
Stars: Bette Davis and Claude Rains
Here's Claude Rains again in a supporting role, that happens to be the title character of the film. He really was the consummate supporting actor, so much so that it's so easy to forget that he's ever technically supporting anyone. In Notorious, for instance, he's there to support Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, but we see more of him than we do Grant. I can't think of another lead actor from the classic era of Hollywood who so frequently dropped down to large supporting roles with apparent relish. Here he's superb but in many ways he's the MacGuffin, the bookends around the story of the real lead character and the anchor that roots her in reality.
The real lead character is a young society lady in demand called Fanny Trellis. She's apparently the most sought after girl in New York, even though she has some seriously scary hair that in some lights makes her appear somewhat like Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein, something that Bette Davis carries like it's the most beautiful thing in the world. Naturally she's fending off admirers right and left, many of whom have already proposed. When Teddy Roosevelt arrives to court her at dinner... sorry, Jim Conderley, played by John Alexander who played the president frequently, he finds that he isn't going to be alone. Edward Morrison is already there, Bill Thatcher is right behind him and more soon follow.
Mr Skeffington arrives too, though not for dinner. He's the employer of Fanny's brother Trippy, or at least was until he was until it was discovered that he's been embezzling money from the company through imaginative methods that weren't quite clever enough to remain hidden. Fanny and her cousin George do what they can to make good the debt but the Trellis family fortune has already been lost, through Trippy's inept estate management. There's just no way that it can be done.
Luckily for Fanny, almost everything she is can be summed up in how she works her feminine wiles and she goes to town on Skeffington. Unluckily for her, she doesn't seem to be getting too far: he doesn't send flowers in the morning and when she goes to his office to play some more feminine tricks on him, she picks the very day that Germany declares war on Russia and his office goes nuts. To her way of thinking, World War I just spoiled everything, but what she doesn't realise is that he had his eye on her even before she got her eye on him and they're married within two months. She doesn't feel a thing for him but he really is in love with her.
Now Skeffington is no idiot. A Russian immigrant whose name is only an approximation of the original attempted by the official on Ellis Island, he's the standard rags to riches story, working his way up to run his own major banking firm. More importantly, while he's married her, he knows full well he hasn't won her yet but as he tells the sympathetic George, he's a patient man. His first name is Job for good reason. On their first anniversary, her suitors are still proposing, not just desiring her any more but desiring to rescue her too. Skeffington patiently puts up with them all, knowing full well that Fanny thrives on the attention and the skill involved in continually dismissing them while ensuring they come back for more.
Of course she marries him to save Trippy from the attentions of the district attorney and can't quite hide that from him forever. The grand irony is that Trippy takes the marriage in utterly the wrong way and storms straight out to Europe. As the Skeffingtons discover watching newsreels on that first wedding anniversary, he's flying with the Lafayette Escadrille. Eventually he dies in action and she's devastated. I haven't read the source novel by Elizabeth (her surname was von Arnim but she didn't use it), but there's more than a hint of incest here and I wonder if it was there in the original material.
Regardless, it's here that the story really begins because it's when the truth comes out. Without realising that Job is in the room, she tells George that she married Job to save Trippy and now all she has is Job. Everything that follows all ties to how that relationship really functions, when it works and when it doesn't and in Skeffington's words that a woman is always beautiful when she's loved. They have a daughter too, though she hardly figures into Fanny's plans, which are all about appearing as young and desirable as possible. Obviously it's pretty hard to pretend to be twenty five when you have a twenty year old daughter.
Bette Davis has a grand part here. Never an actress to be afraid of looking awful on screen, here she plays a character obsessed with never looking awful, but inevitably getting there because that's what age does to a person. Diphtheria can't help but take its toll too, and the ageing used is superbly done. Throughout her life she looks younger than her years, though her attitude gradually ages her, but that illness catches those years up and adds more. It's a leap and a powerful one, something of a prelude to Baby Jane. Her face is too taut as if it's likely to tear itself apart and it's utterly appropriate because as time goes on she appears more and more as if she's going to tear herself apart. Age is an opponent nobody has beaten yet.
