Low Life.

 William Wellman's 1931 Night Nurse is recognised as a racy Warner movie where the studio's Depression Era production values back strong contemporary melodrama, one of the best examples of it’s day and intriguing to see its emerging stars.

The film starts and ends with a view through a wind shield lettered “Ambulance” and a siren on the track.  We get to Barbara Stanwyck right in her element, as the on her uppers girl who didn’t make it through high school, rejected by Chief Nurse Vera Lewis despite her “I’m sure I can make good” entreaty. Easy to recognise the year and the studio.

When Babs (literally)  bumps into respected doctor Charles Winninger on her way out, she is taken on for nurse training, sharing a room with gum chewing fellow trainee Blondell . “It’s the only job where they pay you while you learn.” The pair get down to their scanties to change into uniform at every possibility and don’t show any self consciousness.

They have to deal with grabby Interns Edward J. Nugent and Alan Lane pranking her with an anatomy class skeleton (weak scene), fierce curfews, a patient dying on Dr. Winniger’s table and dodgy situations like not putting walk-in bootlegger Ben  Lyon’s bullet wound on the record after we've seen Cop Jim Farley guarding patient James Bradbury Jr. who has to be sent to the prison ward.

Night Nurse - Lyon, Blondell & Stanwyck

On-ward visitor Lucille Ward asks why her son can’t have a screen like the patient next to them and is told that the screened one is dying. Willy Fung's wife is in one bed and the naked baby we see being washed (Stanwyck carefully framed out of shot tight on hands) is black. Blondell explains that doctors don’t date nurses and the interns see them as cut price receptionists. We recognise a try for Warner documentation.

The girls get to graduate, taking the nurses' oath in a chapel where Lyon’s floral display dwarfs the others.

Then we move to the Night Nurse plot proper where Stanwyck is put in to look after bottle blonde mother Charlotte Merriam’s two little girls Betty Jane Graham and Marcia Mae Jones in the charge of severe house keeper Blanche Friderici and dodgy doctor Ralf Harolde. Babs detects severe malnutrition. There’s an on going party with drunken Walter McGrail having to be punched out when be moves on her and Merriam (“I’m a dypsomaniac”) out of things.

Babs' objections are met by Nick the chaufeur (“a horrid man”) who shows up in the person of an imposing, clean shaven Clark Gable in shiny knee boots and drops Barbara - punch framed out of shot. Her approach to Harrold is met by threats of being thrown out of the profession and Winninger is reluctant to interfere, so she eats humble pie and waits for her opportunity.

Stanwyck with a horrid man.

The situation deteriorates (“These babies won’t last”) with Babs seeing a Trust Fund as  motivation. Ben turns out to be the non stop  party’s supplier. Friderici cracks, setting her hopes on a probably useless milk bath.  Winninger comes to the rescue and evil Clark
decks the old man but when he moves on Ben, our hero taps the hand in his coat pocket against the wall, to give a suitable hard contact thud (we've seen him use a pistol to smash a store window) and the day is saved.

No doubt about the attack and energy Wellman gives this one - characteristic low angle groups and sometimes awkward close two shot dialogues. The sleazy content is occasionally uncomfortable viewing nearly a Century later but it is one of the main things that makes this one enduring “Pre Code”.

We know about these American respectability baiting movies but there is a counterpart in Weimar Germany.

Margin information showing on title.

Werner Hochbaum’s 1932 Razzia in St. Pauli / Raid in St. Pauli is unexpected. It slots in between Ernö Metzner's1928 Polizeibericht Überfall and Helmut Kaütner’s 1944 Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7, alll studies of low life activity in films forbidden by the German censors. 

 

Razzia in St. Pauli is the film the Nazis banned the month before they supressed Testament of Mabuse, sending Fritz Lang off to Paris and Hollywood and changing the course of movie history.

Mixing documentary coverage and scenes of underclass life, like director Hochbaum's 1929 S.D.R. sponsored  Brüder, his Razzia in St. Pauli starts with an OK montage of Hamburg Port activity, mixing nicely to dancing feet and carrying on through a ferry emptying passengers to fill the streets, we get to the port area with it’s bar girls and chop suey restaurants. There’s a disturbing cut to what looks like a small studio-interior guest house room where factory girl Gina Falckenberg has taken to her bed arguing with departing lover, balding Wolfgang Zilzer, while a street band disturbs the peace.

