THE DARK CORNER (1946) ***
If you've ever yearned to see Lucille Ball in a film noir, this movie, directed by Henry Hathaway, will give you the chance. Lucy plays Kathleen Stewart, secretary to a P.I. who has just opened an office in New York City, Brad Galt (Mark Stevens). In no time at all Galt tangles with a crew of weird, menacing characters. One is his former partner, Anthony Jardine, who had Galt framed in San Francisco and sent to prison. Jardine is now a lawyer and one of his clients is Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb), the owner of a ritzy art gallery, whose much younger wife is having an affair with Jardine. We know this because in their first scene together the radio in the background is playing "The More I See You (the More I Want You)." In fact, the movie is filled with ambient sound—music from orchestras or juke boxes heard through open doorways of night clubs and bars or on radios and phonographs in rooms, and street noise of all kinds, including traffic and the rumble of subway trains, heard even through open windows when the action moves indoors. In a moment of bizarre contrast, a lovely version of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" plays while a brutal murder is taking place.
Galt is framed for the murder of his former partner, and Lucy, who has fallen in love with Galt, must help him find the real killer before the police find him. I love Lucy, but she doesn't seem ideally cast here. She handles with aplomb the wisecracking banter with Galt as she deflects his sexual advances at the beginning of the movie, but after that her character becomes a bit bland and she doesn't really get the chance to shine. Stevens doesn't have enough heft as an actor to put across his cynical lines, which sound like they come directly from a Raymond Chandler novel. They really need somebody more forceful, like Humphrey Bogart. Webb is delightful, spouting arch witticisms like "The enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither illegal nor immoral" (actually a variation on a quip by Robert Benchley).
But the whole movie has an air of familiarity, from the predictable plot to the well-worn characters, including Webb, channeling his Waldo Lydecker from Laura, and William Bendix, playing a thuggish P.I., who seems to be reprising his role in The Glass Key. One element, though, dominates the movie: Joe MacDonald's astonishing cinematography, a perfect exemplar of the film noir look. I've seldom seen a movie shot with such high-contrast lighting. This is a black-and-white film in the most literal sense, a film with virtually no tonal gradation: the blacks and shadows are as dark, and the whites as bright, as imaginable, with few shades of gray in between. This extreme lighting, along with the use of mirrors and windows as recurring visual motifs, gives the film great visual appeal. One final note: the set decorators should be commended for their audacity in furnishing the Cathcart Gallery. It is as full of art treasures as the National Gallery in London or the Louvre, filled with Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Van Goghs, even Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.
BORN TO KILL (1947) ***½
A few months ago, in his blog Maximum Strength Mick, San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle asked his readers what they would present as guest programmers on Turner Classic Movies. I chose four undervalued genre pictures from the studio era, and for my film noir I chose this movie. Directed by Robert Wise in a less genre-influenced style than his later near-classic The Set-Up (which I previously reviewed at The Movie Projector), it nonetheless has several effectively atmospheric sequences, especially one that takes place on a foggy night in a remote area of the dunes at the beach. Despite Wise's restrained direction, the movie's plot and characters unmistakably make it a noir.
It opens in Reno, where Helen Trent (Claire Trevor, in an atypically posh role) is just completing her divorce. On her last night in town, at a casino she encounters a man, Sam Wild (!) (Lawrence Tierney), whose good looks and sexual charisma spark her interest. Little does she know he is a paranoid psychopath dating another resident (Isabel Jewell) of the boarding house where she has been staying and that later that night he will savagely murder both Jewell and the man she has been two-timing him with. When Helen discovers the bodies in the kitchen of the boarding house, she calmly walks around to the front door, enters the house, and calls the train depot to reserve a seat on tomorrow's train to San Francisco, where she lives. Later she explains that she didn't call the police because "it's a lot of bother." Within ten minutes the tone of the movie has been established by the gory double murder, and the corrupt nature of its two main characters clearly revealed by their roles in it. When Wild boldly picks up Helen at the train station the next day and follows her back to San Francisco, we can see where the plot is heading: it is inevitable that these two forces—he all uncontrolled impulse and she all cold calculation—will collide like matter and anti-matter, creating an explosive reaction that after minor detonations along the way will end in mutual annihilation.
Along for the ride is a great supporting cast. Esther Howard, who had small roles in seven films directed by Preston Sturges, plays the blowsy, beer-guzzling landlady of the boarding house in Reno. Walter Slezak plays the sly P.I. she hires to track down the killer. Best of all, Elisha Cook, Jr. plays Wild's best friend, Marty, for five years his roommate and protector. After finding out about the double murder in Reno, he patiently tells Wild, "You can't just go around killin' people when the notion strikes you. It's not feasible" and explains exactly what must be done to avoid getting caught. To say that there is an implicitly homoerotic element to the relationship between these two would be an understatement.
We can predict how the movie will end but not the twists and turns it will take on its way there, and watching the scenario play out to its inevitable end—witnessing the thrust-and-parry relationship between Trevor and Tierney as she attempts to control an essentially anarchic force—provides an hour and a half of immensely satisfying entertainment, especially for lovers of the genre.
BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1955) ****
Although nearly unknown in the U.S. until recently, the French director Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) has long been recognized in Europe as a precursor of, and major influence on, the French New Wave. Traces of his style and sensibility are easily recognized in early works by Godard and Truffaut, especially Breathless (which incorporates references to the plot of Bob le Flambeur and even features a cameo by Melville) and Shoot the Piano Player. In fact, a convincing case could be made the Bob le Flambeur is actually the first movie of the New Wave.
This is a heist movie—a type of film considered by many a sub-genre of film noir—in the vein of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing, but I would say that as good as those movies are, Bob le Flambeur is even better. Even though it is a heist movie—the object is the casino at Deauville—the plan for the heist isn't hatched until well into the movie, and the (naturally) unsuccessful heist never actually happens. The movie clearly occupies film noir territory with its almost exclusively nocturnal action; its cast of petty crooks, hustlers, gamblers, and gendarmes who keep tabs on them; and its settings in bars, night clubs, card rooms, race tracks, and casinos both legal and illegal. The whole movie has an aura of life lived on the edge, outside of conventional society and in an atmosphere of risk and unpredictability. Over all hangs an air of fatalism, of men and women driven by internal forces to behave in ways that will inevitably lead to their doom.
Movies of this type invariably have an ensemble cast of colorful characters, but here it is the main character, Bob Montagné, the flambeur or compulsive gambler of the title (he even keeps a one-armed bandit in a small closet in his living room just to amuse himself with), who lifts the story into the stratosphere. As portrayed by Roger Duchesne, Bob is a slick, sophisticated man, a middle-aged ex-con who enjoys the good things in life—a quality wardrobe, a snazzy American Plymouth convertible, and a cool bachelor pad with a loft and picture-window view of the Sacré-Coeur—and maintains his comfortable lifestyle through the tireless pursuit of all sorts of gambling coupled with an unshakable belief in his own good luck. For the first part of the movie, his good fortune always seems to hold. But around midway through, his luck turns and, broke, he is forced to devise the scheme to rob the casino. His plan, so complex and so intricately engineered down to the least detail, clearly indicates a formidable intelligence and organizational ability that channeled into legitimate pursuits would probably have made Bob a very rich businessman.
Melville directs with the flair and personal authority that would later come to be considered hallmarks of the New Wave directors. As well as the conventional flat cuts, dissolves, and fade-out/fade-ins, he revives transitional devices such as iris-ins, iris-outs, horizontal wipes, and at one point even a vertical wipe—just the kind of retro flourishes later used by Truffaut and Godard in their early films. He and his cinematographer, the great Henri Decaë, film the deserted early-morning streets of Paris and the dives frequented by his characters in a near-documentary way that makes the viewer feel like an observer of reality. Melville, who also co-wrote the movie, gives Bob a concisely revealed backstory and places him in situations—such as his avuncular interactions with both Paulo, his young protégé and the son of his former partner-in-crime and Anne, a foolish, uninhibited, but charming teenager living on the streets—that succinctly limn a fully developed, fascinating, and sympathetic character.
In typical noir fashion, the movie ends in irony: waiting for several hours in the casino for the robbery to begin, Bob whiles away the time gambling and manages to win a fortune. He doesn't really need the money any more and feels his self-confidence restored, yet he still carries through with the robbery even though he knows it is destined for failure. I can think of no other movie that so obviously acts as a transition between the American films noirs of the 1940's and early 50's and their offspring, the French New Wave films of the late 1950's and early 60's.
