Cinémathèque Française.
It was a
phenomenon I’d noticed before: 400 films running in Paris at one time and the
film freaks all turn up for the same one - this time Claude Autant Lara’s 1942 Lettres
d’amour, part of a Cinémathèque Fran-çaise season of French films of the
forties.
Afterwards the group, come from all around the world, compared notes and agreed that 40
programs a week, running for 11 months of the year, from the widest range of
product, with all foreign material captioned, silent films scored and formats
correct, is a mind boggling resource.
The Paris
Cinémathèque even has a self-correcting capacity. It has just run a near
complete Sergio (Django) Corbucci retrospective, after the critical
establishment treated him with derision for half a century. Try and sell
that in Australia! They weren’t committing box office hari kari either, having
already prepared the audience with the odd Sergio in their regular schedule.
I saw his 1972 Che c'entriamo noi con la rivoluzione? there about 10
years back. There’s a new book (in French) about him and Peter Cowie, staunch
upholder of Ingmar Bergman, now lectures on his films.
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Vittorio Gassman in Sergio Corbucci's 1972 Che c'entriamo noi con la rivoluzione? / What Am I doing in the Middle of a Revolution.
|
Anyone who takes full advantage of the Cinémathèque
pulls away steadily from movie enthusiasts anywhere else on the planet. In
about three years beginners would be able to familiarise themselves with
material it’s taken me a lifetime to consider. The question remains as to
whether any one is doing that.
Lettres d’amour, the film itself, was disappointing when you consider it as the Autant Lara movie
to precede Douce and using that film’s Odette Joyeux and Jean
Debucourt. A costume comedy, it lacks the bawdy zest of the director's Fric Frac or
Occupe-toi d’Amelie.
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| Lettres d'amour : Debucourt & Joyeux |
The
film starts in the small 1855 provincial town of Argenson, when a double decked
diligence knocks down the celebratory arch announcing the Napoleon III visit,
as dragoons form up with drawn sabres.
The
promise of this opening dissipates with Emperor Debucourt chatting with
young widowed postmistress, Joyeux, covering for her friend, the
Prefect’s wife Simone Renant, by collecting the letters from Renant’s city
lover, a young François Perier, whose mash note gets mixed in with the
documents his superior is signing.
To
pursue his liaison, Perier has himself appointed temporary magistrate in
Argenson. When his note turns up in court, his refusal to let it be read out is
taken as an act of integrity by the townspeople, who don’t know he’s the
author. Merry japes ensue.
Of
course Perier and Joyeux become an item, and when it looks as if he will be
busted, she threatens to blow the whistle on the local power structure by
revealing that it was her influence with the Emperor that got her her
job.
A
subplot introduces the little fiddle teacher Julien Carette, who is the only one
who gets laughs, while struggling to train the locals in an elaborate quadrille
for the ball, where their skill surprises the visiting dignitaries.
Christian
Dior’s elaborate costumes seem to be wearing the players, particularly in the
ballroom climax. This is a ponderous example of the French forties costume
drama (think Ruy Blas, Le bossu) ) and is short on charm or
invention. In a lackluster cast Perier, given business like the peg and ball
game (which he can’t master), is yet to find his character but there’s some
interest in watching him try.
Also
included was La boîte aux rêves / Box of Dreams directed in 1945 by
Yves Allégret. This long lost piece offers synthetic jollity from the end of WW2.
Friends Franck Villard, René Lefevre, Henri Guisol and Armontel share a
“fantasie bohème” in a Wahkevich designed two
tier studio-built apartment, complete with lights dimming to generate
sunset on the view of the painted backdrop city outside the balcony window.
Only the René Clair lead actor Lefevre is in his element with bits of comic
business, like eating his salad with one of the darts he has been throwing at the
faithless blonde’s photo.
At
their lively party Vivienne Romance decides to move in. She flannels the
delivery guy into waiting for his bill and sorts out the boys’ businesses. Her
maid, a barely recognisable Simone Signoret, shows up briefly to prop up the deception
and Gerard Phillipe also has an early two-line part mentioning having been
given a movie role as Raimu’s brother. And that’s about as funny as it gets.