Razzia - Falkenberg

A police chase drives well known burglar Karl the Sailor/ Friedrich Gnaß across the roofs and into the building where his way is barred by the land lady but he still gets into Falckenberg’s room and, after some banter with the rough trade new arrival, she hides him in her bed while the armed cops search the room. 

Deciding the new comer is a more suitable partner, she takes him to Max Zilzer’s  busy Reeperbahn corner bar. When her live-in boy friend shows up to play piano with the small band, there’s a confrontation between the two men which looks like it will turn ugly but ends as a drunken threesome.

Razzia - Zilzer, Falkenberg & Gnaß

We get Falkenberg narrating her background in a rich family, played over scenes of her real  poverty stricken childhood and drinker Charly Wittong  is persuaded to do a song to general applause.

Meanwhile at Police Station 13 (small interior decors with cuts to a wall clock), Inspector Friedrich Rittmeyer mobilises the force to apprehend Gnaß. A suspicious stranger appears the the bar and  is  taken to be a police nark with the customers clearing away the furniture for a fight - clearly a familiar maneuver - but Gnaß recognises the man’s tattoo and hails him as a fellow underworld figure.       

The cops do raid, headed by a bowler hat officer who looks like his counterpart in contemporary films like Blackmail or Spione with the customers dispersed and police wagons with lights blazing racing to the scene. Falkenberg finds herself left to fall back on the company of her old lover for the new day.

Busch in Die Dreigroschenoper.

The film's song by Ernst Die Dreigroschenoper Busch made the piece even more suspect.

It is a symphony of a city montage movie like Walter Ruttman’s then recent Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, mixed in with elements of the Krimmi films (think German Edgar Wallace & Sherlock Holmes), shot largely in real surroundings and using genuine locals as extras (bad teeth seemed to be universal) giving a realistic account of Hamburg’s urban underbelly which immediately shows usual fiction film representations as fake.

This got up the nose of the new Nazi censorship and the film was forbidden as degenerate after a small number of showings, setting the scene for the prohibition of the more ambitious Dr. Mabuse film. It was also seen as a leftist preachment with Hochbaum’s background in the Volksverband für Filmkunst and Social Democratic party. Ernst Bush having been the street singer in the Brecht-Weil Die Dreigroschenoper stoked the fire.

The score is of particular interest. Dr. Giuseppe Becce had been head of music at UFA in the silent period and films of Lang, Murnau and Luis Trenker were first seen accompanied by his music. One of his pieces turns up in the intro to the Karloff Frankenstein. The music on Razzi in St. Pauli, which includes live filmed piano playing must be considered authentic. It sounds nothing like the imitation Kurt Weil, heavy on saxophones, which is usually played with scenes of thirties German low life.

Hamburg’s pleasure quarter seems to have been be a sore spot with the authorities. Grosse Freiheit Nr . 7 was also banned. St. Pauli would go on to become the subject of a whole cycle of  movies like Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s 1954 Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins,  Ákos Ráthonyi’s 1965 St. Pauli Herbertstraße,  Jürgen Roland’s 1969 Die Engel von St. Pauli, Sönke Wortmann’s 1999 St. Pauli Nacht and Timo Rose’s 2016 Reeperbahn. The area was doing a great trade in the seventies when I saw Kon Ichikawa’s Enjô in a run down art cinema on the Grosse Freiheit.

Despite the fate of  his first feature film, Werner Hochbaum had a sustained career during the thirties. Attractive & slim Gina Falckenberg was a departure from the stocky female leads then favored by German films, reflecting a diet high on dumplings and potatoes. She continued in secondary roles and rounded out her career writing movies scripts for twenty years. Husky Friedrich Gnaß might have been expected to have build a substantial tough guy filmography along the lines of Bogart and Charles Bronson but he was confined to support parts. The film did have some influence, notably on Ingrid Bergman’s first film Munkbrogreven.

Razzia in St. Pauli is not a great film. It has self conscious touches (a champagne cork pop butted onto a pistol shot, insets of the teddy bear falling on the doll to take the place of explicit footage)  These conflict with the startling realism. Integrating the documentary material into its slight fiction plot undermines any narrative drive. It’s daring doesn’t run to nudity and violence. We have to do with drunkenness and promiscuity. However it is the most convincing account of thirties Weimar low life that movies achieved and that does make it startling and notable.