For his part, Claude Rains is as great as he's ever been here, and he was never much less than that. He was Bette's favourite actor and the one she handpicked for this role, the fifth of their six films together. He's perfect for the part, which deservedly provides the title to the film even though it's about Fanny Trellis. Playing an important and rich Jewish banker is hardly a great stretch for him, but the role provides plenty of depth. Where the part doesn't demand the depth outright, he adds nuances himself that really build the character. It's a tour de force performance even for him. He also plays very well off Walter Abel, who is excellent as Fanny's cousin George.
What's most surprising is where this film takes us. It's a melodrama, for sure, but one that keeps tipping its hat to other genres, especially the horror genre, as certain shots and angles and looks are unmistakeable in their influence. Perhaps the source novel has more than a touch of the Victorian gothic to it, even though it's set notably later on, with both world wars as a backing and everything in between. Director Vincent Sherman had started out on a horror movie, The Return of Doctor X, but it was one of the worst of its era. Bette Davis wouldn't find her way to horror until the sixties when grand guignol had made a comeback.
Of the obvious names, only Claude Rains was really established in the genre, having started out in Hollywood as The Invisible Man and The Clairvoyant and later adding The Wolf Man and Phantom of the Opera. I think though the choices came elsewhere, in the music of Franz Waxman, who had also written scores for Bride of Frankenstein and The Devil Doll; and the cinematography of Ernest Haller, who had filmed House of Horror as far back as 1929. It's a strange intersection of genres, never trying to be a horror film but in a very subtle way presaging the later grand guignol films of the sixties and in Fanny Trellis gazing upon the huge portrait of her younger lovelier self and wishing that she wasn't in Mr Skeffington but The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Stars: Bette Davis and Claude Rains
Here's Claude Rains again in a supporting role, that happens to be the title character of the film. He really was the consummate supporting actor, so much so that it's so easy to forget that he's ever technically supporting anyone. In Notorious, for instance, he's there to support Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, but we see more of him than we do Grant. I can't think of another lead actor from the classic era of Hollywood who so frequently dropped down to large supporting roles with apparent relish. Here he's superb but in many ways he's the MacGuffin, the bookends around the story of the real lead character and the anchor that roots her in reality.
The real lead character is a young society lady in demand called Fanny Trellis. She's apparently the most sought after girl in New York, even though she has some seriously scary hair that in some lights makes her appear somewhat like Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein, something that Bette Davis carries like it's the most beautiful thing in the world. Naturally she's fending off admirers right and left, many of whom have already proposed. When Teddy Roosevelt arrives to court her at dinner... sorry, Jim Conderley, played by John Alexander who played the president frequently, he finds that he isn't going to be alone. Edward Morrison is already there, Bill Thatcher is right behind him and more soon follow.
Mr Skeffington arrives too, though not for dinner. He's the employer of Fanny's brother Trippy, or at least was until he was until it was discovered that he's been embezzling money from the company through imaginative methods that weren't quite clever enough to remain hidden. Fanny and her cousin George do what they can to make good the debt but the Trellis family fortune has already been lost, through Trippy's inept estate management. There's just no way that it can be done.
Luckily for Fanny, almost everything she is can be summed up in how she works her feminine wiles and she goes to town on Skeffington. Unluckily for her, she doesn't seem to be getting too far: he doesn't send flowers in the morning and when she goes to his office to play some more feminine tricks on him, she picks the very day that Germany declares war on Russia and his office goes nuts. To her way of thinking, World War I just spoiled everything, but what she doesn't realise is that he had his eye on her even before she got her eye on him and they're married within two months. She doesn't feel a thing for him but he really is in love with her.
Now Skeffington is no idiot. A Russian immigrant whose name is only an approximation of the original attempted by the official on Ellis Island, he's the standard rags to riches story, working his way up to run his own major banking firm. More importantly, while he's married her, he knows full well he hasn't won her yet but as he tells the sympathetic George, he's a patient man. His first name is Job for good reason. On their first anniversary, her suitors are still proposing, not just desiring her any more but desiring to rescue her too. Skeffington patiently puts up with them all, knowing full well that Fanny thrives on the attention and the skill involved in continually dismissing them while ensuring they come back for more.
