Prey to the Wind.

 
It’s sixty years since I saw Renè Clair’s 1927 La Proie du vent in a 9.5 mm print lovingly assembled by some British enthusiasts. I enjoyed it then so I was looking forward to seeing the much better copy on the Cinémathèque Française’ “Henri” site where you can still catch it if you hurry. I guess it’s like encountering an old friend after many years - welcome and agreeable though the things that irritated you way back re-assert themselves.

This one was made for the Producer Kamenka’s Russian expatriot Albatross group which put out films with Ivan Mozjoukine. It comes at the end of the silent period and shows European film technique at it’s most developed. Quite perversely it inverts our expectation of the principals. It’s not a comedy, the form to which Clair devoted himself, though it’s not too far away from And Then There Were None come to think of it. Burly Charles Vanel is not the heavy but the aviator hero and Jim Gerald (Clair's Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, Asquith's French Without Tears) plays a serious role. Well he did do Comissionaire Lohman in the Le testament du docteur Mabuse. The elegant, tragic Lillian Hall-Davies and the always touching Sandra Milovanoff  however do not disappoint the justified anticipations of their their admirers.

René Clair

The film kicks off with a bi-plane landing on a grass air strip, one of its several nicely cut passages. (no editor is credited and it may have been the work of the director) The airfield staff are discussing the unrest in Lebanon. (Russia in Armand Mercier’s original novel "L'aventure amoureuse de Pierre Vignal") Shifting there we find ourselves in the women’s prison cells where Milovanoff is tending her dying mother while her husband Jean Murat (La kermesse héroïque) is released and the crones around her accuse Sandra of being a married to a traitor - close up of the mother’s crucifix in her hands.

Flier Vanel takes off but is engulfed in a cloud bank and can find nowhere to land but in the grounds of a picturesque castle. His wing clips a statue and the resulting crash leaves him unable to walk. He is cared for by Hall-Davis, (Hitchcock's 1927The Ring and1928 The Farmer's Wife)  the sister in law of owner Murat. There's by-play between Charles and Lillian exchanging cigarettes and hand contact. We get a quite arresting dream sequence triggered by his suspicions.

Castle & car.

The distraught figure of Milovanoff appears at Vanel’s window and she warns him about her husband and sister in law. “They want me dead.” He soon manages to stagger round the grounds using a stick and contrives to conceal his picking up the note Sandtra throws him by dropping his cane on it and gathering up the two together. Lillian has put off their proposed chess game and when Sandra comes to his room at night he locks the door - ah but there is a secret entrance! One of the film’s several effective shock moments.

 There follows another nicely edited sequence, a car chase down the road through the forest which develops to an impressively delirious climax. Murat produces a pistol determined to resolve things.

Coming back from Paris, Vanel goes to the village inn where a letter of explanation has been left for him by shaven-headed Dr. Gerald. Notice we see Charles' reaction before the inset showing the contents. We get a coda on the Place de la Concorde which rounds out the film nicely.

Vanel

His Albatross films are the most flamboyant of Clair’s work. As well as the Russian fascination with montage, also evident in Clair’s La Tour the following year, we get the occasional Germanic dark foreground action - the unseen airport typist’s hands, the aged woman guardian at the bedside or the final embracing couple. The design co-credited to Lazar Meerson also registers, providing the striking  twisted pillar corridor to go with the imposing real castle exteriors. All this virtuoso trimming suits the melodramatic subject matter and La Proie du vent makes an entertaining viewing even though it remains a minor piece from an often over-rated director.

 

Barrie Pattison 2021

Shimizu

Hiroshi Shimizu

 Long serving director Hiroshi Shimizu (1903–1966) has become the man of the moment. The Paris Cinémathêque has finally mounted it’s three times postponed retrospective.  All my French chums are writing saying they are unimpressed. I felt left out as the only Shimizu film I’m aware of having seen is the 1936  Arigatô-san / Mr. Thank You with Ken Uehara playing a good natured bus driver doing favors for his passengers and the locals along his route through poor mountain villages - so, I dived into You Tube where I found Shimizu’s Kanzashi / The Ornamental Hairpin from 1941.