The Berlin Archive copy is sharp and tinted, with excellent English sub-titles. It has been reproduced with an open gate, admirably trying to accommodate the full frame height aperture but this means that the edge of the sound track and perforations appear distractingly on You Tube.

A murky  copy of Hochbaum's 1936 Der Favorit der Kaiserin without sub-titles is also there. Like a number of German film makers, his career appears to have come to a halt in 1939.

As with Night Nurse, these two films reflect the same impulse towards an unsantised representation of contemporary reality and both contributed to waves of indignation from conservatives in their society and to more aggressive censorship. It's curious to spot the same phenomenon on opposite sides of the world.

 

 

 

Scritpt Nathan Zarkhi
Peter Martin Lampel     ...     (play "Giftgas uber Berlin")

Music by Werner Schmidt-Boelcke    

Cinematography by Akos Farkas    

Art Direction by August Rinaldi

Paul Michael Bünger     ...     production manager
Adolf Rosen     ...     unit manager

Walter Lichtenstein     ...     still photographer

87 min     Filmproduktion Loew & Co.    Germany 1929

WITH Hans Stüwe     ...     Arnold Horn, ein Erfinder
Lissy Arna     ...     Ellen
Alfred Abel     ...     Direktor Hansen
Fritz Kortner     ...     Konzernpräsident Straaten
Gerhard Dammann     ...     Arbeiter Pieter
Vera Baranovskaya     ...     Pieters Frau
Bobby Burns     ...     Pieters Sohn
Nico Turoff    
Paul Rehkopf        
Carl Goetz    

This one is an oddity, a Late German silent free of all the "Expressionist" cinema
trappings and being played in Rinaldi’s (seven films that year) rectangular would-be
realistic factory and home decors, (Contrast Algol) this one brings a remarkable A
feature cast to a regretably predictable plot.

Idealistic chemist Stüwe's delights in completing his formula for a revolutionary
fertilizer and is congratulated by supervisor Abel. However Alfred’s report to the
board of Kortner’s Ten Straaten Corporation alerts them to the possibility of using the
formula as Vita, a weapon of mass destruction - “only a small amount would be
enough to destroy a whole city.”  While plotting mass human killings one director
reprimands an associate for not considering the director’s poodle.

The immediate results are encouraging. The stock goes up 160 points and the workers
are delighted with a fifteen percent rise. Stüwe is rewarded but outraged at the use of
his invention and Abel dismisses him and appoints a bald successor.

Facing penury while raising their small child, Hans’ wife Arna (Dämon des Meeres,
The Squeaker) goes to see the board members trying to make them relent - scene of
the Buddha on the table resembling its owner and being filmed from behind when he
refuses. She is reduced to selling the flowers the factory sends her to win back Hans
on the street. He is outraged.

Kortner smiling while smoking and Abel repeating his head stroking or hand raising
gestures from Metropolis do showy bits of business which contrast with
Baranovskaya, star of Pudovkin's Mat/Mother’s naturalness. Her scenes are the best in
the film.

An accident in the “perfume” section of the chemical works kills worker Gerhard
Dammann and his angry wife Baranovskaya holds Hans guilty. She takes her dead
husband’s straight razor and sets out for his home but there finds Arna tending their
child grief striken, reduced to seling her clothes. The razor drops from Baranovskaya’s
hand.

The workers are in revolt and Kortner’s answer is to hire new employees. Hans can
take no more and heads out for the factory with Lissy in pursuit “My husband is
planning a disaster.” With the toxic gas released from the laboratory after a fight with
Abel there’s a track along the workers lining up for protective masks which run out.
One desperate worker moves on Lissy to get her mask (good scene) and the heavies
perish. The end of This Gun For Hire is in there as well as overtones of Metropolis
and the 1915 William Wauer Der Tunnel.


At which stage there is an abrupt change to a mix of montage and the Gance J’accuse
with train passengers with a pet parrot and the driver overcome by the fumes and a
mix of indignant citizens and streaming city lights to represent the effect of poison gas
“We accuse!” This is not bad.

An unsophisticated message piece handled, by a director who would serve out his
time in Russia, fields established figures of the German entertainment scene along
with Baranovskaya in unfamiliar settings .

Still an intriguing record of major talents trying for significance.


U-Tube 2021 (Poor - soft, goes out of rack, dupey.  OK Eng S/T)           C:24

 

 

Recalling Warners.

