For the Love of Film: On Stage Fright

In a Film Comment essay from 1984 (reprinted in his recent collection When Movies Mattered) on five Hitchcock films that had just been rereleased, Dave Kehr proposes a series of art metaphors for each film: Rope as literature, Rear Window photography, The Trouble with Harry painting, The Man Who Knew Too Much music and Vertigo cinema itself.  The film missing from that series (I assume because it was not among the rereleases) is Stage Fright, whose connection to theatre and acting is perhaps the most obvious of all.  The film begins with a curtain being raised, slowly, on a scene of London traffic, prefiguring the opening credits of Rear Window, and ends with a curtain dropping, literally, on the villain.  The lead is Jane Wyman, a young acting student who is told an elaborate flashback at the beginning of the film by the man she's in love with (Richard Todd) about how he aided and abetted the covering up of a murder by the woman he's in love with (a star actress, played by Marlene Dietrich, her husband was the victim) and was spotted, thus becoming the target of the police's investigation.  This is a classic Hitchcockian wrong man set-up, and the two women are textbook Hitchcockian women: the brunette Wyman that Todd sees only as a friend and the alluring, icy blonde Dietrich, who uses her sex appeal to manipulate Todd to his own destruction.

But the film quickly veers off the expected path.  Rather than following Todd's struggles to clear his name, a la The Thirty-Nine Steps or North by Northwest, he quickly disappears from the action as Wyman takes on the investigative role, donning a series of disguises and performing her way into both Dietrich's household (as a maid) and the arms of the dashing police detective (Under Capricorn's Michael Wilding) with the help of her father, a kooky old man who likes to pretend he's a smuggler when really he's just a nice guy with an awesome voice, played by Alastair Sim.  The film meanders about in the middle (Robin Wood found the film interesting in the context of Hitchcock's career, but pretty boring to sit through) as Wyman tries to gather evidence of Todd's innocence and Dietrich's guilt, but I found the playfulness with the idea of performance pretty charming.  Wyman slowly getting into character as the mousy maid with a ridiculous accent, or getting confused as to which man she's really in love with and which she's just pretending is pretty cute and even Dietrich gets a chance to demonstrate that her character isn't nearly as callous as she appears, that her icy exterior is too a performance.  Also, coming off the extreme experimentation of Rope and Under Capricorn, we see Hitchcock blending the audaciously long takes of those films into a more conventional, less exciting style.  Especially notable is an early track through a doorway that somehow becomes a long crane shot inside a house up a grand staircase and along a hallway.

The long circular middle leads to a predictable, but nonetheless satisfying twist: that we've been lied to from the start: Todd is a performer as well and his flashback sequence which began the film was a lie: he actually was the murderer, he was the right man.  The details here are fudged a bit, at least I didn't quite catch how the whole bloody dress thing came about (this was Todd's evidence of Dietrich's involvement in the murder, but he'd faked it to make it look more bloody than it really was, or something), but by this point it doesn't really need to make sense, nor can it.  When film is shown to be built on a lie, an act, a performance, can anything be trusted to be the "truth" and does it matter?

In Kehr's scheme, he sees the first two films (Rope and Rear Window) as viewing art (literature, photography) as monstrous while the second two (The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much) see art (painting, music) as life-affirming.  Vertigo, as cinema, "moves beyond pro and con, to confront the issue of full complexity."  Stage Fright is the flip side of that: it's isn't particularly complex, but it's a comedy where Vertigo is a tragedy.  Both films are built around lies and life as performance, but in Vertigo the lies control us, we are in thrall to the past, fictional or not it doesn't matter.  In Stage Fright, lies are a means to an end: they liberate and elucidate more than they bind and cover up.  In Stage Fright, there is a final final curtain and (we can assume?) the performance ends; in Vertigo, the madness spirals out of control, into infinity.

This is my second entry in the third annual For the Love of FIlm Blogathon, raising money for the National Film Preservation Foundation to make The White Shadow available for free streaming and to record the score for the film.  Check out the rest of the blogathon at Ferdy on Films, The Self-Styled Siren and This Island Rod, and if you can, click the donate button below:

For the Love of Film: One Week With Hitchcock

Last year, in honor of our playing Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as part of our Nine Circles of Hell Metro Classics series, I decided spend a week watching a bunch of the master's films that I hadn't seen yet and wrote some short reviews of them over on our website.  Well, Metro Classics no longer exists and for that matter neither does the Metro Cinemas, but thanks to the internet my blog post lives on.  And so, to kick off my small contribution to the annual For the Love of Film Blogathon, I'm rerunning that post.  This year the Blogathon is raising money for the National Film Preservation Foundation, with the hope of making available over the internet (and record a score for) what remains of The White Shadow, Hitch's earliest surviving film, on which he served as assistant director, art director, editor and writer.  The Blogathon runs today through the 18th of May and links to all the other participants can be found on the home blogs, Ferdy on Films, The Self-Styled Siren and This Island Rod.  It's a great cause, so if you can spare a few bucks, click the donate button below.

Stay tuned over the next week, I hope to have something new up every day for the Blogathon on Hitchcock and/or silent movies.  Stage Fright is in the works, with hopefully at least The Lodger to follow.