BREATHLESS (1959) ***
After watching this movie—one of the seminal films of the French New Wave—with friends the other night, I asked one (not a cinephile, just an ordinary movie watcher) what he thought of it. His answer: "Merde." I wouldn't go quite that far myself, but I must say that afterward I felt a distinct sense of letdown, a sort of cinematic petite mort. I have to confess that I have never been that fond of Jean-Luc Godard, the film's director. Although I had never seen Breathless before, I have seen several of the movies that immediately followed it. In each of those movies I found some things to like, but with the exception of Weekend (1967) and possibly Contempt (1963), they never struck me as unified works of art or even film narrative. And I always felt that they were keeping me at arm's distance, almost as though Godard was daring the viewer to tolerate his idiosyncrasies.
In Breathless, Godard has an annoying way of taking a stylistic quirk and repeating it ad nauseam. A couple of examples: 1) Those vaunted jump cuts. Exactly what was their purpose? Just to show that he could defy the conventions of film storytelling if he wanted to, as if he could by the power of his ego turn a flaw into a virtue and exhibit his individualism by a refusal to stick to the rules, even when there is a perfectly good reason for the rules? I could understand the cuts that covered major ellipses in the narrative to speed things along, but I found all the small jump cuts (or maybe jumpy cuts would be more accurate), when just a second or so of action was missing, to be distracting. 2) Belmondo's tic of rubbing his lips. Those are magnificent lips—in a way they are the real star of the movie. Is Godard trying to show what a narcissist Michel (the character Belmondo plays) is? The time he did this in front of Patricia's (Jean Seberg) dressing table mirror, I actually thought he was putting on some of her lipstick. These examples beg the question: At what point does novelty become tedium, cleverness become self-indulgence, hommage become pretension? The answer provided by this movie is, around the tenth repetition. But don't worry, you'll get the chance to see this answer confirmed by another ten or so repetitions.
So why watch Breathless? I can offer three reasons (hence the *** rating): 1) The film is historically important. Breathless is—along with The 400 Blows and Hiroshima, Mon Amour—one of the three earliest full-blown examples of the French New Wave, a movement that had tremendous impact on the history of film. 2) Several dazzling extended tracking shots by cinematographer Raoul Coutard, including a 360-degree shot of Seberg circling the room that is repeated a second time, then repeated again with Belmondo circling in the opposite direction. 3) Jean-Paul Belmondo. His performance is as revolutionary as Marlon Brando's in A Streetcar Named Desire—unique, charismatic, and completely riveting. From little more than a sketchy case study of a self-absorbed young man with severe personality disorder, he creates a compelling character. If you can stay with this movie—considered by many Godard's most accessible work—to the end, you might want to seek out more of his films. But as Breathless attests, be prepared to accept the inevitable annoyances and excesses of Godard to enjoy his moments of inspiration.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Famous Actress: Reese Witherspoon
Reese Witherspoon
Reese Witherspoon
Reese WitherspoonFamous Pictures Reese Witherspoon
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 1
For a man who directed only five full-length films released between 1949 and 1972, the French director Jacques Tati (1907-1982) has a huge reputation among cinephiles. Two of his movies, Play Time (1967) and Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), were in 2008 named by the French publication Cahiers du Cinéma among the 100 greatest films of all time. Predictably, only a handful of movies on the list were comedies, including the two by Tati. He was recognized along with other comic masters like Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Woody Allen, a pretty impressive group of people to be included among. While most Americans who know anything at all about movies and popular culture are familiar with those names, I wonder how many know of Tati, much less recognize that among aficionados of film comedy his reputation is the equal of those other well-known geniuses.Tati was born Jacques Tatischeff in France in 1907, the son of a Russian father and Dutch mother. As a young man he served in the French cavalry and was for a while a professional sports player. These are important facts to keep in mind because in his films the 6' 3" tall, gangly Tati often portrayed an ungainly klutz. Yet like that trifecta of silent comedians—Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd—he was an extremely agile man whose awkwardness was entirely—and brilliantly—simulated in remarkable feats of physical acting that rival those of his illustrious predecessors.
This was made clear in a short film he made in 1967, Cours du Soir (Night Class), filmed on leftover sets from Play Time (and included in the Criterion edition of Play Time). Here he portrays his famed alter ego, M. Hulot, as an instructor conducting a night class on comic acting for aspiring comedians. In the course of the 30-minute long film, Tati reveals some remarkable insights into his professional technique.
At the beginning of the class and at times throughout it, he succinctly summarizes the gist of the lesson. "Observe! Observe!" he keeps telling his students: Watch carefully the way people express themselves through their body language, and draw your inspiration from that. In character, he demonstrates to his students how to convey character types through facial expressions, physical gestures, and posture and bearing. What we have is essentially a simulation of his direction of the actors in his movies, with Tati acting the parts to show his performers what he wants them to do. He also demonstrates his still impressive horse-riding skills (remember that he was 60 years old at the time) while showing the students how to use various styles of horsemanship to convey character.
Most tellingly, he demonstrates to his students how to take a pratfall while walking up a short flight of stairs, about three steps. Tati makes it look so effortless that all the students are eager to give it a try. One student even attempts to analyze and diagram M. Hulot's movements mathematically. Yet every single student fails to do successfully what seemed so simple when Tati did it. Their attempts at reproducing his pratfall are truly inept and not in the least comic. Although real, their pratfalls don't seem at all realistic. Only Tati is able to act with his body, to simulate clumsiness, in such a convincing way as to produce humor. What he makes appear so easy to his students is actually a feat of accomplished acting skill and great physical control.
After being in the cavalry and playing sports, Tati eventually became a music hall performer. He performed one of his acts in the movie Parade, which he directed for Swedish television in 1974. Portraying a horse rider in a circus act, he plays the parts of both the rider and the trained horse. From the waist up he is the rider, from the waist down the horse, and he simultaneously imitates both with absolute precision. The French writer Colette described Tati as a centaur in this act, and it is a truly impressive demonstration of his physical and mimetic skills.
Tati first became a film maker when he filmed some of his acts and later co-directed a short film, Gai Dimanche (Jolly Sunday) in 1935. He wrote and acted in small roles in a few movies from the mid-1930's to the mid-1940's, including a short about boxing directed by René Clément, Soigne Ton Gauche (Watch Your Left), made in 1935 and two full-length features directed by Claude Autant-Lara, notably Devil in the Flesh (1947). That same year Tati directed his first solo short film, L'Ecole des Facteurs (School for Postmen). (He reproduced part of this film in Cours du Soir.)
In 1947 he also directed his first full-length film, Jour de Fête (released sixty years ago in 1949), a movie about a village postman, played by Tati himself, that included some ideas inspired by L'Ecole des Facteurs. The movie began as a short film about an overly enthusiastic postman who sees a newsreel feature about modern methods of mail delivery in the U. S. (a very funny film-within-a-film) and tries to adapt them to his own situation, with comically disastrous results. Tati then took the character he created and built around him an entire movie that runs 79 minutes in its restored version and integrates the original short that inspired it as a concluding set piece.The postman's name is François, and he is quite a character. François is in many ways a forerunner of M. Hulot, the comic persona Tati would assume in his next four feature-length films. François is in all ways extreme. An unusually tall man, he is in constant motion, and his movements are awkward, jerky, and very funny. Even the way he rides his bicycle is comical. He is enthusiastic about everything, and his enthusiasms are all oversized. The movie opens with a traveling carnival arriving in a small provincial French town and setting up for the Bastille Day celebrations. The first thing they do is try to set up a large flagpole in the town square.
As soon as François rides into the scene, he throws himself zealously into helping set up the flagpole and has soon commandeered the process, directing everyone else in a scene full of physical comedy built around the ungainliness of the huge flagpole. After the flagpole is finally set up, François walks over to the café-bar for a coffee, and the flagpole collapses, just missing him as he walks through the door, in a moment clearly reminiscent of the house facade falling on Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr.
The thing François is most enthusiastic about—almost to the point of fanaticism—is his job as the village postman. So officious is François that he behaves as though he truly believes his job is the most important thing in the village. When he sees that newsreel about the American postal service, he immediately throws himself with nearly manic fervor into adapting its aims of efficient and speedy mail delivery to his own job. "Rapidité!" becomes his mantra, and he repeats it until it becomes absurdly funny.