The Warner Brothers back catalog has been providing satisfactions pretty much as far as I can remember - and it’s not done yet. A couple of their less well known items have just come my way.

Jean Negulesco proved one of the more approachable Hollywood celebrities. When Alen Eyles and I did an interview, he had just made a film for Zanuck as both their careers were winding down and he noted with some amusement that his producer told him he was a play boy rather than a serious film maker. Negulesco  brandished one of Charles Higham’s books which had been dedicated to him, giving him bragging rights when he showed it to Billy Wilder. 

 

Alen admired the scene in his Humoresque dissolving from brandy swirling in the balloon glass to breaking waves. Negulesco came back “I apologise. That was the most terrible thing I ever did in my life.” I didn’t fare much better, mentioning the nice The Voice That Shook the World short about the arrival of sound and being told that wasn’t one of his. Ever tactful, I said “Your name is on it.” Some time later I ran into him again and he spotted me and said “Hm, you told me 'Your name is on it!'.”

Jean Negulesco

Romanian Negulesco had been an accomplished painter in Europe and gained a spot running second units in Hollywood, Captain Blood and notably the semi abstract retreat from Caporetto in the 1933  Farewell to Arms. Warners put him to directing the shorts used with their features on first runs until he launched with the 1944 Mask of Demetrios where old friend John Huston had drawn to his attention to the studio rights to the story after Huston beat him to The Maltese Falcon. It  came as a surprise to find Negulesco had done an earlier feature, the 1941 Singapore Woman.

That one was doomed from the start. We all warmed to Brenda Marshall being stalwart in Whispering Smith but a do over on the part that Bette Davis got an Oscar for in Dangerous - fair crack of the whip Cobber!

The Steiner fanfare still ringing in our ears, we get mustached David Bruce come from up country to prepare for the arrival of fiancée Virginia Field and partying with associate Jerome Cowan, who comes closest to salvaging something from this wreckage.  In Harry Cording’s seedy waterfront Crows Nest bar, Bruce spots bedraggled Marshall, a regular cause of trouble - flashback to him witnessing her rejected lover shooting himself in the home of her dad Gilbert Emery. Remembering Emory’s assistance (Bruce says) he scoops her up and carries her off to his rubber plantation where she gives ethnic maid Connie Leon a hard time and gets to smash her mirror reflection with a liquor bottle.

Hurrel Portrait of Brenda Marshall

The art department wheel out that tropical foliage they are used to rigging and the verandah set from The Letter. Sorting rubber plants, Bruce tells foreman Abner Biberman “in a few years these will be tires rolling down 5th Avenue.” We get a couple of topical references about the war effort.  However, despite occasional bursts of production value like the long opening tracking of dockside activity, a lively brawl or a dozen extras tin mining, most of the film is Miss Marshall grotesque in awful Damon Giffard outfits and emoting about the jinx that makes her destroy the lives of the men in the support cast.

Featured players are mainly a drab lot with the few good people only making fleeting appearances - Tony Warde, Ian Wolfe and you have to be quick to spot Alexis Smith. Dialogue of the standard of “Gerald’s such a child.” or “You men and your code!”  There are some pieces of badly matched lighting. Negulesco, on his first feature, is trying hard and he’s got the great Ted McCord on camera and an Adoph Deutsch score to prop him up. The comic Crow’s Nest bar brawl accompanied by Eva Puig doing her accelerating rendition of “Dark Eyes” gives hope but the director had a long way to go to the superiority of Johnny Belinda and Humoresque.

Warde, Marshall & Bruce.

The little commented 1929 Broadway Babies gets our attention as an early example of what we will recognise with some enthusiasm as the the studio's city movie, full of Warner’s (First National actually) bustling urban activity.  The opening has a  New York montage backed by “Give my regards to Brodway”,  the iron railed footways back stage fill with chorines in skimpy costumes, the streets are a place of danger. It combines the gangster and musical films that Director Mervyn Le Roy and Warners would shortly make notable. Think Little Caesar or Gold Diggers of 1933.

Show girls Include Marrion Byron, Sally Eilers, Jocelyn Lee & Alice White.

 

Cut to a familiar setting, the theatrical boarding house with three bedrooms to every bath and land lady Aggie Herring distributing towels. This introduces room mates Alice White, Marion Byron and Sally Eilers and dialogue about a Broadway girl getting by without a sugar daddy (very Sally Irene & Mary). They’ve been profiled in the paper as "The Three Musketeers".