Sabotage - This is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, renamed because the other film Hitchcock directed in 1936 was also called The Secret Agent.  The local movie theatre owner (Oskar Homolka) is under surveillance by Scotland Yard as a suspect in a series of bombings around London.  Sylvia Sidney, star of Fritz Lang's Fury and You Only Live Once, and 60 years later the alien-destroying Grandma in Mars Attacks!,  plays Homolka's wife.  Homolka's very good as a sap who gets manipulated into committing far greater crimes than he ever intended, but the signature sequence in the film, in which a young boy unknowingly carries a bomb through London (we see a clip of this in Inglourious Basterds) goes a little too far.  With it, Hitchcock tested the limits of the audience's taste for suspense and learned that we'd react badly if he toyed with our emotions too mercilessly.  It's really very unpleasant.

Saboteur - Similarly named but wildly different is this 1942 film starring Robert Cummings as a factory worker who's wrongfully accused of blowing up an aircraft factory in wartime.  The movie basically feels like a rough draft of North By Northwest, with less charismatic actors and less of a sense of humor.  The first hour of the film moves fairly slowly, as Cummings luckily finds a blind man who trusts him and slowly earns the trust of Priscilla Lane's pretty blonde model.  The second half rushes across the country, dropping plot holes left and right in a rush to get the leads to the top of the Statue of Liberty, in a sequence apparently designed to give me an attack of vertigo.

Under Capricorn - My favorite of this whole batch of movies, and one of the bigger flops of Hitchcock's career.  It's not a thriller, but rather a gothic melodrama set in 1830s Australia starring Joseph Cotton and Ingrid Bergman (whose scandalous relationship with Roberto Rossellini may have had as much to do with the film's failure as its lack of suspense).  Like the previous year's Rope, it's as much an experiment in the use of the long take as it is a conventional film, and as such it feels at times like Hitchcock doing a Max Ophuls impression, with the long, stunning tracking shots weaving a dreamy sense of the snakelike interrelations between the characters and their pasts.  Cotton plays an ex-con who's become rich but is tortured by his past.  Bergman plays his alcoholic wife, similarly tortured by her past.  When young Irishman Michael Wilding comes to town, he resolves to nurse Bergman back to health and uncovers the secrets both Bergman and Cotton (and the evil maid, Margaret Leighton (from John Ford's 7 Women) are hiding.  It's a movie about two people who can't help destroying their own lives for each other's sake, which is about as Hitchcockian a theme as there is.

Torn Curtain -  After Hitchcock's otherworldly run of films in the late-50s and early-60s (Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, The Birds), any one of which could be considered his greatest, came Marnie, possibly his most psychologically disturbing and emotionally traumatic film.  By the mid-60s, Hitchcock must have been exhausted, and so the fact that his next two films are relatively impersonal espionage thrillers should be no surprise.  This beautifully composed 1966 film, starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews is as solid a suspense film as you're likely to find.  Newman plays a nuclear scientist who poses as a defector in order to worm a secret out of an East German scientist.  Andrews plays his girlfriend who tags along, not knowing his scheme until halfway through the film (we know Paul Newman's beautiful, beautiful eyes could never betray his country, but she doesn't).  The last two thirds of the film or so are constructed almost entirely out of textbook suspense sequences, as the two leads are either interrogated (often with a deadline) or chased across Berlin by communists, scientists and one mean ballerina.

Topaz - A worthy entry in the 1960s multinational epic thriller genre (think Guns of Navarone or Exodus) is this 1969 adaptation of Leon Uris's novel about spies on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  John Forsythe (who looks like a weird mix of Humphrey Bogart and Richard Nixon, or maybe Jack Webb) plays the CIA agent who's Soviet defector has info on Cuba, and also of a spy ring in the upper echelons of the French government.  He enlists French spy Frederick Stafford to go to Cuba and find out what's going on, and then expose the evil French guys.  With John Vernon (The Outlaw Josey Wales, Animal House) as the bad Cuban, Karin Dor (You Only Live Twice) as the beautiful Cuban, Michel Subor (Le petit soldat) as Stafford's journalist son-in-law, Claude Jade (Stolen Kisses) as Subor's wife, Roscoe Lee Brown (The Cosby Show) as a French agent and Michel Piccoli (Contempt) and Philippe Noiret (Cinema Paradiso) as suspicious Frenchmen.  Hitchcock keeps things moving briskly through its two and a half hour running time, making it one of the rare entries in its genre that isn't bloated and self-important.

Frenzy - Both a return to the dark psychology of his greatest films, and another experiment in what a filmmaker can get away with is this 1972 film, Hitchcock's first to earn an R rating.  Finally free from censorship, he gives us another wrong man story, this time the hero being accused of serial-killing women with a necktie.  We learn the identity of the real killer fairly early on, in a horrifying sequence in which the murderer rapes and strangles his victim.  Hitchcock ruthlessly puts us in the midst of the scene, in what, like Sabotage, must have been the director trying to find out exactly how far the audience was willing to go (the sequence would not look out of place in the one of those horror films about torture that I don't go see).  Just as disturbing, for me at least, are the scenes later in the film, when the Scotland Yard detective is served dinners by his wife, an aspiring gourmet.  She gives him a fish soup that might be the most disgusting thing I've seen on film.  It's a nasty film, and not nearly as tightly constructed as it should be, even by Hitchcock's MacGuffin-driven standards.