Because of his inflated sense of enthusiasm and his belief in his own significance to the fabric of village life, the other villagers treat him as a "character," joking about him behind his back and making him the object of gentle ridicule in much the same way Harold Lloyd was treated in many of his movies (and here I'm thinking particularly of The Freshman). At one point they conspire to get him drunk under the pretense of playing pool with him for beer. This gives Tati the opportunity to demonstrate his skill at physical comedy by doing a drunk routine, much as Chaplin and W. C. Fields did in many of their movies, always a sure-fire way of getting laughs.
François is essentially the classic comedy outsider, the oddball who doesn't fit in with conventional society. In this way François foreshadows Tati's later creation M. Hulot, whose essential character trait is this same sense of apartness, a sense that became more pronounced with each successive film. It's not exactly alienation, for he never seems completely aware of it, nor does it seem to distress him unduly. Yet there is an implicit element of melancholy in this state of comic outsiderhood. This same sense of melancholy is also present to a degree in the characters played by Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. If I mention them, it is to show that Tati knew his American silent film comedians thoroughly and synthesized aspects of their work with his own original inspiration.
In its final form Jour de Fête is beautifully constructed. It begins with a wizened old lady leading her goat around the village and talking to it, acting like a chorus, introducing us to each of the villagers. This is followed by the arrival of the carnival. The movie concludes the next day with the carnival being dismantled and leaving town. At the same time, François is trying out his new techniques of mail delivery, an effort that ends with his riding his bicycle at full speed into a canal in an arduous physical stunt reminiscent of Buster Keaton. The movie closes with François getting a ride with the little old lady and her goat, now driving a cart into the village.
One remarkable thing about Jour de Fête, particularly when compared with Tati's later movies, is how much sound there is in it. In later films, Tati used sound quite sparingly and used both it and silence in very deliberate ways to create specific effects. But Jour de Fête is filled with sound—jaunty, jazzy music on the soundtrack, ambient sounds and music, sound effects, and lots of dialogue, both essential dialogue in the foreground and nonessential dialogue in the background. In a night scene that takes place in the country, the soundtrack is even filled with the natural night sounds of the countryside.
One final observation about Jour de Fête: With its location filming and largely non-professional cast, it gives the viewer a vivid picture of a traditional small village (Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre) in post-World War II southern France almost untouched by modernity. In the entire movie, an automobile appears only once, briefly speeding through the village. Jour de Fête captures a time, a place, and a way of life that have vanished forever. Considering the film in this light makes both it and the movies that followed it—with their recurring theme of rampant modernity draining the humanity and soul from contemporary life—all the more poignant.
This is the first of a multi-part retrospective of the career and films of Jacques Tati. Other installments will appear in future editions of The Movie Projector.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
René Clair: Breaking the Sound Barrier
"Perhaps the first director to appreciate fully the implications of sound was the Frenchman René Clair."
As any film enthusiast knows, the coming of sound to motion pictures in the late 1920's threw the film industry into a state of confusion. Filmmakers at first simply did not know what to do with the new invention. Recorded music scores were added to already filmed silent pictures, or newly filmed sound or musical sequences interpolated into them. The first all-talking pictures were merely brief newsreel segments or short recordings of novelty acts. Howard Hughes responded by re-shooting the entire movie Hell's Angels—already completed in 1928 as a silent—with sound, finally releasing it in 1930.
By this time, the studios had pretty much decided that sound was synonymous with dialogue. Talk replaced action, sound stages replaced plein air settings, and the addition of bulky sound recording apparatus severely limited the mobility of the camera. Both the concept of montage adulated by the Russians as the apogee of the art of cinema and the balletic aspects of silents—their artistic use of motion and movement—gave way to a static approach that reverted to the primitive notion of the movie as a filmed stage play prevalent before pioneers like D. W. Griffith showed the world a truly cinematic approach to filmmaking.
The French film director René Clair (1898-1981) refused to be limited by the addition of sound to image and became, along with Rouben Mamoulian and Ernst Lubitsch, one of the foremost innovators of ways to creatively combine the two. Having made several silent movies, he was a traditionalist (he once said that "nothing essential has been added to the art of the motion picture since D. W. Griffith") who was ambivalent about the coming of sound to movies. In two of his first sound films, Le Million and A Nous la Liberté (both 1931), he attempted to avoid obvious uses of sound and ended up creating two works that, even aside from being conspicuously novel in the ways they integrated sound with image, are just plain masterpieces.
Le Million is constructed on an elegantly simple premise. A penniless Parisian artist, Michel (Raymond Lefebvre), leaves his jacket with his girl friend, Béatrice (Annabella), a ballerina who lives across the hall from him, to be mended. Then he discovers that he has bought a winning lottery ticket and remembers that it is in the pocket of the jacket. There's only one problem: Béatrice has given the jacket to a petty thief called Le Père la Tulipe (Papa Tulip), who came through her skylight while being chased across the rooftops by the police. The rest of the movie involves the efforts of Michel to trace the missing jacket and retrieve the winning ticket.
Of course, the seemingly simple plot soon develops complications, and in the tradition of the great silent comedies, Clair keeps piling on the complications, each complication leading to yet more complications. First, Michel's friend, the sculptor Prosper (Jean-Louis Allibert)—miffed that his own ticket isn't the winning one and that Michel refuses to divide the winnings with him if he can find the ticket—decides to track it down himself, taking time out along the way to sabotage Michel's own efforts. Then the jacket ends up in a junk shop, where an eccentric Italian opera singer called Sopranelli, taken with the jacket's authentic shabbiness, buys it to use as part of his act ("The Bohemians"!). And Le Père la Tulipe turns out to be not a smalltime crook at all, but the sophisticated mastermind of a gang of professional thieves. When he becomes aware of all the interest in the jacket, he decides to get it back himself to see just what makes it so valuable to Michel and Prosper. Finally, Béatrice, feeling guilty over giving the jacket away, also gets involved in the pursuit by trying to find the mysterious Le Père la Tulipe in the hope that he will lead her to the missing jacket. So we soon have four individuals simultaneously chasing the elusive jacket, now in the hands of Sopranelli, who has developed a very possessive attitude toward it and refuses to part with it.
Clair makes use of sound in several unusual ways. Michel's neighbors and creditors, eagerly waiting to celebrate his good fortune, act as a sort of operetta chorus, singing comments on the characters and the action. Likewise, Le Père la Tulipe sings out his instructions to the gang of criminals he commands. When Michel and Béatrice get to the Opéra Lyrique, they hide onstage behind the scenery while Sopranelli and his female partner perform a duet between quarreling lovers all of whose words and emotions apply equally to the concealed Michel and Béatrice. When dialogue is unnecessary, the actors simply mime speech and use emphatic physical gestures as if they are in a silent movie, sometimes with music playing on the soundtrack much as it might have in a silent movie theater.
The similarity of Le Million to classic silent film comedy—the comedy of Chaplin, Lloyd, and especially Keaton—is obvious in the near impossibility of describing in any real detail the plot of the movie. The numerous, rapid plot complications I referred to don't seem to unfold in a deliberately scripted way but to evolve spontaneously and unpredictably. They are often played out much as they would be in a silent comedy, with movement and wordless sight gags substituting for explanatory dialogue.
If I could use one word to describe the style of Le Million, it would be kinetic. Once events are set in train, the film never stops moving, always proceeding forward . . . forward. It is for its entire 83 minutes a moving picture in the most literal way. And it is unbelievably entertaining, amusing, and unlike anything you are likely to have seen before. Strictly speaking, it isn't even a musical, even though it contains music and singing. If the movie's style can be summed up in one word, so can its effect on the viewer. That word is charming.
A Nous la Liberté, released a mere eight months later, takes the imaginative sound techniques of Le Million and adds to them stinging sociopolitical satire and irony. If the whimsy and kineticism of Le Million are akin to the spirit of Keaton, then the focused social and political criticism of A Nous la Liberté are closer in spirit to Chaplin, but without Chaplin's flirtation with sentimentality. (Indeed, Chaplin has been accused of cribbing ideas from Clair in Modern Times.) The result is that A Nous la Liberté is an even richer and more thematically challenging experience than its predecessor.