This one has more curiosity value than anything else. The opening is OK with a couple of young women, star Kinuyo Tanaka who was married to Shimizu and friend Hiroko Kawasaki, walking along the forest road with the parade of pilgrims paced by the drum beater women whose rhythm is underlined by a passage of the sparse score.

They are staying at the local mountain resort where visitor groups prove to have got the services of the twelve of eighteen blind masseurs management has recruited, leaving the existing long term, reduced price customers out of luck. Grouchy professor Tatsuo Saitô complains. While sharing the hot spring, an unrecognisably young Chishû  Ryû (later regularly with Ozu and Torasan) injures his foot on a coral hair pin that has been lost in the water, seeing a near poetic significance in the event. A letter from Tanaka arrives indicating that she is looking for her missing pin. 

Kawahara, Ryo and Saitô.

Tanaka feels compelled to return and assist in Ryo’s recovery and she and the tree climbing grandsons of old man guest Kanji Kawahara, who Saito is reduced to playing Go with, barrack Ryo’s attempts to go further each day. The plank walk across the river proves too much for him and Tanaka has to piggy back him the last section. Romance between the pair seems likely.

When a noisy pilgrim group arrives - shorter repeat of the early tracking through the interior - the hotel guests, under the grumpy tutelage of the professor, have to double up in their cut price rooms with his snoring worse than old Kawahara’s, about which he has been complaining.

Recovered to the point where he is able to get up the forest stone stairs, Ryo leaves and  Tanaka repeats his climb sheltered by her parasol from the rain (traveling close up of feet on steps) having expressed dissatisfaction with the sheltered Tokyo life she has been living.

Tanaka

The film making is not conventional with particularly the first interiors often single,  vertical line emphasising, static takes where changing the performers’ position rather than edits  is used to vary the image. Only the leads seem to merit medium shot singles. Close-ups of documents punctuate the action. Moving camera shots are rare but striking and the piece uses murky chemical fades. The blind masseurs and kid performers recognisable from other Shimizu films turn up again - to little effect.

The support cast tend to merge and the setting contributes more than they do - the inn with it’s the sliding screen doors and tatami mat shared rooms and management advising “It is a great dishonor to have a guest hurt”, the spring where the men relax naked, the woods and river.

This one is short on information. No one mentions the war and the sub-titles don’t make clear that Ryo is a soldlier on leave (immediately before “The day that will live in infamy”) and we have to deduce Tanaka’s life style from the opening line about sweat washing the powder out of her skin and her later pondering having all her needs met.

The film’s picture of forties Japan is its major point of interest and often it’s not all that convincing or involving enough to ward off tedium. The film goes into the basket of pedestrian contemporary set shomin geki melos like Kinoshita's Nijûshi no hitomi / 24 Eyes or Mizoguchi's Gion no shimai / Sisters of the Gion Quarter.

 

Barrie Pattison 2021.

Japme with Trains & a Tiger.

 Used to be that  the problem was getting to see all the material showing in the theatres. Right now it's finding something that's worth the effort to go out in the cold. The new Japanese animated Josee to Tora to Sakana-tachi /Josee, the Tiger and the Fish meets that need nicely.

I was a Japme enthusiast long before we all heard about Manga. MGM dubbing Akira Daikubara and Taiji Yabushita's 1959 Shônen Sarutobi Sasuke, to emerge Magic Boy, tipped the balance. I remember planting that one with film societies. Shortrly after Osama Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atomu made it onto local TV as Astro Boy and isolated features like Yûgo Serikawa's1963 Wanpaku ôji no orochi taiji / The Little Prince & the 8 Headed Dragon or Kimeo Yabuki's 1969 Nagagutsu o haita neko / Puss in Boots, with one Hayo Miyazaki as a supervising animator, preceded the flood. Movie enthusiasts used to be derisive when I talked these up. Now there are shops devoted to manga movies.

Of course the films and (comic books) aren't all given over to little boy samurai battling wizards and dragons. Tezuka adapted "Crime & Punishment" and Rintaro filmed his Metropolis script in 2001, not to mention items like Isao Takahata's 1988 A Bomb memorial Hotaru no haka / Grave for Fireflies, and there's a broad spectrum of girl toons.