Family Plot - Hitchcock's final film seems like it comes from another world entirely.  It's a screwball thriller more along the lines of The Trouble With Harry than any film he'd made over the previous 20 years.  Barbara Harris (Nashville) plays a faux-psychic who is hired by an wealthy elderly woman to find her long lost nephew so that he can inherit the family fortune.  Enlisting the help of her actor/cab driver boyfriend (Bruce Dern), the two uncover a lifetime of criminal activity committed by the nephew (William Devane), who now runs a kidnapping-based jewel collection racket with his girlfriend, Karen Black (also in Nashville).  Dern makes a great detective, sarcastic and whiny and always chewing on a pipe while Devane, for some reason, talks like Jack Nicholson through the whole film.  I don't know if that was an affectation, or just how he talked 35 years ago, but I have to say, it works.  Together with Frenzy, it forms a fitting summary of the tensions running throughout Hitchcock's career: the combination of whimsically dark humor and disturbingly dark psychology that made him a truly great artist.

Finally, here is a ranked list of the 33 Hitchcock features I've seen so far, keeping in mind that I like all of these movies and every single one of them is worth seeing:

1. Vertigo
2. Rear Window
3. Psycho
4. North by Northwest
5. The Birds
6. The Lady Vanishes
7. Notorious
8. Rebecca
9. Suspicion
10. Under Capricorn
11. The 39 Steps
12. Shadow of a Doubt
13. Dial M for Murder
14. The Man Who Knew Too Much ('55)
15. Strangers on a Train
16. The Trouble with Harry
17. Torn Curtain
18. Lifeboat
19. Blackmail
20. Marnie
21. To Catch a Thief
22. The Wrong Man
23. I Confess
24. Family Plot
25. Rope
26. Topaz
27. Foreign Correspondent
28. The Man Who Knew Too Much ('34)
29. Frenzy
30. Saboteur
31. Spellbound
32. Sabotage
33. Jamaica Inn

On The Lower Depths

I'm going to start by saying that this isn't the least bit "filmed theatre", at least not as I understand the term.  To me, it means a more or less direct translation of a play to film, with little of the technique we generally use to differentiate the experience of watching a film from that of watching a play.  "Filmed theatre" is static, with little in the way of camera movement; it films a flat space perpendicular to the camera to create the effect of a proscenium arch; the actors are frontally focussed, addressing an imaginary audience; there's not much in the way of analytic editing to divide and/or explore the theatrical space, either for dramatic emphasis (closeups at big moment) or just to create a rhythm of varied looks.  When I think of "filmed theatre" I think of the very earliest, pre-Griffith et al days of cinema, when filmmakers really would just plop a camera down and act in front of it with the goal of making the viewer feel like they were nestled into an orchestra seat at a broadway show.  Of course, very few films that would rightly be called "filmed theatre" made since 1912 or so really fit with so strict a definition, but usually when I see that term, I expect to see a lot of those elements, at least significantly more than in a film shot and cut in a standard way.

Well, The Lower Depths is about as far from that idea of "filmed theatre" as one can get.  Director Akira Kurosawa, adapting a play by Maxim Gorky, takes a very talky play limited to essentially one location and creates a tour de force of directorial style.  He basically throws every trick in his playbook at the screen in an attempt to cinematize the play, and the result, visually at least, is pretty breath-taking.  Kurosawa was always a master of composition, especially the relative arrangement of characters within the frame (a skill he learned no doubt in training to be a painter), and this is perhaps his most visually dense film.  He pulls off a trick I've only ever seen done as successfully in films by Hou Hsiao-hsien, where a shot of a few figures talking will be held for quite awhile before you realize exactly how many characters there are on-screen: the shock of recognition after looking at a shot for three minutes and realizing there's actually a character sitting in the bottom left corner is fun, having that previously unseen character suddenly leap to life and begin berating the other characters is genius.  There's one shot early in the film that appears to feature three characters in conversation, then you discover a fourth, a fifth, a sixth and finally you realize just how densely packed the slum these wretched people are living in really is.

How many characters do you see?

Kurosawa also avoids theatricality by filming the main set, a common room in a shack where a number of drunk, sick and for all intents and purposes homeless people crowd together, roughly parallel to the axis of the camera, keeping the whole depth of field in focus.  Instead of a proscenium view with the actors arrayed before us as on a stage, we get a three dimensional space with the characters piled on top of each other yet separated, all on their own planes.  In final third of the film, though, Kurosawa returns to the same common room and films it perpendicular to the camera, but closer up.  The effect is to bring the characters together (they're united in their common shock at the preceding events) in a way they weren't at the beginning of the film.

There's a lot more: the camera moves more than usual with Kurosawa (certainly more than it would move in his later films), he films at unusual angles (there's a cool shot early in the film with the Laughing Samurai from Seven Samurai: Kurosawa gives him a low angle shot with a smooth movement in and simultaneous tilt up, a heroic framing against the sky, ironic considering his doubtful status as a penniless ronin).  Kurosawa's compositions are always interesting, posing characters at odd, dramatic diagonals, in diamond-shaped groups of four where no one looks at anyone else, on different levels not just in depth but in height as well.