The movie opens in a prison, where prisoners are sitting on each side of a long table assembling toy horses. One of the men conceals a file in his sock, and when he and his cellmate return to their cell that evening, they saw through the bars of the window and escape. However, only one of them, Emile (Henri Marchand), makes it over the wall; the other, Louis (Raymond Cordy) is captured by the guards and returned to his cell. Within a few months, Emile has become an entrepreneur and captain of industry, the owner of a huge and successful factory that manufactures phonographs. He has left all vestiges of his former life behind, gaining everything material he might ever have wanted: a lavish mansion, a ritzy limousine, servants, a beautiful mistress, and a slew of high-society friends.
When Louis is released from prison, he hits the road and before long discovers his former cellmate, technically a prison escapee and wanted man, luxuriating in his new life. Not only does he receive a cold reception from Emile, but he finds Emile a changed man. He is now an uptight, status-obsessed capitalist with no desire to renew the easy camaraderie he previously enjoyed with his old cellmate. Louis, though, sees his chance and is determined to use his hold over Emile to his own advantage.
In particular, Louis has fallen in love with a pretty young secretary at the factory, Jeanne (Rolla France), and presses Emile to introduce him and arrange a marriage. This whole idea of Emile being able to procure Jeanne for his old cellmate provides Clair with the opportunity to present a harsh indictment of capitalism. He implicitly compares Emile to a feudal lord and his workers to serfs by having Emile coerce Jeanne's uncle, who also works at the factory and doesn't want to lose his job by alienating the boss, to hand over Jeanne to Louis. He doesn't explicitly threaten the uncle but after presenting his proposal merely asks, "Vous comprenez?" (You do understand?) The pandering uncle does indeed understand and happily complies, for not only will he protect his job, but he will curry favor with the boss by having a niece married to a man who appears to be the boss's best friend.
Another way Clair skewers capitalism and the dehumanizing effects of the modern industrial environment is in the way Emile's factory is depicted. To get in, the workers must first pass through gates as they punch their time cards, the gates first excluding and then confining them. When we first see the main building from the outside, the first impression is of a vast, ultra-modern, monochromatic expanse built on an inhuman scale. Everything is composed of severe, straight horizontal lines and right angles. This is a sterile, featureless, and soulless place, a place where regimentation of form and behavior are pervasive. The closest thing to it we have seen in the movie so far in both appearance and atmosphere is the prison that Emile and Louis were in at the beginning of the movie.
Once the action moves inside, the resemblance to the prison is even more pronounced. The factory floor with its production line—another severe and soulless place—is laid out in exactly the same way as the work room in the opening scene at the prison, with conveyor belts substituting for the work tables. And it is framed and photographed in exactly the same way. Instead of prison guards, we see supervisors overseeing the production line and urging the workers on just as the guards at the prison did. The parallels between the prison and the factory are unmistakable.
Clair combines sound with action in many of the same ways he did in Le Million, using sung dialogue, silent dialogue with musical accompaniment, and sound effects that originate outside the frame (the cinematic equivalent of "noises off" in a stage play), among other devices. He is constantly playing with sound. Even the fact that Emile's factory makes phonographs seems an in-joke. And Clair creates one of the first examples—possibly the very first example—of a sound gag in motion pictures.
When Louis first sees Jeanne, she is standing in the second-floor window of her apartment singing a love song. He is immediately captivated and finds himself falling in love, responding to the sentiments of the song. When she walks away from the window, he ambles over to the door to her building and waits for her at the bottom of the stairs. When she emerges, the song is still going, but Jeanne is not singing. Just at that moment the music begins to falter and slow to a stop, and we (and Louis) realize that Jeanne wasn't singing at all but simply mouthing the words on a disc playing on one of the phonographs that Emile manufactures.
As we learn more about Emile's life, it becomes clearer that it is not as idyllic as it appears. His snobbish friends make fun of him behind his back. His chic mistress is conducting an affair with a gigolo and ends up running off with him. Then another former prisoner spots Emile and is soon joined by other former prisoners, who proceed to blackmail him. And the authorities have also spotted him and are preparing to arrest him. Emile's ideal life, it seems, is about to crumble.
The climactic sequence occurs at the inaugural festivities of Emile's newest, totally automated factory. With the police on their way to arrest him, Emile dedicates the factory then immediately presents it to his employees. "The machines will now work for them!" he proclaims. The self-made capitalist has just placed the means of production in the hands of the workers. Just before the police arrive, Emile and Louis—the former worshiper of materialism and his friend the romantic anarchist—dressed again as tramps, hit the road and are last seen walking in fellowship on their contented way to . . . who knows where?
Taken together, Le Million and A Nous la Liberté are twin landmarks in the history of cinema. They are records of one of the great filmmakers working at a level of intensive inspiration that few directors ever achieve and that Clair himself never again quite equaled in his long career. But beyond their historical importance, these are very entertaining films that can still surprise viewers, encourage them to reconsider the conventions of combining sound and image in movies, and in the case of A Nous la Liberté compel them to re-examine the prevailing values of Western culture toward ambition and success and remind them of the enduring disparity between the powerful and the powerless, the haves and have-nots.
—Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art
As any film enthusiast knows, the coming of sound to motion pictures in the late 1920's threw the film industry into a state of confusion. Filmmakers at first simply did not know what to do with the new invention. Recorded music scores were added to already filmed silent pictures, or newly filmed sound or musical sequences interpolated into them. The first all-talking pictures were merely brief newsreel segments or short recordings of novelty acts. Howard Hughes responded by re-shooting the entire movie Hell's Angels—already completed in 1928 as a silent—with sound, finally releasing it in 1930.
By this time, the studios had pretty much decided that sound was synonymous with dialogue. Talk replaced action, sound stages replaced plein air settings, and the addition of bulky sound recording apparatus severely limited the mobility of the camera. Both the concept of montage adulated by the Russians as the apogee of the art of cinema and the balletic aspects of silents—their artistic use of motion and movement—gave way to a static approach that reverted to the primitive notion of the movie as a filmed stage play prevalent before pioneers like D. W. Griffith showed the world a truly cinematic approach to filmmaking.
The French film director René Clair (1898-1981) refused to be limited by the addition of sound to image and became, along with Rouben Mamoulian and Ernst Lubitsch, one of the foremost innovators of ways to creatively combine the two. Having made several silent movies, he was a traditionalist (he once said that "nothing essential has been added to the art of the motion picture since D. W. Griffith") who was ambivalent about the coming of sound to movies. In two of his first sound films, Le Million and A Nous la Liberté (both 1931), he attempted to avoid obvious uses of sound and ended up creating two works that, even aside from being conspicuously novel in the ways they integrated sound with image, are just plain masterpieces.
Le Million is constructed on an elegantly simple premise. A penniless Parisian artist, Michel (Raymond Lefebvre), leaves his jacket with his girl friend, Béatrice (Annabella), a ballerina who lives across the hall from him, to be mended. Then he discovers that he has bought a winning lottery ticket and remembers that it is in the pocket of the jacket. There's only one problem: Béatrice has given the jacket to a petty thief called Le Père la Tulipe (Papa Tulip), who came through her skylight while being chased across the rooftops by the police. The rest of the movie involves the efforts of Michel to trace the missing jacket and retrieve the winning ticket.Of course, the seemingly simple plot soon develops complications, and in the tradition of the great silent comedies, Clair keeps piling on the complications, each complication leading to yet more complications. First, Michel's friend, the sculptor Prosper (Jean-Louis Allibert)—miffed that his own ticket isn't the winning one and that Michel refuses to divide the winnings with him if he can find the ticket—decides to track it down himself, taking time out along the way to sabotage Michel's own efforts. Then the jacket ends up in a junk shop, where an eccentric Italian opera singer called Sopranelli, taken with the jacket's authentic shabbiness, buys it to use as part of his act ("The Bohemians"!). And Le Père la Tulipe turns out to be not a smalltime crook at all, but the sophisticated mastermind of a gang of professional thieves. When he becomes aware of all the interest in the jacket, he decides to get it back himself to see just what makes it so valuable to Michel and Prosper. Finally, Béatrice, feeling guilty over giving the jacket away, also gets involved in the pursuit by trying to find the mysterious Le Père la Tulipe in the hope that he will lead her to the missing jacket. So we soon have four individuals simultaneously chasing the elusive jacket, now in the hands of Sopranelli, who has developed a very possessive attitude toward it and refuses to part with it.