Their dresser Bodil Rosing is skeptical about glamor (“The biggest Johns on Broadway used to drink champagne out of my slipper") but chirpy blonde Alice has dance director Charles Delaney’s ring (close up). Meanwhile crooked card players Maurice Black, Louis Natheaux and Lew Harvey have a pigeon lined up in “Detroit Bohunk” Fred Kohler, possibly his best role. Their window overlooks the chorus rehearsal room and they lure on Fred with the prospect of an introduction to Alice. They pitch her about Delaney’s meager prospects “too many fat bankers crazy about you to worry about a thin dime.”

 

The Three Musketeers go off to the Blue Moon night club with the gamblers and Kohler puts
forward the prospect of Alice heading up the late show there. She proves (surprise!) a hit - “The little girl who has danced her way into the hearts of Broadway.” The the nasties close in on Fred who somehow starts winning in the fixed  game and has managed to scoop off Alice. The theatricals (“hoofers and acrobats”) are waiting at the engagement party but the bad hats plan on shooting Fred.

White - Broadway Babies.

Attention does start to wander towards the end, the writing is not exactly Shakespearean stuff and director Mervyn Le Roy and Alice White were not the great talents of the cycle. Still, her bubbly flapper character is super appealing - even if she can’t sing, dance (she manages a few high kicks) or go dramatic. It's agreeable to find that she had such a long career, turning up in Korda's silent The Private Lives of Helen of Troy or in Mildred Pearce. Touches like comedian Tom Dugan’s stutter should have been reigned in and the interchangeable numbers ( "Jig, Jig, Jigaloo", "Wishing and Waiting for Love" included) didn’t make it into popular memory, with the final "Broadway Baby Dolls" performance expendable.

Broadway Babies is particularly interesting to anyone following movie history. To start with, it shows the makers already pushing the still new sound film form to it’s limits. Inset titles persist. There’s one over a dissolve from the stage show to the crooked gamblers but music already plays under dialogue. A Xylophone in a room above becomes an element of the plot. Post synch. is occasionally a bit shaky and the first stage number is obviously shot on long lenses from several angles in the stalls, while the wide angle of the theater shows the process roof and chandelier wobbling above the lower portion of the frame. Running to a cab in the dark street is seriously under-cranked and under exposed. However the pacing is excellent. Editor Frank Ware died young after cutting 42nd St.

The flaws make watching the film more interesting if anything, highlighting the rapid progress Hollywood was making with the virtual monopoly.

Barrie Pattison 2021.

Korea Nineteen Sixties.

When it showed up in the Cinema Reborn schedule, my attention focussed on Hyun-mok Yoo's 1961 Obaltan / Aimless Bullet / The Stray Bullet which had the advantages of being unfamiliar and coming from South Korea in the sixties. 

Beongeoli Sam-ryong /Samyong the Mute.

Such films are scarce but not unknown. Sang-ok Shin's 1964 Beongeoli Sam-ryong / Samyong the Mute turned up in the Sydney film festival of it's year and there is a line of them on You Tube, some nice transfers most unsubtitled, but they still fall pretty much outside our usual movie experience. We know more about the recent dim witted  North Korean cinema after some stunt showings here.

Aimless Bullet was made eight years after the end of the Korean War and in the brief period of relaxed censorship between two military dictatorships, compare Czech films from the Post WW2 Pre-Communist era. Admired on its home turf, it has been recently restored and circulated.

Ridiculously grim, this one  kicks off with a bunch of unemployed former soldiers slacking in a seedy Seoul bar where they drink more than barley tea from the kettle. They profess allegiance to their former commander but this also will prove hollow. The crippled officer rejects former love interest Seo Ae-ja who he feels unable to fullfill, leaving her to go with the U.S. soldiers whose Jeeps patrol the streets.

Attention irritatingly shifts among the characters. Her brothers share the crowded shanty town home with their crazy mother Jin Kyu Kim who keeps on waking up and demanding they all flee. One is her son Jin Kyu Kim, an accountant whose salary barely supports the family and won’t cover treatment for the bad teeth which make his life even more miserable, along with Jeong-suk Moon  his pregnant wife, a rebellious young son who sells papers on the street rather than go to school, and Mu-ryong Choi the other brother, a drunk and depressed wounded veteran who keeps on promising daughter Hye-ok a new pair of shoes, without delivering.