Of course she marries him to save Trippy from the attentions of the district attorney and can't quite hide that from him forever. The grand irony is that Trippy takes the marriage in utterly the wrong way and storms straight out to Europe. As the Skeffingtons discover watching newsreels on that first wedding anniversary, he's flying with the Lafayette Escadrille. Eventually he dies in action and she's devastated. I haven't read the source novel by Elizabeth (her surname was von Arnim but she didn't use it), but there's more than a hint of incest here and I wonder if it was there in the original material.
Regardless, it's here that the story really begins because it's when the truth comes out. Without realising that Job is in the room, she tells George that she married Job to save Trippy and now all she has is Job. Everything that follows all ties to how that relationship really functions, when it works and when it doesn't and in Skeffington's words that a woman is always beautiful when she's loved. They have a daughter too, though she hardly figures into Fanny's plans, which are all about appearing as young and desirable as possible. Obviously it's pretty hard to pretend to be twenty five when you have a twenty year old daughter.
Bette Davis has a grand part here. Never an actress to be afraid of looking awful on screen, here she plays a character obsessed with never looking awful, but inevitably getting there because that's what age does to a person. Diphtheria can't help but take its toll too, and the ageing used is superbly done. Throughout her life she looks younger than her years, though her attitude gradually ages her, but that illness catches those years up and adds more. It's a leap and a powerful one, something of a prelude to Baby Jane. Her face is too taut as if it's likely to tear itself apart and it's utterly appropriate because as time goes on she appears more and more as if she's going to tear herself apart. Age is an opponent nobody has beaten yet.
For his part, Claude Rains is as great as he's ever been here, and he was never much less than that. He was Bette's favourite actor and the one she handpicked for this role, the fifth of their six films together. He's perfect for the part, which deservedly provides the title to the film even though it's about Fanny Trellis. Playing an important and rich Jewish banker is hardly a great stretch for him, but the role provides plenty of depth. Where the part doesn't demand the depth outright, he adds nuances himself that really build the character. It's a tour de force performance even for him. He also plays very well off Walter Abel, who is excellent as Fanny's cousin George.
What's most surprising is where this film takes us. It's a melodrama, for sure, but one that keeps tipping its hat to other genres, especially the horror genre, as certain shots and angles and looks are unmistakeable in their influence. Perhaps the source novel has more than a touch of the Victorian gothic to it, even though it's set notably later on, with both world wars as a backing and everything in between. Director Vincent Sherman had started out on a horror movie, The Return of Doctor X, but it was one of the worst of its era. Bette Davis wouldn't find her way to horror until the sixties when grand guignol had made a comeback.
Of the obvious names, only Claude Rains was really established in the genre, having started out in Hollywood as The Invisible Man and The Clairvoyant and later adding The Wolf Man and Phantom of the Opera. I think though the choices came elsewhere, in the music of Franz Waxman, who had also written scores for Bride of Frankenstein and The Devil Doll; and the cinematography of Ernest Haller, who had filmed House of Horror as far back as 1929. It's a strange intersection of genres, never trying to be a horror film but in a very subtle way presaging the later grand guignol films of the sixties and in Fanny Trellis gazing upon the huge portrait of her younger lovelier self and wishing that she wasn't in Mr Skeffington but The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Saturday, 5 September 2009
Edge of the City (1957)
Director: Martin Ritt
Stars: John Cassavetes and Sidney Poitier
In 1955 Sidney Poitier starred in the very last episode of The Philco Television Playhouse, a highly respected live TV drama series, called A Man is Ten Feet Tall. He played Tommy Tyler, with Don Murray as Alex Nordman. Two years later he's back in the same role, but on the big screen, retitled to Edge of the City and with John Cassavetes playing Nordmann, now with an extra N. Martin Ritt directed in his big screen debut, beginning a career that would go on not just to many Paul Newman films from The Long, Hot Summer and Paris Blues to Hud and Hombre, even the American remake of Rashomon called The Outrage, but also to other diverse features such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Sounder and Norma Rae. While the story was apparently written for TV with Poitier in mind as Tyler, the film is really about Nordmann and it's his character that has the real depth.