Clair makes use of sound in several unusual ways. Michel's neighbors and creditors, eagerly waiting to celebrate his good fortune, act as a sort of operetta chorus, singing comments on the characters and the action. Likewise, Le Père la Tulipe sings out his instructions to the gang of criminals he commands. When Michel and Béatrice get to the Opéra Lyrique, they hide onstage behind the scenery while Sopranelli and his female partner perform a duet between quarreling lovers all of whose words and emotions apply equally to the concealed Michel and Béatrice. When dialogue is unnecessary, the actors simply mime speech and use emphatic physical gestures as if they are in a silent movie, sometimes with music playing on the soundtrack much as it might have in a silent movie theater.
The similarity of Le Million to classic silent film comedy—the comedy of Chaplin, Lloyd, and especially Keaton—is obvious in the near impossibility of describing in any real detail the plot of the movie. The numerous, rapid plot complications I referred to don't seem to unfold in a deliberately scripted way but to evolve spontaneously and unpredictably. They are often played out much as they would be in a silent comedy, with movement and wordless sight gags substituting for explanatory dialogue.
If I could use one word to describe the style of Le Million, it would be kinetic. Once events are set in train, the film never stops moving, always proceeding forward . . . forward. It is for its entire 83 minutes a moving picture in the most literal way. And it is unbelievably entertaining, amusing, and unlike anything you are likely to have seen before. Strictly speaking, it isn't even a musical, even though it contains music and singing. If the movie's style can be summed up in one word, so can its effect on the viewer. That word is charming.
A Nous la Liberté, released a mere eight months later, takes the imaginative sound techniques of Le Million and adds to them stinging sociopolitical satire and irony. If the whimsy and kineticism of Le Million are akin to the spirit of Keaton, then the focused social and political criticism of A Nous la Liberté are closer in spirit to Chaplin, but without Chaplin's flirtation with sentimentality. (Indeed, Chaplin has been accused of cribbing ideas from Clair in Modern Times.) The result is that A Nous la Liberté is an even richer and more thematically challenging experience than its predecessor.
The movie opens in a prison, where prisoners are sitting on each side of a long table assembling toy horses. One of the men conceals a file in his sock, and when he and his cellmate return to their cell that evening, they saw through the bars of the window and escape. However, only one of them, Emile (Henri Marchand), makes it over the wall; the other, Louis (Raymond Cordy) is captured by the guards and returned to his cell. Within a few months, Emile has become an entrepreneur and captain of industry, the owner of a huge and successful factory that manufactures phonographs. He has left all vestiges of his former life behind, gaining everything material he might ever have wanted: a lavish mansion, a ritzy limousine, servants, a beautiful mistress, and a slew of high-society friends.
When Louis is released from prison, he hits the road and before long discovers his former cellmate, technically a prison escapee and wanted man, luxuriating in his new life. Not only does he receive a cold reception from Emile, but he finds Emile a changed man. He is now an uptight, status-obsessed capitalist with no desire to renew the easy camaraderie he previously enjoyed with his old cellmate. Louis, though, sees his chance and is determined to use his hold over Emile to his own advantage.
In particular, Louis has fallen in love with a pretty young secretary at the factory, Jeanne (Rolla France), and presses Emile to introduce him and arrange a marriage. This whole idea of Emile being able to procure Jeanne for his old cellmate provides Clair with the opportunity to present a harsh indictment of capitalism. He implicitly compares Emile to a feudal lord and his workers to serfs by having Emile coerce Jeanne's uncle, who also works at the factory and doesn't want to lose his job by alienating the boss, to hand over Jeanne to Louis. He doesn't explicitly threaten the uncle but after presenting his proposal merely asks, "Vous comprenez?" (You do understand?) The pandering uncle does indeed understand and happily complies, for not only will he protect his job, but he will curry favor with the boss by having a niece married to a man who appears to be the boss's best friend.
Another way Clair skewers capitalism and the dehumanizing effects of the modern industrial environment is in the way Emile's factory is depicted. To get in, the workers must first pass through gates as they punch their time cards, the gates first excluding and then confining them. When we first see the main building from the outside, the first impression is of a vast, ultra-modern, monochromatic expanse built on an inhuman scale. Everything is composed of severe, straight horizontal lines and right angles. This is a sterile, featureless, and soulless place, a place where regimentation of form and behavior are pervasive. The closest thing to it we have seen in the movie so far in both appearance and atmosphere is the prison that Emile and Louis were in at the beginning of the movie.
Once the action moves inside, the resemblance to the prison is even more pronounced. The factory floor with its production line—another severe and soulless place—is laid out in exactly the same way as the work room in the opening scene at the prison, with conveyor belts substituting for the work tables. And it is framed and photographed in exactly the same way. Instead of prison guards, we see supervisors overseeing the production line and urging the workers on just as the guards at the prison did. The parallels between the prison and the factory are unmistakable.Clair combines sound with action in many of the same ways he did in Le Million, using sung dialogue, silent dialogue with musical accompaniment, and sound effects that originate outside the frame (the cinematic equivalent of "noises off" in a stage play), among other devices. He is constantly playing with sound. Even the fact that Emile's factory makes phonographs seems an in-joke. And Clair creates one of the first examples—possibly the very first example—of a sound gag in motion pictures.
When Louis first sees Jeanne, she is standing in the second-floor window of her apartment singing a love song. He is immediately captivated and finds himself falling in love, responding to the sentiments of the song. When she walks away from the window, he ambles over to the door to her building and waits for her at the bottom of the stairs. When she emerges, the song is still going, but Jeanne is not singing. Just at that moment the music begins to falter and slow to a stop, and we (and Louis) realize that Jeanne wasn't singing at all but simply mouthing the words on a disc playing on one of the phonographs that Emile manufactures.
As we learn more about Emile's life, it becomes clearer that it is not as idyllic as it appears. His snobbish friends make fun of him behind his back. His chic mistress is conducting an affair with a gigolo and ends up running off with him. Then another former prisoner spots Emile and is soon joined by other former prisoners, who proceed to blackmail him. And the authorities have also spotted him and are preparing to arrest him. Emile's ideal life, it seems, is about to crumble.
The climactic sequence occurs at the inaugural festivities of Emile's newest, totally automated factory. With the police on their way to arrest him, Emile dedicates the factory then immediately presents it to his employees. "The machines will now work for them!" he proclaims. The self-made capitalist has just placed the means of production in the hands of the workers. Just before the police arrive, Emile and Louis—the former worshiper of materialism and his friend the romantic anarchist—dressed again as tramps, hit the road and are last seen walking in fellowship on their contented way to . . . who knows where?
Taken together, Le Million and A Nous la Liberté are twin landmarks in the history of cinema. They are records of one of the great filmmakers working at a level of intensive inspiration that few directors ever achieve and that Clair himself never again quite equaled in his long career. But beyond their historical importance, these are very entertaining films that can still surprise viewers, encourage them to reconsider the conventions of combining sound and image in movies, and in the case of A Nous la Liberté compel them to re-examine the prevailing values of Western culture toward ambition and success and remind them of the enduring disparity between the powerful and the powerless, the haves and have-nots.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
A Small Dark Masterwork: Michael Powell's The Small Back Room
The British film director Michael Powell (1905-1990)—who not only directed but also wrote and produced many of his films, often in collaboration with his professional partner, Emeric Pressburger—was one of the giants of British cinema. His best known, and arguably greatest, works were produced in the 1940's and constitute a truly impressive list, including The Thief of Baghdad, The 49th Parallel, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I'm Going, Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes. At the end of the decade, Powell and Pressburger made a less well-known movie, The Small Back Room (1949), released last year in a newly restored Criterion edition, that is a fitting companion piece to those earlier masterpieces.The Small Back Room is very different from the best-known films that immediately preceded it, which are often thought to represent the typical Michael Powell movie. With the exception of I Know Where I'm Going, these are elaborately mounted, technically dazzling, large-scale Technicolor productions that pushed the artistic limits of studio film making of the time. The Small Back Room is none of these things. Filmed in black-and-white and without major stars, it concentrates not on large themes and visual spectacle like its immediate predecessors but on characters, character psychology, and personal relationships.
Set in London in 1943, the movie is based on a novel by Nigel Balchin, a British author who wrote seventeen novels published between 1934-1967, as well as more than a dozen screenplays. The main character is Sammy Rice (David Farrar), whose prosthetic foot has kept him from active military service. He works instead as a researcher in an obscure government munitions laboratory situated in the small back room of the title. Sammy also has a problem with alcohol—he is a recovered alcoholic—and a huge problem with his attitude toward life. He is a frustrated and embittered man whose personality is dominated by negativity and self-pity. a brooding, self-destructive person whom others tolerate out of a combination of sympathy for his very real problems and admiration for his professional ability.
