Columbia and Hollywood.

 Columbia Studios were always pretty slack about showing their early movies. You got the  impression that Frank Capra was the only director they had pre WW2. Jean Arthur, Jack Holt, Carol Lombard, Fay Wray and Victor Jory  have always been under-represented in my viewing, though a few collector copies and TV prints did slip through. Fortunately the company appears to have looked after the master materials and now some items are showing up on DVD and You Tube in beautiful copies. Bad news is that so far they have been uninspiring.

It Happened in Hollywood - Dix & Wray.

Harry Lachman’s 1937 It Happened in Hollywood however does have a number of claims on our attention. It appears to be Sam Fuller’s first screen credit - as the last name among the writers - not that his input is recognisable. More significantly it is probably the most revealing of those Hollywood accounts of the silent to sound period, again promoting the myth of the stars destroyed by recording. This keeps on surfacing in movies -  the Star Is Borns, Hollywood Cavalcade, Singing the Rain, You’re My Everything and of course Sunset Boulevard, The Buster Keaton Story and The Artist. Hard to quantify these things but the drop out rate seems to be greater among the Broadway imports of the early sound years ... Robert Ames, Talulah Bankhead, Osgood Perkins, Helen Morgan?

It Happened in Hollywood has probably the best coverage of that transition filmed, notably the crane round the studio where they are working with a dialogue director, two cameras in sound proof booths, number board and clap sticks. Throw in exterior shooting of a tracking shot walking with a hand held microphone and canvas & timber camera blimp or the always splendid William B. Davidson as a director peering at a miniature of the set using a viewfinder.

We see a board for one of the films within the film with "R. Maté" on it. A character in a beret steps up with a filter and I thought we might be getting treated to a glimpse of the cameraman of European films by Dreyer and Clair. One Cyril Ring is credited in the part.

Particularly notable here is the contribution of  lead Richard Dix, a powerhouse of the silent period (To the Last Man, Vanishing American) whose stardom carried on into sound with his Nothing But The Truth and Cimarron. In this one he gets to do the show piece scene, playing the awkward silent cowboy star in his Tuxedoed screen test with glamorous Fay Wray, where his delivery of the dialogue is so stilted that speech coach Franklin Pangborn (no less) playing perfectly straight, steps into the glamor decor wearing his business suit and repeats the lines more convincingly using the delivery of early sound films. Later in a nice scene alone with Wray on the sunny, flower covered hillside, Dix does this passage with his own phrasing making it sound sincere and touching. This detail alone, which most wouldn’t notice, gives the film some interest. No longer the giant of the movies he had been, Dix never the less owns this one.

Pangborn, Wray and Dix

It Happened in Hollywood starts with a fakey silent western with Dix & Wray, which proves to be being shown in a children’s hospital ward where young orphan Bill Burrud is about to be wheeled off for his operation. Dix the kid’s visiting cowboy hero,  bucks him up with the suggestion that he should come see him in the movie capital - Oh, Oh!

A man of integrity, Dix ignores the opportunity for publicity “I’m not gonna use cripples and orphans to get my name in the paper” and goes off on his personal appearance montage.

However sound arrives and, after seeing his test, studio head Granville Bates lets our hero go. “They’re not making outdoor pictures anymore.” This means that Dix has to sell the nineteen acre ranch, where he planned on setting up a boys’ camp, to nasty Edgar Dearing. Fay’s test was a hit so Richard bows out of her life though still smitten.

Outside the studio he gets into a punch up with Dearing while the cafe pianola plays and director Davidson watches and has an idea. “Cagney and Robinson - even Gable - are playing gangsters.” He cast Richard as a bank robber in Faye’s picture. When the script is modified however our hero walks, though they are behind schedule and losing the light (indoors!). Mindful of his fan base, he rejects the character of “low down, cop shootin’ gutter rat”. Faye, always gorgeous, even if she could never master the business of acting with sound, tells him “You’d have let me down if you’d played it.”

Our hero decides “When a cowboy can’t feed his horse, it’s time to move on.” However who should arrive in the rain that night but young Burrud run away from the orphanage.