The
guys all hanker after Romance but she is homing in on Villard, baring his
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La Boîte aux rêves : Romance & Villard.
|
(narrow) torso down to his Y-fronts. He’s a more plausible lead in Marcel
Pagliero’s Les Amant’s de Bras Morts a few years later.
One scene curiously anticipates the dinner in Vincent, Paul, François
et les autres when Romance calls Villard a painter who never paints,
Lefevre an actor who never performs, Armontel a writer who never writes and
Guisol a musician who never plays. Her departure shocks them into creative
activity, even if Villard’s admired portrait of her is really a piece of crude
poster art.
The
film is studio phony, too long and has a mean streak, getting the goose drunk
at the party, dismissing the butler with a hand gesture and kicking the blonde
in the pants. Allegret struggles to make it move along with quick, inventive
camera movements and rhythmic-edited close ups, usually of the lead quartet - odd for its assistant director René Clément to come out of this
environment.
The
season’s pay-off, however, was my viewing of Pour une nuit d'amour / Passionnelle of
1947, possibly Edmond T. Gréville’s best work.
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| Pour une nuit d'amour : Joyeux |
The
Tavernier documentary paints Gréville as the neglected master of French cinema
but I know him mainly from his English language output - Mademoiselle
Docteur, with his regular star Erich Von Stroheim, Naughty Arlette,
Noose, Guilty and Beat Girl, a mixed selection to say the least,
having nothing to suggest the intensity of Pour une nuit d'amour.
The
early stages are costume heavy scene setting. A humble telegrapher, Roger Blin,
is ridiculed as an épouvantaille scarecrow by the chorus of village washerwomen at the river
- which is odd because he is the best looking guy around. There is some dumb byplay
with him protecting the poor mute girl that doesn’t go anywhere. His friendship
with cobbler Henri Arius is better.
Blin
has the hots for Joyeux again, here as the daughter of the big house, with
 |
| Pour Une Nuit d'amour : Blin |
him
repeating her “Bonsoir” when she acknowledges him and watching her from his
window in the shoemaker’s shop. She is betrothed to visiting Count, Jacques
Castelot, but has been having an affair with the local ladies man, Raymond
Galle - both suitors wearing silly mustaches. So far so so, with
Jean Weiner’s score - a flute solo goes with Blin walking - and lots of filming
in depth of costume and period decor the best points.
However,
comes the night of the ball and Joyeux calls Blin in through the rear doorway -
hand protruding to lead him. “You say you love me. What will you do for me?” He
replies “Everything.” She throws back the bed cover to reveal Galle’s body. She’s taken him down with a heavy candlestick for trying to ruin her rich match. Odette
promises Blin a night with her as reward. Flashback to the fair, with her waltzing, while her shawl floats around
the dancing couple.
Blin carries the body through the town in the dark - a celluloid cuff dropping to be
washed away in the gutter. Meeting the local gendarmes, he puts a cigarette into
the corpse’s lips and passes the body off as a fellow drunkard. Then dumping
the dastard into the river, he comes back, picking up the dead man’s dropped
shoe and enters the mansion. Joyeux is willing to make good her promise but he
indignantly refuses. “Jamais!”
Now
the subject of a police hunt, Blin makes for the hills leaving Joyeux appalled by
what she has done. When she tells her mum, Sylvie (her personal best?), that
she is going to confess, her parents are shocked, envisioning the engineered
match with the visiting aristocrat (who is not above slipping into the barn
with a sexy servant girl) collapsed, ruining them all.
Papa
André Alerme, doing comic with his lead soldiers, is no match against Sylvie’s
resolve as she contemplates the failure of their matchmaking. “C’etait le fin
d’un monde - c’ettait le fin du monde.”
Unable
to move her parents, Joyeux goes to the convent she has just left and brings
the mother superior back with her to intervene, but she too is won
over. “You have committed a sin lying to me.”
