Cinematheque

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. 

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.

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

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.

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. 

 

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.
 

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