The plot redemes the maudlin material with a curious and agreeable development where bungalow court neighbor and Mae Robson lookalike Zeffie Tilbury suggests they simulate a Hollywood celebrity gathering by having all the movie stars’ stand ins turn up in character at the hired ranch. Some of these are actually impersonators who appear only in this one film. They’ve got a Chaplin, a Harold Lloyd, a Joe E. Brown and a W.C. Fields. William Powell’s real stand-in does the star. The less convincing ones get to walk through and some get sustained scenes. His brother Arthur in a Captain Flagg uniform has Victor McLaglen down pat. Virginia Rendell, a convincing Mae West, vamps Dearing and Earl Haddon, their Bing Crosby, breaks out in a number. This is more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Burrud and Joe E. Brown impersonator Charles Dow Clark

The venture however fails to raise the money needed to care for the Burrud so we swerve into crime movie - pouring rain, shoot out & car crash and Dix emerges as a hero signed for a new movie where he’ll again share the screen with Wray, whose own stardom had been fading. The ranch is made over for a boys camp - happy end.

More a curiosity than a success this one is beautifully filmed by Lachman who (rather like John Farrow) had a life more interesting than his films. He was a cartoonist who became a serious painter (Mary Meerson assured me he had a canvas in the Louvre) He moved to designer for Rex Ingram and into directing in Europe and the U.S. working through a string of B movies, including Charlie Chans. This is one of his better efforts.

Exploring old Hollywood  is  pastime that's seen me through a lifetime. Sometimes it pays off.

 

Barrie Pattison 2020.

French Film Fesitval 2020 Preview

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2020

A few notes on included titles I’ve managed to see.

Le mystère Henri Pick - Luchini, Cottin.

Director Rémi Bezançon’s Le mystère Henri Pick  / The Mystery of Henri Pick is one of those ultra civilised French movies with a couple of recognisable stars and picturesque scenery all aimed at an audience not unlike the women’s book club that becomes part of the onscreen action.

Arts TV personality Fabrice Luchini (think Waldo Lydecker without the murders) humiliates author Henri Pick’s widow on air when he says that the book they are considering couldn’t have been written by her semi literate pizza cook husband. Fired over this, he sets out for Crozon in  distant Finisterre to prove his claim and encounters the dead cook’s daughter Camille Cottin. “You turn a blind eye to the beauty of things.” They partner in his search with examination of clues like the new ribbon in Pick’s preserved typewriter and some subdued will they or won’t they. This leads to a museum of rejected manuscripts base on an actual Quebec institution.

A feature production, charming people, rugged locations and sophisticated motivation - the whole art cinema package, even to having Hanna Schygulla bit parting. It’s delivered agreeably enough.

The combination of the always admirable Roschdy Zem (also in Rebecca Ziotowki’s  Les Sauvages included in the event) and director Arnaud Desplechin looked promising. A departure for Desplechin, Roubaix, une lumière (Oh Mercy!) is a nocturnal policier set in his home town, the grubby city between Lille and the Franco-Belgian border, the poorest commune in France, with 45 per cent of its population living under the poverty line. There  Algerian Commissaire Roschdy in his element investigating a Xmas Eve slate of crimes and non crimes.

Roubaix - Zem.

Derived from a TV documentary, the piece takes its time (two hours worth) dissecting a racist insurance scam which it’s perpetrator brings into the station, a girl runaway, arson and rape in with a visit to Rochdy’s home community (“Your uncle was a prince” he’s reminded) to wade through before attention settles on the murder of an old woman which takes him to the run down home of lesbian couple Lea Sedoux and Sara Forestier.

Instead of shoot outs and chases it features Rochdy’s interrogations with side kick Lieutenant Antoine Reinartz having to keep up with his more experienced superior. It’s convincing. Performances are superior and cars prowling round the orange sodium lamp streetscape give atmosphere but the film is finally only passably involving.

Director Bertrand Bonello is maturing and with Zombi Child and his Nocturama he’s moving into a characteristically French cycle - the cinema of outrage. Think  Clouzot’s Le Courbeau, Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes and the Gaspar Noé Seul contre tous / I Stand Alone,  though Bonello’s films are as different from those as they are from one another.

There is a narrative buried in Zombi Child but more importantly it’s the most substantial study of voodoo that the movies have come up with. Separate stories merge into something

which is of a piece though it doesn’t follow any familiar pattern.

We follow black Haitian student Wislanda Louimat joining a prestige French girls boarding school on the basis that her mum got the Légion d'honneur for her work in oposition to the brutal François "Papa Doc" Duvalier regime. Her pale, uniformed school mates, who sway in rehearsed wave response to the head mistress’ instructions, regard her with some suspicion. However virginal Louise Labéque befriends her and wants her accepted into their secret sorority. Anticipate an exotic Mean Girls or a female Dead Poet’s Society. We feel some concern for the newcomer’s fate among the snobby sisterhood who take candlelight meetings after lights out. Claiming to be the grand daughter of a Haitian Zombie doesn’t seem to fit into this scheme.