More recently these have mutated into adaptations of stories that might have been done as live action like 2016's Kimi no na wa. / Your Name or Nakao Yamada's Koe no katachi /A Silent voice. In fact Josee, the Tiger and the Fish had been filmed by Isshin Inudou in 2003, a slight, agreeable movie.

The current film is a  ‘Scope girlie manga without Princesses, fairies, J-Pop girls or talking animals (they do run to a winningly hostile domestic cat).  This one blows away most other entries we’ve seen in this cycle.  

Tsuneo, the student lead is learning Spanish and saving for the scholarship to study marine life in Mexico. He works with friends in a Dive Shop and sure enough his professor gets to tell him that his Thesis has attracted a scholarship.

However embittered crippled girl Josee literally crashes into his life when her wheel chair gets away from the grannie who is pushing her and rolls down the hill into him. The outcome of this is that he gets hired on to look after her while gran is off at the arcade games parlor. He’s intrigued when he glimpses the marine world painting in her inner room and he starts to create things like a seated skate board for her to move about on when her chair gets bogged in sand at the beach. 

Her superficial hostility begins to melt and she attends to her appearance and, to her surprise, begins to makes outside friends. The girl librarian proves to share her admiration for François Sagan after one of whose characters Josee was named. Josee’s predictable try at reading the tinies there “The Little Mermaid” bores all but one of them. They wander away from her  circle but her drawing on the white board intrigues them. The dive shop staff join in searching when she goes missing - despite the fact that the bikini girl also has the hots for our hero. One of the many nice moments is when the two young women achieve a common end and double high five one another.

Of course we are spared nothing and it looks like all the dreams will come to a halt in the hospital but that’s not going to happen in this picture.

It has the usual Japme fascination with railways. Think Spirited Away.  A couple of El trains pass in the Osaka set up scenics before we get to the journey footage with the wheel chair ramps being laid out. Striking, unfamiliar animation effects include the car headlight beams behind the action at night, the leaded glass windows of the old woman’s house or the sun through tree patterns falling on walking characters. The leafy setting is one of the film’s pleasures and is played with a change to winter snow. Their zoo tiger is a striking drawn concept and its hint of menace gives the often damp eyed piece an edge. The characters’ shared fascination with sea creatures generates a whole range of striking visuals - the aqualung scenes, the visit to the aquarium, the Clarion Angel Fish lamp, Josee’s paintings and her final mermaid story.

It goes on a bit too long but the climaxing session with the library kids intercut with the back story is irrestistible and could carry a weaker film than this over the line. The film is TV animation series director Kôtarô Tamura's first feature and it appears to have been widely admired.  This one deserves its theatrical run. Even if it does make it into local small screen distribution, it's qualities will be diminished.

Barrie Pattison 2021

 GLEB PANFILOV and INNA CHURIKOVA.
 

 When Gleb Panfilov’s Proshu slova opened in Paris in 1976, as  Je demande la parole (I can’t find any English language version), I went because it was a new Russian movie and I found myself gobsmacked, totally unprepared after having only seen the director’s slight, agreeable 1970 Nachalo / The Beginning.

In Proshu slova, Panfilov’s wife of fifty years Inna Churikova, near unrecognisable from her urchin parts, is smartly turned out as the honored Soviet Citizen whose success as an Olympic sharp shooter has been given recognition by making her the mayor of her town. Meanwhile, a writer former colleague has sent her a copy of his play to which she feels bound to provide a critique pointing out its failure to meet the guide lines for Socialist art. He acknowledges her comments but points out that it’s already doing business in two Moscow Theatres. Inna’s engulfed in the supervision of the construction of a new housing development and her unsupervised child shoots himself with one of her pistols. Her husband is outraged and he turns on her with a harangue that is a companion to Beau Bridges’ “I am completely without” monologue to his activist wife Sally Field in the 1979 Norma Rae. Churikova’s husband’s clincher argument is that in Paris there are twelve hundred restaurants, a facility barely present in their world. She takes this on board and the ending is her, as a delegate to the immense council of  the Supreme Soviets, standing up and saying “I ask for the floor.”