Her
options now all closed off, Joyeux visits Blin in hiding in
the hills his musket leveled, to tell him she must prepare for the wedding. Blin leaves his
sanctuary determined to intervene at the ceremony – a great scene of his
purposeful advance with Weiner on the soundtrack, only to have him back
off when he sees the couple at the altar from the back of the church and realizes
that his action would benefit no one.
And we get the last of the film’s similar subject dissolves – a man with
walking stick to a man with walking stick, moving feet to moving feet – with Blin’s
manacled wrists mixed to Joyeux’ hands clasped as she kneels.
Greville
is still heading up the B team here. Even lead Joyeux was not really one of the
top stars, although he gets good value out of talents like Weiner and Sylvie. The
look is comparable to the best of the contemporary French period films. This
Zola adaptation is in exalted company, a companion piece to Douce or Diable
au Corps, where other vicious matriarchs sort out willful ingenues without regard to genuine morality.
Recall also those other contemporary films showing the French establishment as
corrupt - the both banned Plaisirs d’amour and Le Courbeau.
The
rest of the season contained old favorites like the Delannoy-Sartre Les jeux
sont faits, Serge de Poligny’s excellent Le Barone fantôme with
Cocteau, Maurice Tourneur’s Impasse des deux anges the best of the
director’s last films, Guitry’s draggy La Malibran and the Louis
Daquin kid film Nous les gosses. Given more time I’d have liked to rake
through the rest of the 25 films included.
This
was not even one of the strains they were foregrounding. Attendance was
moderate.
To
celebrate the theatrical release of Beoning / The Burning, Korean Lee Chang-Dong’s first film
after eight years, the Cinémathèque ran
a retrospective of his work. Monstrously long at two and a half hours, Beoning
tries for Asian Antonioni. There’s even an enigmatically vanishing girl.
Deliveryman
and wannabe writer Ah-In Yoo encounters tombola girl Jong-seo Jeon, who claims
to have been his neighbour growing up in rural Paju, not far from the DMZ.
Propaganda broadcasts can be heard distantly. Did he rescue her from a well?
Were there any wells? Is the cat she wants him to feed in her absence real?
They get it on. She’s a winning young woman given to taking her top off and gets
a naked dance scene at dusk.
Jong-seo
Jeon sets off for Africa to live with the tribals but there’s a bomb plot in
Nairobi and she returns three days later and asks him to collect her in his farm
truck. When he arrives at the airport she’s in the company of well off guy, the
enigmatic Steven Yeun Sang-yeop (Westworld), and goes off in his
Porsche. "There are so many Gatsby's in Korea."
 |
| Lee Chang Dong : Beoning / The Burning |
The
three hang together while Ah-In Yoo reluctantly sells his farm and his one
remaining cow. Sang-yeop says his idea of fun is setting fire to the plastic
and timber frame greenhouses in the farm fields, but none seem to be going up
in smoke. Jong-seo Jeon disappears and we see Sang
Yeop giving a makeover to his new girlfriend in his luxury flat. Ah-In Yoo has
decided he wants the missing girl and ends up killing his rich rival.
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| Ah-In Yoo & Jong Seo Jong : Beoning / The Burning. | | | | |
What
it all means is speculative and the enigmatic tone (Faulkner via Murakami) gets
to be tedious when there is nothing in the characters to involve the viewer and
the film’s production values are ordinary. Critics are raving, but there’s a
lot of that. I always wonder whether they really are impressed or want to
signal that they are among the informed elite who recognise material like this.
Also
among this director’s work was the 2002 Oh-Ah-Si-seu/ Oasis, an earlier exercise in the same
inconclusive tone. This eccentric romance opens with fresh out of jail lead
Kyung-gu Sol getting busted for running up a cafe bill he can’t pay. His family
retrieves him and we learn he’d gone in for hit and run. A visit to the home of his victim brings him into contact with their
cerebral palsied daughter So-Ri Moon, and given a chance he’s in there with a
rape attempt. Looks like this guy is a bad lot.