Meanwhile we get what prove to be flashbacks to the nineteen sixties and the fate of

Mackenson Bijou drugged and buried alive by a rival - hearing the dirt being thrown on the coffin he is being buried in. Much sobbing and ritual chanting. Bijou makes an unexpected return. You can forget the likes of Black Moon (Roy William Neill 1934), I Walked With a Zombie or Lucio Fulci.

Zombi Child - Louimat & Labéque

The film’s focus however proves to be on Labéque, her desire settled on Sayyid El Alami the shirtless moto riding hunk who has lost interest. She picks up at the news that her chum’s aunt is a “mambo” and starts hitting the cash dispenser. When we get to the (impressive) spirit evocation, the demon proves scornful of all this white bread activity.

The films achieves strange on multiple levels not least by fielding a present day that seems to belong to the past and a period fifty years back that is alarmingly modern. It’s mix of Euro Art movie, horror film and quasi documentary has upset not a few commentators. I was intrigued.

I commented Les hirondelles de Kaboul / The Swallows of Kabul, directed  by animator

Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec and actress  Zabou Breitman when It showed in the Persian Film

Festival and it looks like getting the wider release it deserves.

It offers parched, hand painted images of 1998 Kabul under the Taliban where the streets

fill with Kalash wielding soldiers and blue burka women, Mohsen a young man voiced by

Swann Arlaud passes the stoning of a woman convicted of licentious living. Children are

climbing onto a parked tank to watch and Mohsen finds himself joining in the brutality.

Full of self-reproach he comes back to wife Mussarat (Hiam Abbass no less) desperate at being confined to her home in his absence, drawing on the wall and playing an English language song about burkhas, on the cassette machine. Mohsen warns her that the music can be heard in the street or by their Religious Observant neighbour. Across town there is another homecoming. Hard man jailer Atiq (Simon Abkarian) has limped back to Zunaira  (Zita Hanrot) his  nurse wife who is now dying of cancer. They are aware that the regime they serve is incapable of providing them happiness.

The plot develops into shock value melodrama distanced by being presented in pale water colors and the fact that Afghans are speaking sub-titled French though none of this stops what we are seeing being disturbing. This one registers its indignation - not what you expect from a widely distributed animation. The style alone would get attention, though the undetailed faces don’t stand up to the close-ups they occasionally get. I might watch it again. Don’t ask me what the swallows signify. 

André Téchiné’s Hôtel des Amériques was always a handsomely made film - Bruno Nuytten on camera, Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko design, Philipe Sarde score it now has acquired a nostalgia patina which compensates for it’s conventional Boulevard feature romance plot.

It’s mad love again. When neurotic anesthetist Catherine Deneuve come close to running

down Patrick Dewaere, they end up spending the night together. He decides she’s “la plus

belle dame du monde”,  quite plausible in 198l. However she is still obsessed with the memory of the dead engineer-lover whose house they visit. Patrick gets through to Catherine but but starts neglecting her under the pressure of the gap in their social status.

(“It’s proof love can end”)

This plays parallel to the conversion of the Biarritz beach hotel into a tourist trap.

The films is too long and confused but does have the odd striking moments - the train window view superimposed on the ball room’s painted trees, the striking close-up of the keys still under the step of the dead lover’s house.

Jacques Demy’s Peau d'âne / Donkey Skin is always greeted with affection even though the tireless efforts of wife Agnes Varda to keep their work in the public eye have made it one of the most accessible items in the movie repetoire. I liked her stories of fans trying to make the cake that Catherine Deneuve at her zenith sings the recipe for here. The film is back again hopefully in it’s stereo restoration. There should be more of that.

Peau d’an has Demy’s  personality stamped all over it - fairy tale for grown ups (think the less succesful Pied Piper), all sung film (Parapluies de Cherbourg), distancing adult elements - here the incest plot to go with Jacques Riberolles’ singing serial killer in Demoiselles de Rochefort or Montand’s deadbeat dad in  Trois places pour le 26. Mag Bodard threw a barrel full of money at it and the costumes, jokey colour settings and cast dazzle, backed by one of Michel Legrand’s most humable scores. Even with all this I’ve always felt that fey wasn’t Demy’s best register - not that that’s likely to keep me away.

Also on view Ludovic Bernard’s 10 Jours Sans Maman,  a French version of  Ariel Winograd’s amusing 2017 Mamá se fue de viaje with Frank Dubosc in the Diego Peretti role.

   

Peau d'an - Marais, Deneuve.

Philippine & HK

One Offs

The local scene is becoming a grab all of one off movies. In Sydney,  Randwick Ritz seethes with them. 

Quezon's Game Bagastsing, Bianco, Billy Ray Gallion & friend.