Aimless Bullet - Hye-ok & Mu-ryong Choi.

He moves to the center of attention when an old flame who works with a movie company gets him an acting job offer which he indignantly rejects after discovering his qualification is the war wounds they want him to show them. He, of course, smashes a glass door and spends the next scenes with a bandaged hand. 

 

 A new development is his surprise discovery of the officer nurse, who cared for him in military hospital, waiting at the other side of a level crossing as the train passes. She’s not doing too badly living in a flat at the top of iron stairs, keeping  a pistol to ward off a would-be poet admirer who moons about. Our hero and the ex nurse slide off the bed together.

This resolves over night with suicide and murder, as described by the elderly cage bird keeping caretaker. Mu-ryong Choi reads the love letter left him and takes the pistol, recruiting his would be actor former sergeant to drive a Jeep in the bank job he’s been obsessively planning.

Shots ring out. The driver takes off and our hero is pursued through a building site, exchanging bullets with the cops and dragging a sack full of bank notes, a handful of which his movie actress old flame ends clutching.

But no, there’s more - Jin Kyu Kim’s life threatening dentistry, complete with low angle spitting, a taxi ride from the University Hospital to the morgue and the police station with his anesthetized monologue about being an aimless bullet. Throw in one kid blowing bubbles and the son’s newspaper seller chums spreading the story in the morning edition.

Director and one time editor Hyun Mok Yoo’s film finally intrigues for it’s mix of styles and themes. It’s a companion piece to 'thirties Lost Generation movies like the Richard Barthlemess Last Flight and Heroes for Sale, along with the rubble settings of the forties  Irgendwo in Berlin and Hue and Cry. It has the languid defeatism (they called it alienation) of the then contemporary Antonioni, whose sharp exterior photography the film also emulates, all presenting a picture of post peninsular war Koreans caught in a hopeless spiral of poverty and depression - unemployment, bombed buildings, a hill of squatter shanties, construction sites and the presence of whore chasing U.S. troops.

The film was promptly banned by the incoming General Park Chung-hee government but in it's current restoration it is enjoying a  burst of high trendiness. We can see a fuzzy first version of more notable films - the gift promised the little girl in Hun Jang's 2017 Taeksi woonjunsa / A Taxi Driver  or the the poverty stricken family sharing their home in Bong jun-ho's better known 2019 Gisaengchung / Parasite.

The copy on You Tube is quite good and well sub-titled.

For context, I considered  Dae-jin Kang's Mabu / The Coachman, another Korean film from the same year with an outlook as gloomy as Aimless Bullet. It has status in its home market but proves much more routine.

Mabu / The Coachman

Titles superimposed on the turning wheel introduce Seung- Ho Kim  as  Mabu the horse cart driver facing multiple misfortunes. 

We kick off with his bike riding son chased through the streets as a thief. His mute daughter is beaten by her unfaithful husband. The older son has failed his law exams three times and his other daughter is being groomed to pick up businessmen.

The owner boss keeps on threatening to sell the horse that provides the family income. However his sympathetic housekeeper slips Mabu rice wine when the other drivers go off to drink from the tap. She fancies him.

Things (of course) get worse. The mute daughter commits suicide. The young son is brought back by the cops and triggers a self criticism to grandma’s picture in the yard. Then dad is involved in a traffic accident and gets no help from the boss.

Fortunately, his sympa son earns some money, beats up the daughter’s low life boy friend for slapping her and gets her a factory job. The house keeper buys the repossessed horse with her savings and gives it to them anonymously.

With his young brother back in school, the son takes over the horse cart and (best scene) the family gathers in the square to celebrate him finally passing the exam, complete with a track-in on dad and a crane shot of the family going down the street in the snow together.

The lab work is good and the handling routine-assured but the film making is otherwise undistinguished (one fuzzy white transition) and the writing and performance are from stock. Glimpses of Korean life are minimal - the society of the cab drivers gets very marginal treatment and the attachment to the horse is token.

That one could have come from any of the less developed Asian industries of its day. It offers maudlin sentimentality in place of Aimless Bullet's focused anguish.