We're in New York City at the railroad yards where Nordmann has come to get a job as a stevedore. He keeps his past very much hidden and even his name too, calling himself Alex North instead. He has an in at the yards, a man called Charlie Malik, but while Malik plays along because of a name that gets dropped it's pretty obvious from moment one that they've never met and have no idea who the other is. That name is the key to it all: it's what tells Malik that he's hiding something important, important enough to warrant a kickback to prevent him letting on to the bosses.
Everything would work slick and smooth, with North working on Malik's stevedore gang and chipping him a quarter an hour for the privilege, but even before he's met Malik he's already bumped into a cat called TT. TT is Tommy Tyler, of course, and Poitier demonstrates in no uncertain terms just why this story was written for him, regardless of who it's really about. He's utterly infectious here, all over the film like a rash and it's impossible not to watch him. Cassavetes is no minor talent and he does a great job here, but as Axel is about hiding and Tyler is about not hiding, he gets the unenviable job of trying to shine without being obvious while his co-star is supposed to be obvious.
Tyler takes a real interest in Axel and before long they're not just co-workers with Axel working on TT's gang but firm friends too. When they're not working they're hanging out together back at Tyler's place with Tommy's wife Lisa and a friend of the family called Ellen Wilson that they try to hook him up with. Given that Ruby Dee played alongside Poitier in four movies in the fifties alone, plus two later on, it almost feels like home to us too. Life is pretty good, but there's always Malik and Axel's hidden past to contend with and as we soon find out it isn't one small enough to be ignored. Axel is an army deserter, facing 20 years if the cops or the army catch up with him, but he's really been running a lot longer than that and that's what this film is all about: fear.
Early on in the film Tyler tells us where the original title came from. In his philosophy there are two types of people in the world: not black and white, as you may expect given that this is Sidney Poitier and 1957, but what he calls men and the lower forms. Men are people who stand up for themselves and take care of their responsibilities and the lower forms are those who exploit and are exploited. If you go with the men, Tyler tells us, you're ten feet tall. If you go with the lower forms, you're nothing. Of course Tyler's a man in his own estimation, while Malik is a lower form. The drive of the story is Axel, who gets to change from one to the other by conquering his fear.
It's a pretty deep script wrapped up in a tight and tough drama. Most obviously the fear belongs to Axel, as we see from moment one when he rings his mother in Gary, Indiana. He talks to her but he keeps his hand over the mouthpiece so she can't hear him, not for the first time either. He's running from his family, from what he thinks people feel; he's running from the army, of course, and the cops; though really he's running from himself, the thing inside him that stops him taking a stand. Tyler's a huge part of how he changes, but he's not the only factor.
Jack Warden is excellent as Charlie Malik, a thug of a man who we discover is really a racist at heart. That little subplot is hardly surprising and while it does appear to detract a little from the core of the story, it really shows another aspect of it, racism being is rooted in fear, after all. Ellen Wilson, the girl that the Tylers set Axel up with, is also afraid but in a very different way. She's a massively intelligent woman whose drive to learn has put her somewhat above those around her, working as a teacher and trying to find a way to connect back down to the rest of humanity. The connection helps Axel and Ellen both. Kathleen Maguire does a solid job, though this was her first film of only five and it looks to be most prominent role.
Amazingly the acting, while solid throughout, isn't what really makes this film so worthwhile. Its biggest success is the fact that it refuses to go down any of the directions we expect, courtesy of writer Robert Alan Aurthur who also wrote the original teleplay. It covers racism, but not as a be all and end all concept, racism just being another example of fear. There's an off hand comment halfway through the film about people needing to be 110% American, especially at this point in time, and this really speaks to the heart of that. It isn't a socialist film or a communist film, but it's one that raises a lot of questions about what the House Un-American Affairs Committee was doing at the time. Tyler would have called them lower forms.
Stars: John Cassavetes and Sidney Poitier
In 1955 Sidney Poitier starred in the very last episode of The Philco Television Playhouse, a highly respected live TV drama series, called A Man is Ten Feet Tall. He played Tommy Tyler, with Don Murray as Alex Nordman. Two years later he's back in the same role, but on the big screen, retitled to Edge of the City and with John Cassavetes playing Nordmann, now with an extra N. Martin Ritt directed in his big screen debut, beginning a career that would go on not just to many Paul Newman films from The Long, Hot Summer and Paris Blues to Hud and Hombre, even the American remake of Rashomon called The Outrage, but also to other diverse features such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Sounder and Norma Rae. While the story was apparently written for TV with Poitier in mind as Tyler, the film is really about Nordmann and it's his character that has the real depth.