Proshu Slova - Churikova & Nikolay Gubenko

I’d never seen anything from Russia that so seriously reproached Communist society and I haven’t since. I would have expected that to bring the roof in on the Panfilovs but it was his next film Thema / Theme that had troubles, being suppressed for seven years and only released in 1979 after the findings of a Glasnost era committee appointed to review all bans since 1930. The sticking point was, we were told, that it had a Jewish character forbidden to emigrate to Israel. In the copy I eventually saw there’s a dissident who want to go to the ‘States.

After this Panfilov, either from choice or convenience, retreated to Maxim Gorki adaptations and TV series about the Romanovs.

I can’t help thinking of Helmut Kautner after 1943’s Romanze in Molle or Feng Xioagang and the 2016 Wo Bu Shi Pan Jinlian / I Am Not Madame Bovary, immensely popular creators whose prestige work the authorities needed but who sailed too close to the wind and found themselves muzzled. What ever you may think about Capitalism, it never managed to stop Sidney Lumet who achieved prominence from making a lifetime of films that tore into its most prized institutions - democracy in Fail Safe and more overtly Power, religion in Child’s Play and particularly the rule of law in Twelve Angry Men, Prince of the City, The Verdict and Find Me Guilty.

I’d worked at finding the Panfilovs’ output so it was with some surprise that I discovered the 1968 V ogne broda net / No Path Through Fire / There is no ford in fire, a film earlier than The Beginning (which had been touted as their first) on You Tube in a nice sharp, correct format copy with English subs. IMDB lists Panfilov as director and he discusses it as his first major

V ogne broda net / No Path Through Fire

film and first collaboration with Churikova on the sleeve notes of the French DVD, but the print has him as producer and another name as director.

Titles over the striking drawings, which become a key plot element, cut to the black and white wide screen images of bleak snow covered Russian landscape with that familiar straight line horizon. It already evokes Alexei Gherman or Andrei Tarkovsky among whom Panfilov had a certain community though each of these directors showed a distinct personality in what appears, from this distance, to be the richest period of Russian film making. Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Tarkovski’s Andrei Rublev and regular lead, is in No Path Through the Fire.

Kononov & Churikova.

A distant train crosses the screen, a mobile hospital where Churikova complete with peasant stoop and drab outfits is an orderly. First time young Mikhail Kononov, an accordionist soldier, sees her he thinks she’s a boy. His friend moves on Inna but is sent packing but she and Kononov become an item despite their inexperience and awkwardness, walking off along the sandy river bank together and necking in the shrubbery.

He’s distraught when the train moves on with her but when it comes back he's alarmed when she sells her attractive floral blouse to buy him a suit and overwhelms him with her “Psycho” undisciplined affection. Great moment of him desperately doubling back to her from the troop train taking him away and then running to rejoin it.

At their new destination, the medical train is engulfed by the horse carts bringing wounded in the rain. The shot of the mother holding a board over her injured son’s face as the water beats down registers and her exclusion from the train is significant, coming with objections from the peasant who has left his family because there is no food in the village and no food in the town, to join the team's blonde nurse.

In Churikova’s discussions with the train medics, their shared dream is of a future without exploitators. She reveals her peasant belief in The Evil Eye and they learn that Bolsheviks have even killed the Tsar.

Polit Agit car joins train

The Polit Agit carriage is attached to the train, objections nervously silenced. Their artist sees Inna with a piece of black bread (“You have food?”) and they trade - cut to him with the bowl and her joining painting the carriage side decoration. 

She starts working with the art materials, guarding her drawings from the inspection of the artist and rebuffs his advances, telling him she is spoken for.

Then, in one of the film’s great images, a hoard of soldiers, rifles slung on their shoulders,
emerge from the fog, headed for the Don. The nurse is ordered to pull her skirt over her
knees by the Bolshevik doctor. Train medical personnel, caught up in the emotion of the
moment, fall in with the troops, with the one who brings his saddle ridiculed because they
are an infantry unit.