Barrie Pattison 2021

Bucket List Movie

That slight movement of the earth you just felt may be accounted for by the fact that this is SPROCKETED SOURCES 100TH ENTRY - Well actually 105 but I've knocked out some that were no longer relevant.  - B.P.

I'm getting on for having exhausted my inventory of  important works of cinema left to see but then again I must be on the way to exhausting the time I have to get through them - and of course there are all the ones I have yet to hear about, to start with a vast range of Hispanic and Arab films which are never considered in English language writing. 

One title which has always eluded me, though I made a serious effort to track it down on visits to Italy, was Mario Camerini’s 1929 Rotaie / Rails celebrated as the major Italian film of  the last years of their silents. Well, there it is on You Tube at the press of a button. Another one off the bucket list.

Rotaie opens with a most Germanic sequence, the camera tracking down the dark street following shabby couple Käthe von Nagy and Maurizio D’Ancora obviously experiencing hard times. They take a room in the cheap hotel planning a suicide pact - close up of an effervescent tablet in a glass - but buoyed up by their mutual affection they leave and face the glittering light’s of the night time city. The pair find themselves in front of the rail station (montage of travel posters). In the buffet a man, rushing to catch the train that's leaving, drops his wallet. He is seen,  pulling away, as they pick it up and look for him. The wallet is full of bank notes.

On impulse (“Dove andiamo”) D'Ancora buys them tickets on the train at the platform, it's giant locomotive bellowing steam, and they find themselves in a a compartment headed for Monte Carlo. In the breakfast car, diner Daniele Crespi changes his seat so they can be together. He has a thin mustache so is obviously a hand kissing foreigner of loose morals of the kind normally played by Warwick Ward at the time.

 Rotaie - Von Nagy & D'Ancora

They arrive as the speed boats are racing on the bay, like the scene in the l933 Gloria Swanson - Laurence Olivier Perfect Understanding. Crespi is following the action from the hotel terrace and, seeing Nagy struggling with her new purchases, he sends the uniformed page to help her. Taking the young couple in hand, Crespi introduces the husband to the gaming room where he soon is captivated by roulette, winning big only to see (best sequence) his new found wealth raked back away from him by the croupier. In desperation he tries to steal chips from the next gambler but is spotted by the floor manager and only saved from calamity by the intervention of  Crespi  who gives him another handful of notes which he is sure to lose.

Planning to collect on his investment, Crespi sends Nagy flowers and an invitation and, outraged by her husband’s irresponsibility, she accepts only to find herself in a situation she can’t control. After a dramatic confrontation, the leads flee the luxury hotel and buy a third class rail ticket home, sharing the compartment with the breast feeding mother, her son who gives them an apple and the father who accepts a cigarette. A couple more montages - one of those familiar geometric shots of tracks filmed from the moving train and one of giant factory machinery pumping away and D’Ancora is finishing his shift with Nagy bringing his meal in a basket, now happily part of the industrial working class.

Finally Rotaie emerges is a scaled down Sunrise, (simple couple lost in the big city) trading actual settings for the exuberant theatricality of the American film. The plotting in Rotaie is too familiar and too simple minded to impress, like its "stay with your own kind" message, which seems to have been in step with the Italian populism of the day. The craftsmanship is not sufficiently stylish to redeem it. 

However Rotaie is an interesting enough item coming from a place and time whose films we don’t know.  The film’s odd mix of twenties gloomy expressionist streets and Soviet editing with society drama from the thirties and forties' location shooting, does make it a revealing book mark in movie history.

Von Nagy.

Appealing Fraulein von Nagy’s performance out classes the others. She would have a strong career in the thirties, playing leads for most of the major German directors of the decade in  films that it appears nobody bothered to sub-title. She does get second billing in Gustav Ucicky’s splendid Fluchtlige but that one is all Hans Albers’ film. D’Ancora, only seventeen when he made this film, continued headlining till after WW2. Crespi does double duty here also working as designer. Cameraman Ubaldo Arata went on to film Open City. Director Mario Camerini, whose agreeable comedy films (including Darò un milione) would shortly launch the star career of Vittorio De Sica, can be glimpsed at the gaming tables.

The copy on You Tube is the 1931 "sonorised" re-issue running marginally too fast with a so so added music and effects track. It was lifted off Italia Tre and the quality is just passable. The sparse intertitles are not translated but it doesn’t take fluent Italian to follow what’s going on.

Barrie Pattison 2021