There
are, however, double misleading depictions of the families of the leads, plus
details of life in urban South Korea, as the film’s strengths, which makes the
relationships mildly involving. On the girl’s wall there’s a tapestry of an
Oasis - symbolism or not? Who really cares? Competent handling.
I’ve
already covered the Japanese pre-war season and my enthusiasm for Tomu Uchida’s
1933 Keisatsukan/Policeman.
I also
caught the one-off showing of the Thomas Ince - Reginald Barker 1915 The
Despoiler (put into context by historian Marc Vernet promoting his new book
on early Hollywood), in which Colonel Charles K. French has captured a Balkan
enemy town. There allied, turban wearing Emir Frank Keenan’s troops threaten
mass violation of the local women, who have taken shelter with Fanny Midgeley’s
nuns in the Abbey. Unbeknown to French, his daughter Enid Markey (later with W. S. Hart in The Captive God and Jane to
Elmo Lincoln’s Tarzan) is with them and, when Keenan looks like having his will
of her, she shoots him with his service revolver. French is so outraged at the death of his brother-in-arms that he orders
the execution of the killer, not realising it is his own daughter. The veiled
assassin is shot and revealed as Markey, plunging her dad into grief.
The
then ambitious production values ran to a unit of horsemen and some obvious set
construction and the film provided a chance to see the admired romantic duo of
Markey and Keenan.
Though
unremarkable, The
Despoiler was shown to discuss the controversy it’s Teutonic
villain provoked among the Chicago German population in supposedly neutral WW1
USA, causing the film to be attacked and banned. I preferred the silents at Pathé’s Centre Jerôme Seydoux.
The
Cinémathèque’s big showpiece of the moment was a 50-program career of Leo
McCarey, with a lecture by le Monde critic Muriet Joudet and a Cine concert at
advanced prices. There’s a new book about McCarey too. As with their major
undertakings the programmers were extraordinarily determined, including his TV
episodes, remakes of his films and even 1930's Le joueur de golf, a
curious half feature in French actually directed by Edgar Kennedy, where
McCarey regular Charley Chase stars, handling the language plausibly - much
better than Buster Keaton would do in this period.
 |
| Thelma Todd & Charley Chase : Crazy Feet. McCarey script. |
McCarey
is a film maker who is exceptionally accessible in the days of DVD, from his
Hal Roach apprentice silent quarter hours shot in back streets,
developing into a run of great two reelers with Chase, Laurel and Hardy and Max
Davidson, then as a reliable shepherd of established thirties comedians - Harold
Lloyd, Mae West, Eddie Cantor, Charles Laughton (!) and the Marx Brothers - before
moving to his big name A features with Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Gary Cooper and
Bing Crosby and his past-his-use-by days in the CinemaScope era.
Over
years I’d worked through all of this with varying enthusiasm but there had always
been a gap: McCarey’s shift to long form features in the first years of sound,
of which only the lackluster Gloria Swanson Indiscreet circulates. In
this large season, my timing was right to catch the missing titles. 1929’s The
Sophmore was represented by a mute copy so I let that go and Red Hot
Rhythm didn’t make the cut, but they did run a couple of his almost never
seen early William Fox sound films. These were a change of pace for their
director, serious subjects like Fox’s Common Clay rather than McCarey’s
jazz age entertainments for Paramount and Goldwyn.
In
the 1930 Wild Company, a protracted scene of department store owner H.B.
Warner adjusting his bow ties sets up his fractious relationship with his son
Frank Albertson, who keeps over-spending his generous $50 a week allowance.
Albertson
takes off in his roadster for the beach club with his sister Joyce Compton, who
is barely recognisable and oddly marginalised. His chum sends the girls off in
a friend’s car and takes Albertson to Bela Lugosi’s Sports Star Club where,
drunk, Frank harasses the singer, Sharon Lynn (good) who’s keeping company with the
silent era’s The Virginian, the shady Kenneth Harlan in one of
his better later roles.
Harlan
doesn’t find Albertson’s finger gun salute funny. However, he realises that a
son of civic reformer Warner could be of use to him, and he puts the girl in
Albertson’s path.