Sammy is conducting a clandestine affair with the secretary of his research unit, Susan (Kathleen Byron, who gave a memorable if a trifle overwrought performance as the mad nun in Powell's Black Narcissus), who lives in the flat across the hall from his own. Susan genuinely seems to love Sammy, tolerating his negativity and moodiness with equanimity. Besides Susan, the one thing that keeps Sammy going is a real interest in his research work. But even that is fraught with problems, mostly the result of bureaucratic regulations, inter-departmental in-fighting, and the ignorance of those in charge about the nature and value of the work his unit is doing.In a very funny sequence, a fatuous government minister (Robert Morley, in an uncredited cameo) who clearly has no grasp of the work being done by Sammy and his colleagues pays a flying visit to the lab. Knowing the minister's lack of any real knowledge of, or even interest in, their work, the group devise a flashy demonstration that is almost like a magic show, with fire and smoke to dazzle him. The demonstration fizzles, but the minister is so uninterested that it doesn't even faze him. Instead he sits down at a calculating machine—to him a real novelty—and proceeds to perform simple arithmetic problems, like a child playing with a toy, before flitting on his way. In another, more serious sequence, Sammy attends a meeting to evaluate a new artillery gun and is caught in a conflict between the military, who don't like the new weapon based on their tests of it, and the accountants, who do favor it based strictly on a statistical analysis of its design specifications. He sympathizes with the military's practical objections to the gun but realizes he can't afford to alienate the bureaucrats if he wants them to continue funding his research unit.
Sammy does find one assignment that intrigues him, when an army Captain, Dick Stewart (Michael Gough), consults him about a new type of bomb being dropped by the Germans. Innocuous-looking, like a Thermos flask, it has been killing children who pick it up not realizing what it is. Sammy arranges for the Captain to contact him the next time one is found so he can examine it and analyze its detonating mechanism. This element of the story is used as a device to provide continuity. It opens the movie, recurs at a couple of key points in the middle, and provides the movie with its masterly concluding sequence.
The movie has an episodic structure, moving back and forth between Sammy's work, his love life, the problem of the new type of bomb, and his struggles with alcoholism and what today would be recognized as clinical depression. If the film has a weakness, it is this episodic structure. which tends to fragment the movie's momentum by giving its plot a rather fluctuating rhythm. But at the same time, this structure also provides opportunities for Powell to create several brilliant set pieces that clearly show what a cinematic genius he was.
Actually, this sense of disconnection between bravura moments and the more low-key sections that link them is to some degree characteristic of most of Powell's movies; it's just that in this one it's especially apparent. As the film moves from one spectacular sequence to another, the lulls in-between are just a little more obvious than in most of Powell's movies. And these sequences of heightened artistry seem on occasion a bit overdone, just a little more fancy than absolutely necessary. For example, when Sammy attends the test of that new artillery gun "on the Salisbury Plain," Powell uses Stonehenge as a backdrop for the tests, as though he felt constrained to increase the visual drama in a sequence that might have been just as effective without the distraction of unneeded embellishment. (IMDb claims that these scenes were actually filmed at Stonehenge. I may be wrong, but to me it has a slightly unreal look to it, the stones a bit too smoothly worn and the color a bit too even, and the stones seem to lack substance, as though they're made of something lighter than rock, like those fiberglass boulders you see at Disneyland.)
Taken separately, however, several sequences in the movie achieve genuine tour-de-force status. Two sequences set in a night club (night clubs seemed to be a staple of movies of the 1940's, especially ones with noirish overtones, as this one sometimes has) that Sammy and Susan go to are impressive for their elaborate set decoration, jazz music, staging, and photography. In the second one especially the elegant setting and frenetic jazz music provide a superb counterpoint to the heated quarrel that Sammy and Susan are having. In another great sequence, Sammy falls off the wagon and gets drunk in a pub filled with soldiers of all nations. His drunken row with the bartender, who refuses to serve him any more, and his aggressive behavior toward the other people in the pub are dramatic indeed and show just how hostile and obnoxious Sammy can be at his worst.
In another sequence—visually, the most striking of the movie—Sammy has an attack of severe anxiety when Susan fails to show up at his flat for a planned rendezvous and again ends up getting drunk. The sequence begins with what seems a nod to The Lost Weekend, with Sammy attempting to resist the temptation to drink, then becoming more and more agitated, and finally giving in and getting so drunk that he smashes up the flat and begins hallucinating.Powell goes all out to portray the nightmarish, surrealistic qualities of this hallucinatory state, using bizarre camera angles and arranging objects in the frame to produce extreme foreshortening of perspective and distortion of scale. At one point the camera is placed quite low, looking up at a huge bottle of whiskey that appears about three times the size of Sammy and looms over him as if it is about to crush him. The background detail in the frame is stylized, the whole illuminated by what Powell calls "Caligari lighting" (a reference to the 1920 German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). In the commentary that accompanies the DVD, the cinematographer, Christopher Challis, explains that the scene, which ostensibly takes place in Sammy's flat, was actually done on a different set, with Sammy and the bottle filmed separately then joined in a matte composition to get them in the frame together. Challis praises Powell for his "visual sense" and for having such a thorough knowledge of lighting and photography that he could describe in detail what he needed his cinematographer to do to get the exact visual effects he wanted.
The film's conclusion, a more than 15-minute long sequence, is another thrilling tour-de-force. Two of the mysterious German bombs have been found on Chesil Beach on the south coast, where Sammy is summoned. When he arrives, he finds that Capt. Stewart has been killed trying to defuse the first bomb, and that he will have to work alone to figure out the detonating mechanism on the remaining bomb. Chesil Beach is an eight-mile long stretch of what the British call shingle, large pieces of unstable gravel, and a worse site for trying to work on something as dangerously sensitive to movement as an unexploded bomb cannot be imagined. Powell has said that it was this scene in the book and the prospect of filming it on Chesil Beach (his own idea—in the book, the setting is an ordinary sandy beach) that first attracted him to the project.Powell uses all of his considerable narrative and visual resources to create a lengthy nail-biter of a sequence so tense that it had me squirming the whole time. The stark beachfront setting—reduced to its essential elements of shoreline, sea, and sky—with Sammy separated in space from his colleagues, with whom he communicates via a radio microphone as he describes to them his actions, isolates and emphasizes the element of danger until it is the only thing in the movie. After Sammy reaches the bomb and drops to his hands and knees, much of the scene is filmed in tight close-up—his face, his hands, the bomb looming in the foreground almost like the whiskey bottle did earlier.
The mechanism turns out to be more complicated than Sammy anticipated. Just when he thinks he has disarmed the bomb, he discovers it has a second detonator, and the sequence is extended even longer. Knowing that Sammy cares so little for his life, that he is more interested in the engineering of the weapon than in his own safety, only emphasizes the risks he is taking, creating a sequence of nearly unbearable suspense.This and the other sequences I have described constitute the highlights of the movie. But what really holds the movie together more than anything else is the character of Sammy and his portrayal by David Farrar. Sammy is a very modern character for the time, a self-centered and essentially unsympathetic (although not exactly unlikable) person, the kind of tortured character more often associated with the most bitter American films noirs of the era. Farrar conveys with absolute conviction and realism Sammy's self-loathing, his dissatisfaction with life, and his inability to relate on any intimate level to other human beings.
On the DVD, Powell comments almost regretfully that when he saw The Small Back Room years later at a retrospective of his movies, he found it a "cold" film. Given its subject matter and its main character, I don't see how the movie could have been otherwise and still have maintained its honesty. From today's perspective, the picture seems ahead of its time in its attitudes. That coldness that Powell spoke of—the resistance to using easy sentimentality to lighten the grimness of the movie that so often tempted his film-making contemporaries—is to me what makes the movie seem so fresh and still comprehensible in psychological terms to our more cynical modern sensibility.
This is a movie that despite falling just a bit short of Powell's very best work, nonetheless has many parts that are as good as anything he ever did, as well as a main character as original and compelling as any to be found in his canon. With such qualities, The Small Back Room deserves to be admired and enjoyed alongside Powell's other masterworks.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have a website devoted to their work, powell-pressburger.org . Powell's widow and tireless advocate of his films is the three-time Oscar-winning film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited nearly all the films of Martin Scorsese since Raging Bull. If you've never seen a Michael Powell movie, I would recommend starting with I Know Where I'm Going or The Red Shoes, which along with Peeping Tom (which I have also written about at The Movie Projector), are my favorite Michael Powell movies of the ones I've seen. Kathleen Byron died last January at the age of 88. Her final appearance was in the award-winning BBC mini-series Perfect Strangers (2001).