An abrupt finale cuts to where Inna has fallen into the hands of the Whites’ Colonel, who asks what she wants to do after the war and she tells him it’s to become an artist. He releases her because he recognises her sensibility when she is able to pick out the superior icon there that its owner can’t differentiate from his other pieces. However when the Colonel orders the brutalisation of the prisoner, who turns out to be the peasant who opposed the Bolsheviks (“Orders are more important than mothers?”) she stands by the man's side until moved on and, out in the snowy yard, picks up a rock...

This is pretty much the most plausible rendition of the Russian Civil War we have on film. "Dr. Zhivago" is a glossy, romanticised presentation of the same scene. Here again the Bolsheviks are naive, idealistic, doctrinaire and brutal while the Whites are cultured, idealistic, doctrinaire and brutal but the stark, grubby handling gives Panfilov’s film real conviction. 

No Path Through Fire’s Sharp ‘scope B&W and surprisingly thoughtful criticisms of the Heroes of the Revolution constantly catch attention  but the star element is winning young Churikova, alternately plain and appealing, simple minded and unquestioning  but making perceptive instinctive choices. It is the first of her dominating, distinct characters who will head up Panfilov’s movies and make her one of the leading performers of their industry.

Inna Churikova and Gleb Panfilov.

The impressive work  of Gherman (includes Moy drug Ivan Lapshin/ My Friend Ivan Lapshin) has recently been rehabilitated and a short Gherman retrospective has been circulated round cultural events. The imposing Panfilovs are over due one of those. 

Barrie Pattison 2021

 Silent Witnesses.

It occurs to me that I’ve been giving the same introduction showing silent Hollywood for my entire adult life, telling the audience that the body of it’s output wasn’t either masterpieces or primitives. American studios produced the thousands of films which made the movies dominate entertainment in the Twentieth Century. The nearest thing the world ever had to a universal frame of reference was geared to the  neighborhood audiences who visited the theatres maybe twice or more a week and their definite expectations. These were established or adopted pretty much round the planet. 

The Conrad Veidts at home - for Long Hairs

What the mass audience saw was selected on the basis of stars and subject.

The occasional documentary was about African wild life with maybe the odd polar expedition. Arab and Asian cinema didn’t exist outside its home market. The anguished dramas from the Soviets or Germany were for some small band of longhairs.

This made the Hollywood film dismissable and trite to it’s critics. A lot of it was and is. However a sizable proportion retains the appeal it once had as popular entertainment, to which is now added its value as a record of it’s day, the first and best such documentation in history. It's a bit like Paddy Chayefsky has William Holden say in Network - they learned about life from Bugs Bunny.

So I pulled a couple of DVDs out of the silents stack, with hopes that have often been justified. 

Director Erle C. Kenton’s The Girl in the Pullman comes from 1927, the tail end of the mute era with Vitaphone already surfacing. There’s a hint of desperation in it.

It fields Marie Prevost and Harrison Ford (Mark I - Hawthorne of the U.S.A. & Rubber Tires) who had been the stars of the 1926 Up in Mabel’s Room, while support player Harry Myers had played lead in a Getting Gertie’s Garter short. This is another in that cycle of comedies with the same unfulfilled hint of raunchiness, a poor relative to the Reginald Denny vehicles of the day. 

Harrison Ford and Marie Prevost.

The piece starts off none too promisingly with successful Dr. Ford treating an aged customer for nerves with a dome sun lamp that drops over his head. Our medico also has that regular in twenties comedy, an electric (steam) cabinet. Lawyer Myers, who has an office in the same building, handled his divorce from Prevost. Ford’s new fiancée Kathryn McGuire (opposite Buster Keaton in The Navigator & Sherlock jr.) we are told is a gold digger and she brings along her mother - perennial frontier woman Ethel Wales, here got up in a sophisticate outfit with lamé and turban - for the couple’s lunch at the up-market Embassy Hotel. They decide to get married in California. To reassure us it’s a daring movie, we get a track along bare knees.

As Ford’s ex, a here subdued Prevost, takes a dim view of the new arrangement and, finding out that her divorce isn’t final till the next day, sets out to stop Harrison becoming a bigamist, taking Myers along when they join the same train. Porter Heinie Conklin, in plausible black face, has routines about looking after two brides.