The acting is uniformly pretty great, featuring a ton of Toho contract players, many of which are recognizable from other Kurosawa films, especially Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Throne of Blood and Yojimbo.  Toshiro Mifune is, as always, the ostensible star, but the film belongs to Hidari Bokuzen (unforgettable as Yohei in Seven Samurai), who plays a passing old man who who seems wise in dispensing grandfatherly advice but is probably concealing some horrible secret.

Unfortunately, while the film transcends what I would call "filmed theatre", it does suffer from what a lot of play-based films do, that of being too written.  See, it's not the visual style failing to "open up" the film that is the problem, rather it's a matter of everything in the film being put into words.  Theatre is a verbal medium, just as film is a visual one, and in a play you expect the characters to say what they're thinking in interesting and dramatically compelling ways.  To a certain extent, that kind of thing is expected in a (talking) motion picture as well, but the problem I've been having lately with a lot of very writerly films is that the fundamental wordiness of the scripts not only gums up the visual artistry of the filmmaker (not in Kurosawa's case of course, but in others) but it subverts the kind of reality that's most appealing on film.  (Why I should react this way to the "writtenness" of this film, or Marty or The Big Knife and not the very stylized and writerly films of, say, Whit Stillman, Quentin Tarantino, Ben Hecht, Woody Allen, etc is a question I don't yet have a satisfactory answer to).

In the end, like a lot of these over-written films, The Lower Depths just feels phony.  And worse, it's the kind of phony with a lame message: that it sucks to be poor and live in a slum that's easily mistaken for a garbage dump because the people that live at the bottom of society are just mean and awful and there's no hope so just get drunk because you're going to die of tuberculosis anyway so you might as well enjoy it.  Maybe that's the difference:  The Lower Depths, like the Paddy Chayefsky and Clifford Odets films I haven't been enjoying, is trying to convey a social realist message, but the unreality of the writerly dramatic style is creating a disconnect, whereas the writerly films I do like are generally not the least bit concerned with reality or trying to convey a socially conscious message.  The verbal form is conflicting with the thematic content, creating an overall feeling of phoniness.

The Laurel & Hardy Project #11: Sugar Daddies

All of the films in the Project thus far have been two-reel shorts, which, a reel of film in the silent era being about ten minutes long, means they each run twenty minutes or less.  They were also made very quickly in a studio setting.  Maybe a month at most for the whole production.  This is how we're now eleven films into the series and have progressed in time fourteen months from July 1926 to early September 1927.  So, as you'd expect under these conditions, the films follow certain formulas and structures, and some gags get repeated in multiple films.  At the most basic level, the two-reel comedy short tended to be evenly split in half, with the setup in the first reel and the conclusion in the second, usually filmed at two different locations (often the second reel has two locations intercut).  Think of With Love and Hisses evenly divided between the train location of the first reel and the camp location of the second, or Love 'Em and Weep with the office location for the first reel and the intercut restaurant and home locations for the second.  This basic structure makes me think something is wrong with Sugar Daddies, or at least the version included in this DVD set.  The first reel is simply too short at less than seven minutes long, and as a result the film feels even slighter than it should.  This fact, plus some recycled jokes, make this the least satisfying film in the Project yet.

James Finlayson plays a millionaire drunk who accidentally gets married one night on a bender.  Oliver Hardy plays his butler (this isn't the first time Hardy's played a butler and I don't really get it, he doesn't seem right for that type of part at all to me).  The new wife turns out to be a grifter and her brother blackmails Finlayson.  The lawyer, Stan Laurel, is called in to help (this sequence has the best touch in the film: looking closely you can see that Laurel's office, specifically his telephone, is covered in cobwebs; it's that kind of attention to detail that leaks through even the worst films of great filmmakers.  The production still at the top shows the office without dust).  But abruptly, the reel ends here with the three heroes running away from the gun-toting brother and the second part starts with them hiding out at the sea shore.  The grifters discover their location thanks to a newspaper item about Finlayson and 27 chorus girls (interestingly, the rest of the newspaper is taken up with a story about Edward Muybridge, whose photographic experiments helped lay the foundation for motion picture technology).  When the bad guys show up at the hotel, we get an early version of what will become a Laurel & Hardy catchphrase: Laurel says to Hardy, "A fine mess you've made of things!"  What follows are some typical chase antics, including the "Laurel sits on Finlayson's back and they pretend to be a ridiculously tall woman" gag from Love 'Em and Weep, which is extended here far past the point where it's actually funny.

The second part of the chase (the second half of reel two) takes place at an amusement park funhouse, which has some fun bits in it but the location doesn't seem like its possibilities are being fully exploited.  Fifteen years later though, the cinematographer for Sugar Daddies would direct a film with a great funhouse sequence that shows it off at its surreal best.  That film, A Damsel in Distress, stars Fred Astaire, George Burns, Gracie Allen and Joan Fontaine and was directed by George Stevens.  Stevens also, of course, directed Gunga Din and Giant, both of which have screenplays credited to Fred Guiol, the director of Sugar Daddies and most of the early Laurel and Hardy films.  Guiol began as a prop man for Harold Lloyd in the late teens and was Oscar nominated for the Giant screenplay, his last film credit.