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
Brief Reviews
THE SET-UP (1949) ***½
The Set-Up recounts one crucial night in the life of a boxer, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan). Although the film is steeped in the milieu of the world of professional boxing, that milieu is so deglamorized and so filtered through the film noir look and sensibility that the movie transcends the boxing genre to become one of the key examples of the noir genre of the late 1940's. At 72 minutes, The Set-Up is lean and concentrated. Every detail is selected by director Robert Wise and cinematographer Milton Krasner to create a focused noir ambiance. The film's harshly lit nocturnal underworld is bounded by the dilapidated Paradise City Arena (boxing Wednesdays, wrestling Fridays), the shabby Cozy Hotel where Thompson is staying, a tawdry penny arcade called The Fun Palace, and a seedy night club called Dreamland whose garish dance music can be heard every time the action moves outside or a door or window is opened.
Everyone in the movie is sleazy—the lowlife hustlers huddled in doorways or loitering on the sidewalks, the jaded, corrupt men who work at the arena, the vicious smalltime hoodlum who fixes fights, and especially the grotesques in the audience screaming for blood and mayhem. The boxers are portrayed as pathetic losers who start out as frightened kids and end up as punch-drunk burnouts. Somewhere near the end of this career arc is Stoker Thompson, who after twenty years in the ring is at the age of 35 considered over the hill. The one thing that keeps him going is the illusory belief that he is always just "one shot away" from a really important match that will make his dreams reality.
The climactic bout between Thompson and a much younger boxer that caps the movie—brilliantly staged, photographed by multiple cameras, and edited to emphasize its brutality and arduous physicality—was clearly an influence on Scorsese's Raging Bull. Robert Ryan, in one of his rare starring roles, is uncharacteristically sympathetic, a dreamer who refuses to admit that any chance of success faded long ago, a man who no matter how badly beaten always struggles back to keep on fighting. As he says, "If you're a fighter, you gotta fight." And he keeps right on fighting until the end of the movie, when the relentlessly bleak world he inhabits finally breaks and then discards him.
GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 (1933) ****
In the early 1930's Warner Bros. produced a series of musicals that established their own unique style, a down-to-earth working-class view of show business in keeping with the gritty movies the studio produced in other genres. The typical Warners musical features a story about the practical and financial problems of mounting an elaborate revue-like stage production. The musical highlights are the outlandish and often surreal production numbers of Busby Berkeley set to the songs of Al Dubin and Harry Warren as performed by Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and Ginger Rogers.
The archetypal Warners musical is often considered to be 42nd Street (1933). But after seeing Gold Diggers of 1933 again recently, I would have to say that it is the better movie. The plot is constructed in such a way that rather than jamming all the production numbers into the last part of the movie as in 42nd Street and the similar Footlight Parade (1933), they are distributed throughout the movie, which opens with "We're in the Money" and concludes with "Forgotten Man," the latter perhaps the apotheosis of all Berkeley's production numbers. This results in a better balance, and more appealing mix, of music and plot. The plot itself adds new elements to the familiar "let's put on a show" story of other Warners musicals. It follows three showgirls as they pursue fame and romance—the innocent Polly (Ruby Keeler), the voluptuous and intelligent Carol (Joan Blondell), and the zany Trixie (a very funny Aline MacMahon, in a role reminiscent of Jack Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like It Hot). When these showgirls tangle with the members of a snobbish Boston family (Dick Powell, Warren William, and Guy Kibbee), it allows for the kind of pointed interaction between the working class and the privileged rich more typical of a Capra comedy.
The Great Depression is an integral part of the movie, both onstage and off, providing a more topical context than the standard Hollywood musical. And while other 1930's musicals are often suggestive, this one—made the year before the Production Code began to be enforced in earnest—is at times downright bawdy. Gold Diggers of 1933 has enough serious elements and enough depth of characterization to give it greater substance than one might expect, but it never forgets that it is primarily an entertainment, and a very lively and thoroughly enjoyable one. Also worth noting are the fluid camerawork of Warners house cinematographer Sol Polito and the eye-catching Art Deco sets of Anton Grot.
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955) **½
In the 1950's the director Otto Preminger seemed deliberately to seek projects that challenged the Production Code. In The Moon Is Blue (1954) the offending subject was sex. In the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), an allegation of rape—a crime not supposed to be mentioned by name—played a large part. Advise and Consent (1962) was one of the first mainstream American movies to deal openly with homosexuality. In between these movies, Preminger tackled the taboo subject of heroin addiction in this film, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Because of the film's notoriety and its source material, I anticipated a work of harsh realism and ground-breaking maturity. What I found instead was a subject daring for its time framed in strictly conventional Hollywood terms. The whole movie is filmed on a studio set that represents a city block of a down-and-out Chicago neighborhood. But as impressive as this set is, its resemblance to the real thing is superficial, its squalor relegated to a few suggestive touches.
Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, who has just returned from a jail term and treatment for heroin addiction at the federal facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Faced with the stress of a neurotically possessive paraplegic wife (Eleanor Parker) who is obsessively jealous of a pretty downstairs neighbor (Kim Novak) and whom he doesn't love, and with constant inducements to return to his criminal cronies and resume his use of heroin, he must use all of his willpower to resist falling back into his former life. The casting of Arnold Stang as his best friend, Leonid Kinskey as a quack doctor, Robert Strauss as a petty hoodlum, and Darren McGavin as a heroin dealer makes the atmosphere closer to Damon Runyon than Nelson Algren. The details of his life seem a Hollywood version of sleaze, more imagined than observed. The restrained Novak is surprisingly good, while Parker gives a florid, old-style performance that seems anomalous given the modern subject matter. The melodramatic contrivances of the plot also seem curiously old-fashioned.
One definite plus is the cinematography of Sam Leavitt, whose camera glides elegantly around the set during Preminger's customary long, unedited takes, although in a sense that elegance seems incongruous with the grim nature of the story. Another plus is Elmer Bernstein's hard, brassy jazz score, although its jagged tone unintentionally emphasizes the flaccidity of other elements of the movie. The biggest plus is Frank Sinatra's earnest performance (which deservedly earned him an Oscar nomination), in which he convincingly portrays Frankie's desperation to be strong while battling his own inner weaknesses and external temptations. That performance alone makes the movie worth seeing, but aside from that, don't expect anything remotely resembling realism. This is a purely Hollywood approach to a social milieu the movie clearly doesn't have much understanding of.
PYGMALION (1938) ****
Anyone familiar with My Fair Lady (1964) should take a look at this film version of the play by George Bernard Shaw on which the later musical is based. It is an even better movie. The plot is essentially the same, as is much of the best dialogue—no great surprise, since the adaptation is by Shaw himself. Without interruptions for songs and with its brisker pacing, the wit of the dialogue and the social commentary of the plot are even more pronounced.
Leslie Howard, who co-directed the movie with Anthony Asquith, is splendid as Prof. Henry Higgins, not so effete as Rex Harrison but still a self-centered academic insensitive to the feelings of others. Howard, a trained stage actor, gave many fine dramatic movie performances (The Animal Kingdom, Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Petrified Forest, Intermezzo), but I've never seen a better one by him than his comic turn in Pygmalion. As Eliza Dolittle, Wendy Hiller, also a trained stage actress, demonstrates amazing range in an even more demanding role.
As Higgins attempts to transform Eliza from a coarse Cockney flower seller into the simulacrum of a lady, Hiller must show Eliza's innate intelligence and a growing awareness of the artificial nature of class distinction. In the scene where Eliza has tea with the mother of Prof. Higgins, Hiller, playing the scene absolutely deadpan, is riotously funny. When she tells off Higgins for his coldness and lack of response to her feelings, she does so with a fiery spirit reminiscent of the young Katharine Hepburn. And at the end she must show that the experience of a new lifestyle has so altered Eliza that she is riven with confusion and anxiety at no longer having any real identity. All this Hiller does wonderfully in a subtly nuanced performance that is the center of the movie. She expresses all the phases of her character's transformation without ever losing the continuity of the character, convincing us that all of this playing about with social identity and self-presentation is happening to a real person. It is simply an astounding piece of acting. Even if you are thoroughly familiar with My Fair Lady, Pygmalion—with its brilliant balance of entertainment and social satire—is a film not to be missed.