Albertson
makes off with items from the store for Lynn, so there’s a face off with
dad, after which he refuses to come home for dinner, thus upsetting mum Claire
McDowell (the silent Ben Hur's mother). Harlan cons the boy with a story about
a fixed back room game, while planning to rob manager Lugosi, who
regards this quite pragmatically until he gets shot. Warner, who has rushed to
the scene trying to sort out the problem, arrives just in time to see Lugosi’s
body on the floor and his son going out the window – an OK piece of staging.
When
faced with the law, the bad hats all swear Albertson did the killing, leading Warner
to say “Take my boy away too.”
The
judge’s verdict is that it’s as much Warner’s fault, through lack of parental
control, and, being obliged to send Albertson up for five years, paroles him
into the custody of his dad. We are meant to believe that’s the way to handle
Flaming Youth. Having a serious message - albeit twaddle - plus the efforts of
a talented cast give this some interest, although the handling is mainly dull
sustained dialogue two shots without music. Briefly out of doors, the possibilities of a background
tennis match are ignored.
Also
from 1930, comes Fox’s Part Time Wife / May I Come In, where Edmund Lowe is the head of troubled Murdoch Oil. He
addresses his board, and that’s the last we hear about the oil business. In
fact, this is just another early thirties golf movie, like Love in the Rough
and All Tee’d Up. Champion player wife Lela Hyams is more interested in the course than in Lowe, and they separate. This was one of the ten films she made in 1930. Lowe then takes up the game for his
health and recruits as caddie little orphan boy (Oh! Oh!) Tommy Clifford, who
lives in a shack off the course.
There’s
a subplot about the boy’s bitza dog recovering from being gassed at the pound
and some minor tension during Lowe’s match with his leering rival Walter
McGrail, until the dog races onto the green and picks up the ball, forcing Lowe
to concede the match in a gentlemanly manner. But the leads’ lack of personality
makes their separation and reunion both predictable and uninvolving.
The
film’s one value now is as an example of the early Fox sound film. The only music
is under the titles and playout. The full-height picture aperture shows a
different frame line on footage sourced independently. It even sounds as if
the thing was cut single strip, with a couple of lines off, meant to cue the
actors, still audible on edits. It is rare to see these at all, let alone in
nice theatrical standard copies, which gave the show interest for me. What the
rest of the audience made of them is speculative.
I’d
also never seen McCarey’s cheerful, undistinguished pre–code 1931 Paramount
musical Let’s Go Native, where
a thin plot has choreographer Jeanette McDonald shipping costumes and dancing
girls to Argentina for a show, while repo man Eugene Palette, who disappears
early, has the bailif’s men clearing out her flat. McDonald has rejected
playboy James Hall (Hell’s Angels) because he has no job, although she’d
be prepared to live on the pitiful salary he could earn - that recurring
McCarey plot.
 |
| Let's Go Native : Jeanette Mc Donald |
Hall
is alienated from his wealthy family because he wants to marry McDonald instead
of a family friend’s unseen daughter they’ve selected for him. Guess who? Along
with taxi driver Jack Oakie and passenger William Austin (the first movie
Batman’s Alfred), he becomes a “trimmer” – a stoker on the liner transporting
McDonald. They are all reprieved from the boiler room when the captain
discovers Hall’s rich grandfather’s association with the shipping line.
The
ship, of course, is sunk and the principals land on a desert island where another
castaway, Broadway dance director Skeets Gallagher, is co-ordinating native dancing
girls with flat abdomens. Oakie pairs with an underclad Kay Francis, who gets
to do their number using her own voice, and the finale runs to hoarded pearls
and an erupting volcano.
 |
| Let's Go Native : McDonald, Oakie, Austin, Gallagher & chorus |
The
musical interludes are undistinguished, as McDonald’s material gives way to
Oakie’s. The on deck routines climax in a passable montage and the title song
"Let's Go Native" has an effects shot where the chorus line in the
upper half is reflected inverted in the lagoon below, but that’s as adventurous
as the staging gets. All the reviewers quoted Gallagher’s “This was the Virgin
Islands but it drifted”. I can’t see the fervent Catholic McCarey happy with
this racy for 1931 material. He thought his (draggy) 1958 Rally Round the Flag
Boys was obscene.