The Laurel & Hardy Project #10: With Love and Hisses

This is another pre-official team status pairing of Laurel and Hardy, and their characters and relationship are beginning to come into a bit more focus.  The story this time is a military one, with Laurel as a new Home Guard recruit, Hardy as his sergeant and James Finlayson (seen most recently in Love 'Em and Weep) as their captain.

The first reel follows a repeated joke pattern, each time escalating the crazy though never quite reaching the comic heights they would in later films.  While the troop is boarding their train to head out for camp, Laurel unwittingly (literally) sets Hardy up to get in trouble with the captain: by leaving his luggage in the way so the captain trips over it and blames Hardy, by convincing him that two girls flirting with the captain are actually flirting with Hardy, by taking the captain's private cabin, only to have Hardy take it over and eat the captain's food.  It's a one-note joke that doesn't really go anywhere interesting, though the sight of Hardy taking his shirt off and devouring an entire fruit basket is pretty funny (why does he take his shirt off?  Because it's awesome, that's why).  But the relationship between the two leads is promising, with Laurel again and again getting Hardy into a fine mess.

In the middle of the film is a cute little scene where Laurel is trapped on the train with an annoying bunkmate who is eating raw green onions and garlic sandwiches.  Errol Flynn as Custer in They Died with Their Boots On also made a point of always eating raw onions, I like to think Flynn's Custer smelled just as bad as Laurel's nemesis.  The sequence ends with the smelly guy offering Laurel a berry pie (presumably also slathered in garlic), which Laurel promptly throws out the window.  This being the end of reel one, the pie of course lands several cars down the train in Finlayson's face.  I believe this marks the first pie in the face of this series, though I might be wrong about that.

The second reel details two sequences at camp.  In the first, Finlayson is inspecting the troops while Laurel is being clueless.  This is the best sequence in the film, Laurel really shines with the physical comedy here.  After a misunderstanding over the nature of the "dress, right" stance, which Laurel takes as a bit of flirting between himself and the captain, with Laurel doing a Chaplinesque coquette routine.  This will pay off in the scene's capper.  Next though, when presenting his gun to the Captain, he opens the bolt-action only for the assembly to come flying off in his hands.  Laurel sells the gag by holding a deadpan expression for several seconds longer than you'd think would be necessary.  It's the surprise wait that makes you laugh.  As Finlayson attempts to put the gun back together, he orders the men to about face, but, in a beautifully balletic move, Laurel can't manage the necessary half turn, but can only do a full pirouette.  The first time he does it, it's merely silly, the second time, it's just lovely.  Finally, Finlayson throws the gun at Laurel, who throws it right back.  The two throw the gun back and forth for awhile until it hits Laurel in the nose.  In a perfect childlike action, Laurel pauses, then breaks into his "weepy" face.  This is his signature comic touch, and he uses it here better than he has to date.  More than just a silly looking expression, Laurel sells the fact that his nose and his feelings really are hurt by the captain ("Now I really am mad at you.").  He continues to make a big production of it until the troops march off, wherein he catches the captain's eye and instantly changes from weepy back to his flirty coquette look.  And just like that we know the weepy face is all an act, that all of this is an artifice and that Laurel built it.

The final sequence involves Hardy, Laurel and the troops marching to a pond, where they disrobe and go for a swim.  But, after Hardy inadvertently burns up all their clothes, they have to return to camp for inspection disguised as a billboard for the latest Cecil B. DeMille epic The Volga Boatman (heads peeking through the picture's bodies, like in one of those novelty photo stands).  They're all saved from disgrace thanks to a swarm of bees they run through (they're being chased by a skunk) which attack everyone at camp.  It's a ridiculous way to end a ridiculous film, but one that points to better things to come.

On Kanal

I liked the only other Andrzej Wajda films I've seen, Ashes and Diamonds, though I thought it was a bit overstuffed with Style! and Symbolism!, which is strange because generally I like that kind of thing (Cranes are Flying, for example, is all Style!, though less so with the Symbolism!).  This film is a bit more subtle, though that hardly seems an appropriate way to describe a film that equates war with Andy Dufresne's escape from Shawshank, except instead of crawling through "five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can't even imagine, or maybe I just don't want to", Wajda's freedom fighters are trapped there, seemingly for eternity.  The first third of the film is typical war movie stuff, introducing the characters and their relationships and making clear the hopelessness of their situation, in the waning days of the Polish revolt against the Nazis.  Soon the small band is cut off and their only escape route is through the sewers of Warsaw, and ancient labyrinth that looks back to Dante and ahead to Apocalypse Now.  Wandering in the darkness, wounded and poisoned by the noxious gasses, the group splits and splits again, until we're left with only a couple small groups of soldiers: a woman who knows the sewers well leading her dying lover to the sea, a composer who loses his mind, doomed to wander the tunnels blowing a haunting tune on an ocarina, and most poignantly, the platoon's Lieutenant, who, with an attendant, makes it to safety only to find the platoon had been left behind him long ago.  In a film so relentlessly hopeless, the Lieutenant's final act, descending again into hell to try to rescue his men, is miraculous.  He knows they're doomed, he knows he's doomed.  But he does it anyway.  It's as pure an act of heroism as you'll ever see in a film, done with resignation and horror.