The Set-Up recounts one crucial night in the life of a boxer, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan). Although the film is steeped in the milieu of the world of professional boxing, that milieu is so deglamorized and so filtered through the film noir look and sensibility that the movie transcends the boxing genre to become one of the key examples of the noir genre of the late 1940's. At 72 minutes, The Set-Up is lean and concentrated. Every detail is selected by director Robert Wise and cinematographer Milton Krasner to create a focused noir ambiance. The film's harshly lit nocturnal underworld is bounded by the dilapidated Paradise City Arena (boxing Wednesdays, wrestling Fridays), the shabby Cozy Hotel where Thompson is staying, a tawdry penny arcade called The Fun Palace, and a seedy night club called Dreamland whose garish dance music can be heard every time the action moves outside or a door or window is opened.
Everyone in the movie is sleazy—the lowlife hustlers huddled in doorways or loitering on the sidewalks, the jaded, corrupt men who work at the arena, the vicious smalltime hoodlum who fixes fights, and especially the grotesques in the audience screaming for blood and mayhem. The boxers are portrayed as pathetic losers who start out as frightened kids and end up as punch-drunk burnouts. Somewhere near the end of this career arc is Stoker Thompson, who after twenty years in the ring is at the age of 35 considered over the hill. The one thing that keeps him going is the illusory belief that he is always just "one shot away" from a really important match that will make his dreams reality.
The climactic bout between Thompson and a much younger boxer that caps the movie—brilliantly staged, photographed by multiple cameras, and edited to emphasize its brutality and arduous physicality—was clearly an influence on Scorsese's Raging Bull. Robert Ryan, in one of his rare starring roles, is uncharacteristically sympathetic, a dreamer who refuses to admit that any chance of success faded long ago, a man who no matter how badly beaten always struggles back to keep on fighting. As he says, "If you're a fighter, you gotta fight." And he keeps right on fighting until the end of the movie, when the relentlessly bleak world he inhabits finally breaks and then discards him.
GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 (1933) ****
In the early 1930's Warner Bros. produced a series of musicals that established their own unique style, a down-to-earth working-class view of show business in keeping with the gritty movies the studio produced in other genres. The typical Warners musical features a story about the practical and financial problems of mounting an elaborate revue-like stage production. The musical highlights are the outlandish and often surreal production numbers of Busby Berkeley set to the songs of Al Dubin and Harry Warren as performed by Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and Ginger Rogers.
The archetypal Warners musical is often considered to be 42nd Street (1933). But after seeing Gold Diggers of 1933 again recently, I would have to say that it is the better movie. The plot is constructed in such a way that rather than jamming all the production numbers into the last part of the movie as in 42nd Street and the similar Footlight Parade (1933), they are distributed throughout the movie, which opens with "We're in the Money" and concludes with "Forgotten Man," the latter perhaps the apotheosis of all Berkeley's production numbers. This results in a better balance, and more appealing mix, of music and plot. The plot itself adds new elements to the familiar "let's put on a show" story of other Warners musicals. It follows three showgirls as they pursue fame and romance—the innocent Polly (Ruby Keeler), the voluptuous and intelligent Carol (Joan Blondell), and the zany Trixie (a very funny Aline MacMahon, in a role reminiscent of Jack Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like It Hot). When these showgirls tangle with the members of a snobbish Boston family (Dick Powell, Warren William, and Guy Kibbee), it allows for the kind of pointed interaction between the working class and the privileged rich more typical of a Capra comedy.
The Great Depression is an integral part of the movie, both onstage and off, providing a more topical context than the standard Hollywood musical. And while other 1930's musicals are often suggestive, this one—made the year before the Production Code began to be enforced in earnest—is at times downright bawdy. Gold Diggers of 1933 has enough serious elements and enough depth of characterization to give it greater substance than one might expect, but it never forgets that it is primarily an entertainment, and a very lively and thoroughly enjoyable one. Also worth noting are the fluid camerawork of Warners house cinematographer Sol Polito and the eye-catching Art Deco sets of Anton Grot.
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955) **½
In the 1950's the director Otto Preminger seemed deliberately to seek projects that challenged the Production Code. In The Moon Is Blue (1954) the offending subject was sex. In the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), an allegation of rape—a crime not supposed to be mentioned by name—played a large part. Advise and Consent (1962) was one of the first mainstream American movies to deal openly with homosexuality. In between these movies, Preminger tackled the taboo subject of heroin addiction in this film, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Because of the film's notoriety and its source material, I anticipated a work of harsh realism and ground-breaking maturity. What I found instead was a subject daring for its time framed in strictly conventional Hollywood terms. The whole movie is filmed on a studio set that represents a city block of a down-and-out Chicago neighborhood. But as impressive as this set is, its resemblance to the real thing is superficial, its squalor relegated to a few suggestive touches.
Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, who has just returned from a jail term and treatment for heroin addiction at the federal facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Faced with the stress of a neurotically possessive paraplegic wife (Eleanor Parker) who is obsessively jealous of a pretty downstairs neighbor (Kim Novak) and whom he doesn't love, and with constant inducements to return to his criminal cronies and resume his use of heroin, he must use all of his willpower to resist falling back into his former life. The casting of Arnold Stang as his best friend, Leonid Kinskey as a quack doctor, Robert Strauss as a petty hoodlum, and Darren McGavin as a heroin dealer makes the atmosphere closer to Damon Runyon than Nelson Algren. The details of his life seem a Hollywood version of sleaze, more imagined than observed. The restrained Novak is surprisingly good, while Parker gives a florid, old-style performance that seems anomalous given the modern subject matter. The melodramatic contrivances of the plot also seem curiously old-fashioned.
One definite plus is the cinematography of Sam Leavitt, whose camera glides elegantly around the set during Preminger's customary long, unedited takes, although in a sense that elegance seems incongruous with the grim nature of the story. Another plus is Elmer Bernstein's hard, brassy jazz score, although its jagged tone unintentionally emphasizes the flaccidity of other elements of the movie. The biggest plus is Frank Sinatra's earnest performance (which deservedly earned him an Oscar nomination), in which he convincingly portrays Frankie's desperation to be strong while battling his own inner weaknesses and external temptations. That performance alone makes the movie worth seeing, but aside from that, don't expect anything remotely resembling realism. This is a purely Hollywood approach to a social milieu the movie clearly doesn't have much understanding of.
PYGMALION (1938) ****
Anyone familiar with My Fair Lady (1964) should take a look at this film version of the play by George Bernard Shaw on which the later musical is based. It is an even better movie. The plot is essentially the same, as is much of the best dialogue—no great surprise, since the adaptation is by Shaw himself. Without interruptions for songs and with its brisker pacing, the wit of the dialogue and the social commentary of the plot are even more pronounced.
Leslie Howard, who co-directed the movie with Anthony Asquith, is splendid as Prof. Henry Higgins, not so effete as Rex Harrison but still a self-centered academic insensitive to the feelings of others. Howard, a trained stage actor, gave many fine dramatic movie performances (The Animal Kingdom, Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Petrified Forest, Intermezzo), but I've never seen a better one by him than his comic turn in Pygmalion. As Eliza Dolittle, Wendy Hiller, also a trained stage actress, demonstrates amazing range in an even more demanding role.
As Higgins attempts to transform Eliza from a coarse Cockney flower seller into the simulacrum of a lady, Hiller must show Eliza's innate intelligence and a growing awareness of the artificial nature of class distinction. In the scene where Eliza has tea with the mother of Prof. Higgins, Hiller, playing the scene absolutely deadpan, is riotously funny. When she tells off Higgins for his coldness and lack of response to her feelings, she does so with a fiery spirit reminiscent of the young Katharine Hepburn. And at the end she must show that the experience of a new lifestyle has so altered Eliza that she is riven with confusion and anxiety at no longer having any real identity. All this Hiller does wonderfully in a subtly nuanced performance that is the center of the movie. She expresses all the phases of her character's transformation without ever losing the continuity of the character, convincing us that all of this playing about with social identity and self-presentation is happening to a real person. It is simply an astounding piece of acting. Even if you are thoroughly familiar with My Fair Lady, Pygmalion—with its brilliant balance of entertainment and social satire—is a film not to be missed.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
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