We come away from his retrospective able to recognise Leo McCarey's input into his films. Let’s Go Native’s throwing hats over
the side after the demo with the boater which sails back to its owner is very
Laurel & Hardy and the wise crack line about “The only thing that guy’s head
did was keep his ears apart” is recycled thirty years later in Rally Round
the Flag Boys. His newspaper headline montages are a cop out way to do plot developments in Wild Company and Belle of the Nineties and young Clifford’s dog being
brought from the old country anticipates the even more saccharine material with Barry Fitzgerald’s aged mum in Going My
Way - another golfing film. McCarey’s take on parental responsibility protrudes from his
two worst films, Wild Company and the dreadful My Son John.
Bunching his films together, you spot a recurring premise, explicit in Let’s
Go Native, Make Way for Tomorrow, Good Sam or Affair to
Remember, that the value of a man is his ability to support a woman. I
don’t know how that would fly in the current climate.
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| Frank Albertson getting sage advise from H.B.Warner - note director initials on the still number. | | | | |
I
wonder about intense scrutiny of Leo McCarey or Lee Chang-dong - or John M.
Stahl or the Renoir-Bergman-Antonioni repertory, particularly when director season programming sidelines film makers as substantial as Alan Crosland, Alf
Sjöberg or Tomu Uchida along with one off movies - think The Congress Dances, Forbidden
Planet or Pakeeza. Are celebrity seasons all that great an idea or just
something that was scooped up as part of museum culture? I did actually like the Forum
des images event devoted to lookalikes - which netted Conrad Veidt, Manga and
George Romero’s The Dark Half - but the Cinémathèque one made up of films set in art galleries?
The
Cinémathèque program also included seasons on Jean Renoir, Ingmar Bergman, M.
Night Shyamalan, Sergio Leone, Valeria Sarmiento and Yousef Chahine and premières of Beoning and Pierre Schoeller’s historical
spectacular Un Peuple et son roi.
While we visitors were gobsmacked at the range and quality of Cinémathèque screenings,
the natives were restless and I could see where they were coming from. Their
audience is visibly aging and those of us who remember the Langlois years miss
his dazzling first run copies, the spontaneous responses and great
interactions. All the current seasons I dipped into were disappointing in different
ways. The French films were, outside La Nuit d'amour, quite mundane and the
Japanese event was marred by poor prints. There is a point where it’s better to
replace a defective copy with another title.
Whatever
it’s limitations and defects may be, the Paris Cinémathèque represents world’s
best practice. Since I left they have run five hundred sessions and hosted
Jane Fonda and Ennio Morricone in person. In that time in Sydney there have
been zero such events. Even the odd live introductions which were once touted as an indicator of the growth of the local scene, have dried up. The difference is
obvious at a glance. Lacking activity, the audience withers. Consider the miserable turn-out for the screenings of Wings at Paddington, where two attempts at
Cinémathèque exhibition were allowed to collapse.
You've got to ask what
is the value in pouring millions in tax funding into training and film making in this uninformed and unquestioning environment? Decision
makers don’t want to know when they are told that the point at which France began to dominate the art movie scene was when their Cinémathèque took hold in
the mid thirties and that Australian films started to attract international
attention three years after the Australian NFT was put in place and they lost that
respect three years after it was wiped out - by a mix of incompetence,
political correctness and simple minded self-interest.
That in fact is just a side issue. The reason for maintaining a serious cinémathèque is the self evident one that it enriches its surroundings in ways that don't show up in balance sheets and that it's absence impoverishes those in ways that we can see all around us.
Barrie Pattison
Fox Company made before the merger with Daryl Zanuck's Twentieth Century. Zanuck put his own earlier films, like Call of the Wild, into re-issue in preference to the old Fox product, though some of it did get used to make weight in TV packages in the black and white years.