Matthew E. Rosen’s Quezon's Game showed up there. How long is it since you saw a Philippino film? It’s clearly a movie of high seriousness. It deals with the Philippines president in power in 1938 as the transition to self government from the USA is taking place and World War II looms. This one is not going to tell us about native rice famines and the establishment of a Philippino language however. Star Raymong Bagastsing, a busy actor with a background in martial arts films and appearing in the Spanish 1898 Los Ultimos Filipinos, spends the movie agonising about twelve hundred Jews that the Nazis prove anxious to off load while racist elements in the American political system block his attempts to accept them.

This works out as lots of footage of the cast impersonating historical personages smoking cigars and wearing baggy tropical gear at card games where we never see the value of the hands. The presence of David Bianco's Dwight Eisenhower, then in the American  colonial administration, keeps on threatening to provide significant historical comment and failing to do so. Jennifer Blair-Bianco’s Mamie doing the To Have and Have Not put down of the “shameless bitch” band singer who has eyes for Ike does spark interest but goes nowhere. At least a nasty SS Officer in full black dress uniform provides variety.

What we get is endless detail on immigration quotas, visas, the agonising process of crossing names off a list produced by placing an advertisement in German papers to attract immigrants for the new Quezon City while Bagatsing coughs blood into a folded white hankie.

As director, Commercials specialist Matthew E. Rosen can’t manage the drama unearthed for Ship of Fools or Exodus. He does better under his other hat as cameraman, providing an appealing, sunny Manila of luxurious Malacañang Palace  interiors, homes and terraces and picturesque poled water taxis.

Add this one to the list of political toned, English (mainly) speaking foreign movies like Curtiz or Paris Song that are turning up in fringe distribution.

First Night Nerves

Stanley Kwan was in the eighties one of the brightest lights of Hong Kong Cinema. He’s spent most of the last decade producing in an uneasy relationship with the Beijing industry.  Now he’s promoted as China’s one openly gay director. Since coming out (a big deal in that environment) his work has been erratic and distorted by wanting to reach the gay audience.

Well here he is back again with Baat go leuiyan, yat toi hei (Eight Women, One Stage) / First Night Nerves a film that clearly shows his interests and style. If you think you are going to see something comparable to Kwan’s 1986 Love Unto Wastes, Rouge 1987 or even Center Stage 1991, you’re likely to feel you’ve burned your fourteen bucks but if you’re curious about it’s maker’s career, this one intrigues. 

 It’s a great looking movie and proves to be densely plotted and finally likeable if you stay with it.

Basically it’s about two celebrity actresses who are cast in a theater production in the giant Hong Kong City Hall (for which Kwan joined in protests to keep developers at bay). The women have a history, the anticipated antagonism arrives and there’s some sword crossing - Gigi Leung has done a line count and finds Sammi Cheng has more than she does so she's hired in a critic, that transgender director Kam Kwok Leung hates, to beef up her part and the director has a heart attack. Cheng’s reduced circumstances make her take a small flat but the play’s enthusiast backer lights a fire under the attorney handling the late husband’s will and activates a trust fund for their child’s education. We lean that the husband died on a flight with another wife with whom he had two more children. Throw in the sixteen year old son skyping he wants his mum to acknowledge his teenage boy friend.

Leung's late discovery character is still agro over the fact that the Beijing producers of her last movie didn’t think her Mandarin was up to standard and had her dubbed.

The lead pair have a long talk out in the cemetery, reconcile and the play opens - apparently to success.

 

Stanley Kwan's First Night Nerves.

 

 

 

The piece suggests the influence of the Casavetes Opening Night as with the characters taking tasty looking meals together back stage. Theater manager Kiki Sheung rushes in to say there should be no open flames in the building. She is comforted to learn that a light bulb is the heat source and joins in.

I found First Night Nerves hard to follow and was continually trying to catch up. Some of the native language speakers to whom the performers were more familiar had problems too, so (without one of those English language press books of the kind that creates a comfort zone for the regular commentators) I may have got some of this wrong.

The plot rates as dodgy but the film’s imagery is exceptional in the best Jacques Demy tradition. A costume fitting has one of the leads in the grey dress decorated with the red stitched on flowers. The pink light falls on the gauze behind which the musicians play lit by the set’s giant green neon lettering. The smoothly circling camera crossing the stage edge hu du men shows the action as a theatrical presentation and a domestic interior, without an edit. Diffusion makes the participants look like they have been dusted with icing sugar. Attention wanders following the narrative but it is constantly snapped back by the visuals.

 

Barrie Pattison 2020