We're in New York City at the railroad yards where Nordmann has come to get a job as a stevedore. He keeps his past very much hidden and even his name too, calling himself Alex North instead. He has an in at the yards, a man called Charlie Malik, but while Malik plays along because of a name that gets dropped it's pretty obvious from moment one that they've never met and have no idea who the other is. That name is the key to it all: it's what tells Malik that he's hiding something important, important enough to warrant a kickback to prevent him letting on to the bosses.
Everything would work slick and smooth, with North working on Malik's stevedore gang and chipping him a quarter an hour for the privilege, but even before he's met Malik he's already bumped into a cat called TT. TT is Tommy Tyler, of course, and Poitier demonstrates in no uncertain terms just why this story was written for him, regardless of who it's really about. He's utterly infectious here, all over the film like a rash and it's impossible not to watch him. Cassavetes is no minor talent and he does a great job here, but as Axel is about hiding and Tyler is about not hiding, he gets the unenviable job of trying to shine without being obvious while his co-star is supposed to be obvious.
Tyler takes a real interest in Axel and before long they're not just co-workers with Axel working on TT's gang but firm friends too. When they're not working they're hanging out together back at Tyler's place with Tommy's wife Lisa and a friend of the family called Ellen Wilson that they try to hook him up with. Given that Ruby Dee played alongside Poitier in four movies in the fifties alone, plus two later on, it almost feels like home to us too. Life is pretty good, but there's always Malik and Axel's hidden past to contend with and as we soon find out it isn't one small enough to be ignored. Axel is an army deserter, facing 20 years if the cops or the army catch up with him, but he's really been running a lot longer than that and that's what this film is all about: fear.
Early on in the film Tyler tells us where the original title came from. In his philosophy there are two types of people in the world: not black and white, as you may expect given that this is Sidney Poitier and 1957, but what he calls men and the lower forms. Men are people who stand up for themselves and take care of their responsibilities and the lower forms are those who exploit and are exploited. If you go with the men, Tyler tells us, you're ten feet tall. If you go with the lower forms, you're nothing. Of course Tyler's a man in his own estimation, while Malik is a lower form. The drive of the story is Axel, who gets to change from one to the other by conquering his fear.
It's a pretty deep script wrapped up in a tight and tough drama. Most obviously the fear belongs to Axel, as we see from moment one when he rings his mother in Gary, Indiana. He talks to her but he keeps his hand over the mouthpiece so she can't hear him, not for the first time either. He's running from his family, from what he thinks people feel; he's running from the army, of course, and the cops; though really he's running from himself, the thing inside him that stops him taking a stand. Tyler's a huge part of how he changes, but he's not the only factor.
Jack Warden is excellent as Charlie Malik, a thug of a man who we discover is really a racist at heart. That little subplot is hardly surprising and while it does appear to detract a little from the core of the story, it really shows another aspect of it, racism being is rooted in fear, after all. Ellen Wilson, the girl that the Tylers set Axel up with, is also afraid but in a very different way. She's a massively intelligent woman whose drive to learn has put her somewhat above those around her, working as a teacher and trying to find a way to connect back down to the rest of humanity. The connection helps Axel and Ellen both. Kathleen Maguire does a solid job, though this was her first film of only five and it looks to be most prominent role.
Amazingly the acting, while solid throughout, isn't what really makes this film so worthwhile. Its biggest success is the fact that it refuses to go down any of the directions we expect, courtesy of writer Robert Alan Aurthur who also wrote the original teleplay. It covers racism, but not as a be all and end all concept, racism just being another example of fear. There's an off hand comment halfway through the film about people needing to be 110% American, especially at this point in time, and this really speaks to the heart of that. It isn't a socialist film or a communist film, but it's one that raises a lot of questions about what the House Un-American Affairs Committee was doing at the time. Tyler would have called them lower forms.
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