Things pick up on the train where Myers gets to do the nice (prohibition era) mime inviting Prevost to join him for a drink and Wales is outraged to see Ford trying to conceal Prevost in the compartment down the corridor. They decide to give us too much of a good thing, when the Pullman car detaches from the train and goes rolling down the steep mountain tracks on it’s own, for a finale.

Ford struggles to be a farceur doing the sudden moves and double takes but is out matched by the talented support. Patient Franklin Pangborn on the other hand is totally in his element here. Marie Prevost was notably more conspicuous in the Lewis Milestone The Racket next year but her career lasted only a few years longer than Ford’s into the thirties.

The film is one of the Cecil B. De Mille productions of the day, so it is mounted well. Director Kenton slogged through a long career of which the Charles Laughton Island of Lost Souls is the highlight.

The Sunrise Silents disk is bearable.

1925’s The Mad Whirl is marginally better. It is one of a run of films on which director William A. Seiter used the talents of Lewis Milesone, who is credited as a writer. Their 1924 Listen Lester with Harry Myers & Louisa Fazenda is more fun.

The rich, philandering Herringtons, Alec B. Francis & Myrtle Stedman and their son Jack Mulhall, are into cheating on their partners and celebrate after dark with their jazz era friends, leaving the butler exhausted and legs of girl guests hanging out of trees. Their flapper life style contrasts with that of disapproving ice cream parlor owner and reformed saloon operator George Fawcett (Valentino’s dad in Son of the Sheik - imposing) whose daughter, May MacAvoy, Mulhall used to know in Sunday School. The appealing McAvoy was the lead in the silent Ben Hur and The Jazz Singer.

The Mad Whirl - McAvoy.

Mulhall’s roadster passes her horse and buggy on the road and he becomes interested in re-kindling their association. However Fawcett is not impressed - OK scene of him preparing a sundae (“That’s all we’ve got”) in the shop for Jack who slips it into the cuspidor only to have it refreshed because he “spilled” it.

Jack’s fast living set form a cordon round him in their bathers when he passes their beach outing and McAvoy escaping dismisses him as a playboy.

After one Saturday night blast, Jack’s squeeze Marie Astaire has passed out and he carries her back into her home. On his way home, his car radiator boils and he goes to get water from the church tap just as the congregation with McAvoy comes out, passing himself off as a parishioner.

A further deception follows when he stops next to the runaway horse cart where it pulls up after the animal, startled by a train whistle, has bolted leaving May swooned. Jack accepts her mistaken belief that he’s her savior.

However the lies weigh on him and he fesses up but is still rejected, kissing her roughly and having her cut his face with her riding crop. After her visit to the church for guidance, May accepts Jack, upsetting the snobby Harringtons who can’t admit the daughter of a saloon keeper and Fawcett, who refuses to let his child enter such a dissipated home.

The rich couple reform and turn back the night’s revelers, while the young leads head for Niagara Falls.

The film has a curious and disappointing form, starting off as comic depiction of flapper morals which switches to a tortured romance and, after some heavy praying, into a morality. The cast are adequate. Curious to see a young Mulhall in the lead.  His career would dwindle to unbilled bit parts though he did get to play Scientific Detective Craig Kennedy in a sound version of The Clutching Hand. Barbara Bedford, heroine of the Tourneur-Clarence Brown Last of the Mohicans, barely registers as Fancis’ cheating partner. Director Seiter hit his peak three decades later with One Touch of Venus, which threw Ava Gardner and Curt Weil together.

Mad Whirl is a curious item on which the names of King Vidor or Frank Borzage would not have been unexpected. Best element is the small town setting - leafy roads, Root Beer shop with urchin customers and the white timber church. They set this against the rich home where the butler serves the disinterested owners the cook’s elaborately prepared breakfast from the family room side board. It's not hard to see the distant shadow of Kings Row and Peyton Place approaching.

Craft aspects are assured but this one shows every evidence of its age. The Grapevine Video copy gets by and has an OK original piano score.

Barrie Pattison 2021