The Laurel & Hardy Project #9: Why Girls Love Sailors

This is just the second time in the series that Laurel & Hardy are paired as the stars of the film, after Duck Soup, though they are not yet an official comedy team and their personae have yet to fully mature.  They come close here, with Laurel playing up his crybaby mugging portraying a wimpy-looking young man ( "the great periwinkle fisherman") in love with a girl (Viola Richard, in her first film) who gets kidnapped by a much taller sea captain.  Laurel begins the film flirting with the girl, giving her a seashell necklace and twirling away in a bit of Chaplinesque acrobatics.  He then rolls around playfully on a bed, childlike and not the least bit erotic.  When the captain bursts in and pours a pitcher of water down his shirt, Laurel gives his longest weeping face to date, extending the single joke for almost a minute, until the captain takes the girl.  I really don't know what to do with this face.  I still don't think it's particularly funny, but it's Laurel's signature move and I'm starting to appreciate the absurdity with which he commits to it.

Anyway, Laurel chases the captain and his girl back to the ship and, pulling his turtleneck up over his head, attacks one of the crew Ichabod Crane-style ("The headless man. . . he gave me the evil eye!"  The titles by HM Walker are pretty great).  After deciding haunting the ship won't get his girl back, Laurel dresses up in drag (his third disguise, after child and ghost).  One by one, he lures the crew members behind a wall, knocks them unconscious, then tricks Hardy (the ship's ornery first mate) to throw them overboard by posing the crew members behind him thumbing their noses and hitting Hardy on the head.  Every time this happens, it's filmed from the front, with Hardy looking at the front right and Laurel in the left back corner of the screen, out of sight of Hardy, but clearly visible to us as he does a hilarious happy dance each time a crew member gets thrown over.

The crew dispatched, Laurel goes after the captain and flirts with him, a plan which doesn't seem particularly well thought out.  Fortunately, the captain's wife shows up and, after knocking out Hardy with one punch, shoots the captain while Laurel and the girl make their escape.  In the last shot of the film, the wife shoots at them too, blowing their pants off.

This is clearly a showpiece for Laurel, and while it has some funny bits and his mastery of physical comedy is obvious, the film never really escalates to anything particularly interesting or chaotic.  Hardy is wasted, his character doesn't have much to do or much personality, and while I like the idea of a woman knocking him out after Laurel had been throwing things at his head all night to no effect, it's weird that his character just disappears in the final act.  This film was out of circulation and considered lost for decades.  Wikipedia cites this factoid, "Why Girls Love Sailors went missing in the U.S. for nearly fifty years.  Cinémathèque Française had a 16mm print, French film critic Roland Lacourbe saw it in 1971, and pronounced it mediocre."  Which sounds about right to me.

The Laurel & Hardy Project #8: Fluttering Hearts

Possibly the funniest short to date, though it lacks the formal brilliance of Jewish Prudence, is this Charley Chase film featuring Oliver Hardy.  Chase is one of the most well-regarded comics of the silent period, though he isn't nearly as well-known as the superstars.  This is, I think, the first film I've seen him in (though he did have a small part in the first film in this series, Thundering Fleas).  He looks a bit like John Cleese: tall, gawky and angular with a little mustache and, at least in this film, an air of bemused competence.  He's not always in control of his world, but he's having fun in it nonetheless.

Chase plays an idle millionaire who helps a cop (the always welcome Eugene Pallette) chase down an even idler girl who's driving like a maniac through the streets of Los Angeles (one of the little pleasures of silent films: the time capsule look at the city as it was when it was little more than a series of undeveloped villages loosely connected by dirt roads).  They catch the girl but she's so cute and charming they decide to help her buy some linens.  You know those solemn news stories every Thanksgiving weekend about the craziness at Black Friday sales and how we can't believe society has sunk so low that people will actually physically fight each other for a shot at a decent bargain?  Yeah, that's not new.  This marks the third silent I've seen wherein the violent lunacy of sale-shoppers is a major set-piece (the others being Chaplin's The Floorwalker from 1916 and Harold Lloyd's 1923 Safety Last!).  After the sale, the girl (played by Martha Sleeper, who was also in Thundering Fleas and whose last screen appearance was in Leo McCarey's The Bells of St. Mary's) tells Chase her father hates idlers and so Chase becomes his chauffeur, setting in motion the second half of the film.

The father is being blackmailed by Oliver Hardy (playing "Big Bill"), who possesses an incriminating letter.  The father and Chase go to a local speakeasy to get the letter back, but the bouncer won't let them in unless accompanied by a woman.  Their first attempt (dressing the father in drag) is foiled and ends with the father being chased away by the police ("That she is a he!"), so Chase gets a mannequin and, manipulating it Weekend at Bernie's style, uses it to flirt with Hardy and get the letter back.  This culminates in a charming fight scene wherein everyone in the bar throws bottles and plates at Chase while he bats the objects right back at them (knocking them all unconscious) using a drum and a banjo like tennis rackets.  The reveal of the whole bar piled up with unconscious bodies is perfectly timed and one of the comic high points of the series thus far.  As is the film's capper, when Chase mistakes the girl for the mannequin and attempts (off-screen) to retrieve the letter from its hiding place in her dress with disastrous results.

On The Buster Keaton Story

There is almost nothing in this biopic that has any basis in fact, historical or otherwise.  A couple of the film titles are correct (The Balloonatic, The General, College and The Boat are referenced) others are completely made-up.  The longest bit of Keaton recreation comes in a fake film called The Criminal that has elements of Cops, The Goat and Sherlock Jr.  Donald O'Connor, playing Keaton, does OK with the physical comedy, though he overplays everything (despite the fact that the "Keaton" character is remarked to have a "dead pan", O'Connor mugs as usual for him).  When it comes to the facts of Keaton's life, the film gets two things right: he did grow up in vaudeville and he did have a drinking problem.  Everything else appears to be a product of writer-director Sidney Sheldon's imagination (including the timing of and causes for Keaton's alcoholism).

The most egregious of the film's many transgressions is the way it paints Keaton's relations with his studios.  In the film, Keaton shows up at a studio and talks his way into a contract in which he will star and direct his own films after appearing in a small role in one film (and despite the best efforts of an obstinate director played by Peter Lorre, of all people).  He then happily works at that studio ("Famous Studio", seriously it is called that) for years, making hit after hit with his silent films, only to be unable to transition to sound (because of an inability to say his lines properly) which exacerbates his drinking problem to the point that he's no longer able to function.  Through all this, his wife (played by Ann Blyth) loyally and understandingly stands by him, until she doesn't.  In the end, Keaton triumphantly returns to vaudeville where he finds happiness reenacting his old routines and making people laugh.



In reality, Keaton worked for quite awhile before getting a starring role, most prominently as a sidekick for Fatty Arbuckle, one of the biggest stars of the era.  It was only after the scandal that killed Arbuckle's career that Keaton became a star in his own right, and even then he only occasionally was his own director, more often working in collaboration with Edward Cline or someone else.  During the silent era, he didn't work for a studio, rather he worked with independent producer Joseph Schenk.  It was at the end of this era, when sound came in, that Keaton signed with MGM (after the financial disaster of The General), where he made his last silents and several talkies.  Far from being unable to transition, Keaton's talkies were immensely successful commercially, though fairly weak artistically, mostly because the studio system limited his creative input as much as possible and refused to let him even co-direct.  (I reviewed all the late Keaton films here).

Keaton was an alcoholic, and his problem became increasingly worse during the MGM years.  But all accounts I've seen place the blame for that on his awful marriage (his second) to Mae Scriven (1933-36).  Both of these marriages are unmentioned in the film, though the marriage that is in the film seems roughly comparable to his third and final one (to Eleanor Norris) from 1940 until his death in 1966, that he credited with helping him kick alcohol and restart his career.  A career which far from being confined to the vaudeville stage, had him steadily working in film and television for 25 years.

But does any of this matter?  Does a film, even a biographical picture, have to be bound by the basic facts of history?  Shouldn't it be allowed to tell its own story in its own way, as long as that story is itself, entertainingly told?  I do think there's a limit beyond which the truth can be stretched too far in the name of art.  Despite our best efforts to ignore, obfuscate, reframe, mythologize and narrativize them, things actually did happen in the past just as they continue to happen in the present and will keep on happening in the future.  There really was a Buster Keaton.

The Laurel & Hardy Project #7: Love 'Em and Weep

Once again in the same film but not yet as an official comedy team and hardly in any scenes together at all, this film does feature both Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.   It's part of a series Hal Roach was trying in 1927, the All-Star Comedy series, in which various contract players were mixed and matched with varyingly prominent parts, from leads to bit players.  Mae Busch gets top billing here, though Laurel probably has the most screen time and James Finlayson plays the ostensible lead character.  Hardy has only a very minor role (he nonetheless makes the most of it).  Finlayson plays a rich, married businessman, Laurel his employee (a title card claims Laurel has a "commanding power over women").  Finlayson's old flame Busch appears brandishing a photo of the two of them in swimming attire and threatening blackmail unless he pays her off at 7 o'clock.  Finlayson, however, is with his wife hosting Hardy and his wife at that time, so he gets Laurel to try and keep Busch away.  This fails, of course, and when Laurel and Busch arrive at the dinner party, mildly amusing antics and violence ensue.

Finlayson doesn't work very well as a lead.  Short, slight and bald with a broad fake mustache, his go-to comic move is to look at the audience, bug out his eyes and wiggle his whiskers.  It's cute in its own way, but he uses it way too much.  Laurel, by comparison, uses his own trademark mug (facing the camera and making an exaggerated "weeping" face) only once in the film, where we get Finlayson's fourth wall shattering twitch a half dozen times in the film's first reel.  Finlayson would go on to play supporting roles in many Laurel & Hardy films, for which I'm sure he'll prove to be much more suited, lasting in Hollywood until Royal Wedding in 1951.

Mae Busch, on the other hand, is pretty funny.  In the opening sequence, she gets to hide from Finlayson's wife behind a paper towel dispenser, which is as silly looking as it sounds.  In the middle section of the film, where she fights with Laurel in a restaurant, she doesn't really do much other than hit Stan and yell (Laurel steals this with some wonderfully non-sequiter stunts: falling down the stairs followed by being sniffed by the maitre'd for alcohol, opening a door into his face (a move I practiced often in high school and that I still think is hilarious) followed by the flying hat trick (when you put the hat on your head, only to have it pop off onto the floor) and backing his car into a much odler old car that immediately collapses in a heap of junk) but once they get to the dinner party and Busch faints (there's an errant bit of gunfire), she shines.  Laurel and Finlayson have to figure out how to get her unconscious body out of the house, and she plays the role of a limp body perfectly (imagine Weekend at Bernie's type antics).    Busch, too, would go on to appear in many Laurel & Hardy films, often playing Hardy's wife.  She started in Hollywood in 1912, had what appears to have been a big role in Ertich von Stroheim's 1922 blockbuster Foolish Wives and worked continuously until her death in 1946.

This Week in Rankings

A few weeks ago, I talked with Edwin of The Isolated Moviegoer about John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King.  You can read our conversation over at his website.

Here are the movies I've watched and rewatched over the last week or so and where they each land on The Big List.


Waterloo Bridge - 12, 1931
The Strange Love of Molly Louvain - 24, 1932

Springfield Rifle - 21, 1952

Project A - 10, 1983
The Armor of God - 16, 1986
Project A 2 - 11, 1987
Night and Day - 5, 2008

This Week in Rankings

Safe in Hell - 7, 1931
Frisco Jenny - 25, 1932
The Purchase Price - 30, 1932
China Seas - 15, 1935
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town - 22, 1936
The Hurricane - 20, 1937
A Family Affair - 22, 1937

Born Yesterday - 13, 1950
Les Girls - 18, 1957

Take Shelter - 10, 2011
Game Change - 2012

On The Miracle Worker

Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke both won Academy Awards in 1962 for reprising their roles as Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller.  They had played the parts together on Broadway, for which Bancroft also won a Tony.  The play itself was written by William Gibson, based on his own script for the TV drama series Playhouse 90.  That pretty much should indicate most of the strengths and weaknesses of the film.  The actresses playing the two leads are really, really good but the script at times veers into the kind of playwriting you expect to see on television: everything is always stated a little too clearly, a little too often.  If you're not sure why Sullivan is using a particular tactic in trying to teach Keller, don't worry, she'll explain it to you at least three times.

Fortunately, also reprising his role from the Broadway show was director Arthur Penn, making his second feature film after the very solid revisionist Billy the Kid Western The Left-Handed Gun, starring Paul Newman.  Penn, of course, is most famous today for directing Bonnie & Clyde and helping to make mainstream the influence of the French New Wave in Hollywood.  Already with The Miracle Worker, though, Penn is starting to break down the classical style into something rawer and more immediate.  While several scenes in the film textually involve nothing more interesting than Bancroft reciting the script's Big Themes, Penn frames them expressionistically, with deep shadows, odd angles, close foregrounds, etc, which helps prevent the film from descending into the "filmed theatre" trap that ensnared many theatrical/television adaptations in the late 1950s and early 60s (Marty and The Big Knife, I'm looking at you).

The best thing about the film is the centerpiece sequence where Bancroft, as Sullivan, the partially blind teacher is attempting to get Keller, the blind, deaf and mute 7 year old to eat breakfast properly at table.  Because of her disability, Keller's family has been allowing her to do whatever she wants: wander around the table, grabbing food from people's plates at will, eating with her hands, and generally making an unholy mess.  For the first time in her life, Keller is told "no" when Sullivan tries to get her to sit still and eat with a spoon.  She reacts with an outrageous tantrum and the two of them brutally fight, destroying the dining room in the process.  Penn films it in a dynamic, unmoored style, putting us in the midst of the action, and extends the scene for a remarkable nine minutes.  The fierceness and reckless abandon with which the actresses throw themselves into the fight is breathtaking: I'd say they earned their Oscars just for this sequence alone.  I can't think of a better fight sequence in any American film of the 1960s.  Maybe the opening shots of Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss have the same kind of visceral impact.  For a fight scene between two women, it might be unmatched by any film I've seen up until Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

This is one of my favorite things about film.  You can take a heartwarming, inspirational, start-writing-your-Oscar-acceptance-speech-now piece of filmed theatre and in the right hands and the right time, it can manage to become something entirely different, something totally new.  The fight sequence captures the essence of the film better than any of its speeches, and of its grand actorly moments.  If the film consisted of nothing more than it and a few surrounding contextualizing minutes (say from when the family first sets down to eat to when Sullivan emerges triumphant only to be told that it's now time for dinner) it would express exactly the same themes, have exactly the same meaning.  Instead of Sullivan's determination and unwillingness to accept Keller as a lesser human being, one unworthy of being treated like anyone else (the soft bigotry of low expectations?) being explained in painstaking detail like it is in the rest of the film, we see it in action and understand it better than we ever would otherwise.  It's a little bit of cinema at the heart of a TV play.