More Lake Gangjin.

Water Gate Bridge.

Though the official credits remain the same as those of  last year’s Zhang jin hu  / The Battle at Lake Changjin, the all time most expensive, most lucrative Chinese film ever, the current release Battle at Lake Chanjing II  : Water Gate Bridge  is alleged to be the footage left over from part one, largely shot by Tsui Hark, whose 2014 3D Zhi qu wei hu sha /Taking Tiger Mountain this one resembles. It offers the Chinese People's Volunteer Army's 7th Company arriving at the Water Gate Bridge in the Funchilin Pass with instructions to frustrate the retreat (“advance in another direction”) of the American 1st Marine Division - adding to the humiliation of the allied forces fresh from their triumphs in the WW2 Pacific. We are still waiting for the Poles, Turks and (pause) Australians to show up.

The action focuses on the fighting round a spectacular set of  mountain side six foot diameter pipes and their pumping station, glimpsed in the earlier film and featured in the promotion for this one.

Questions around the new film pretty much obliterate the one about whether Water Gate Bridge  is worth your fifteen bucks and two and a half hours of your time.  In the current charged atmosphere it looks like a warning shot, though this is largely repudiated by the fact that they have been working on it for five years. I still watch uneasily, considering the way these military spectaculars have come to dominate the current Chinese films we are being offered and their enormous attendance figures on their home turf.

As an example of the state of Chinese movie making art it is generally imposing with odd lapses - obvious model planes or the show piece truck crashing down the mountainside  interrupting impressive battle action material - the drone shots moving through arrested motion action with bullet tracks arching round them, characters crashing through levels of buildings, napalm victims running encircled by globes of flame. Hard not to worry about turning agonising death into a handsome piece of kinetic sculpture.

One top of this there’s the question of credibility. The imposing combat footage is again spaced by historical context material. We’ve lost that pensive Chairman Mao but James Filbird’s General Douglas MacArthur is back, looking ridiculous puffing on his corncob pipe at a formal reception. He’s clearly the villain, urging the use of the A Bomb to Ben Z Orenstein’s not very lookalike Harry Truman who is seen pondering next to his Napoleon portrait, like heavies in U.S movies - think Ricardo Cortez in Bad Company or Lionel Barrymore in It's a Wonderful Life. While the American troops are generally shown with some plausibility, they have to have a psychopath G.I. lurking in the shadows with a sharp screw driver to take out the upright Chinese soldiers.

   Jing Wu in action.

We pick up our guys - er - their guys (it’s an effort to remember who you are supposed to be rooting for) in the middle of the advance on the Chosin Resevoir, determined to impede the U.S. withdrawal despite their air supremacy and the support of the U.S. Carrier Strike Force. The Seventh have already taken away American artillery pieces only to have them bombed intro scrap metal. The response is to hand over the souvenir side arm and tell their commander to immediately go and capture some more from the invaders. Despite chipping their teeth on frozen beans and having their radio batteries ice up, the Chinese forces are inspired when the cloud clears to reveal the snow capped mountains “That’s our motherland” - more convincing in the last film and that was a special effect.

The action peaks on getting into the empty pipes by cutting a hole and shooting the pumphouse with a rocket along the cavity. Ha! The yanks didn’t expect that one! More spectacular action including placing explosive satchels under the enemy armor. Against orders, John F. Cruz’ General Smith pulls out. The blazing fires of the battle dissolve into chill morning ashes. This has not been without cost. Only nine party members survive. No one takes prisoners in this picture. We’ve had a flashback to Jing Wu’s home life to get the only woman into the movie and we end on a down beat note, repeating the opening of part one.

There is no doubt that the action staging can hold it’s own with Hollywood efforts like Saving Privare Ryan which is almost certainly an influence but the unrelenting assaults are numbing, dissipating a good part of the effect, and there is the old problem - one muddy guy in a uniform looks pretty much like another one, meaning it’s hard to differentiate characters and give the audience a chance to relate to them.

In many ways this is more accomplished than Part One but it’s impact is less because
we have already seen some of the makers’ tricks and because it pretty much abandons
the attempt to flesh out the would-be sympathetic characters.

 

I’d suggest diving on this one immediately, as it may move out of our grasp forever.
On the other hand it may become a permanent feature of our interface with Asia as
people draw positive and negative inferences.

Barrie Pattison 2022

Lulu’s Sister -

Blogspot Sprocketed Sources : Lulu’s Sister.  

 

Betty Amann

Alright - which Hollywood starlet trooped off to Weimar Germany to give one of the all time great silent movie performances, worked with Hitchcock and Ivan Mozjoukine and hung around to make more European hits before quitting the country to make B westerns back home?

If you said Louise Brooks you failed. Virtually no one now remembers Betty Amann. She’s not even in Ephram Katz' exhaustive Film Encyclopedia, though her career paralleled the now legendary Brooks, peaking in Amann’s lead opposite Gustave (Metropolis) Frölich in Joe May’s 1929’s Asphalt, one of the great physical performances in one of the last great silent movies.

She was spotted as Bee Amann, a minor Hollywood starlet, and signed by Germany’s ever talent conscious Erich Pommer for the Joe May film, where she was too conspicuous to ignore. Through the early thirties Amann had leads in other German, British and Polish films playing opposite stars like Heinrich George and Hans Albers without repeating her success. She’s notably ill served as the would-be exotic Princess in Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange. With the German situation becoming ever more tense, Jewish Amann decamped for the ‘States, where she was relegated to minor parts in minor movies.

  In Rich & Strange - with Henry Kendall.

I was surprised to find her as second female lead in In Old Mexico of 1936, the Hopalong Cassidy entry which she made on her return. She’s assured speaking English and she steals her scenes from the regulars. Amann even rides a horse. Why no one chose her for more substantial parts is a good question.

I found no answer looking at her other accessible performances. Most of her European movies are gone or at least out of reach. Still in her mid twenties when she made Asphalt, she comes out of 1929’s Der Weisse Teufel well enough as Mozjoukine’s Slavonic squeeze and she’s awful in Rich & Strange but so is everyone else.

The one new piece of data is her last European film Schleppzug M 17 / Tugboat M17 which looks like a personal venture for star Heinrich George, who you will have seen as the spanner waving foreman in Metropolis. He was the leading sound era Emile Jannings imitator, notably in the 1940 Der Postmeister and a major star in the Nazi era, dying in a Russian prison camp at the end of WW2.

 George began the direction of Schleppzug M 17 himself and his wife Bertha / Berta Drews co-stars. He plays the Captain of Tugboat M17, first seen penetrating the fog off the German coast with him at the wheel singing. His family, wife Drews and his two sons, live on board. We are in the then current river world cycle of Jean Gremillon’s Maldone, the Vigo L’atalante, Helmut Kautner’s Unter den brücken, Marcello Pagliero’s Les amants de Bras-Morts or Ingmar Bergman’s Skepp till India land and most of the memorable material shows life on board - passing through he locks to the Berlin mooring,  showering the kids with a watering can on deck, loading the cargo of timber.

However the film also reflects completing director Werner Hochbaum when the action moves into a seedy bar like the one in his Razzia in St. Pauli  and George meets city floozie Amann, abandoned by her gangster associates. Heinrich punches out a bar fly who tries to move on her. Nice moment of Betty admiring his bicep which her hands will just fit round. The woman bar singer does her number and soon Heinrich and Betty have moved into a curtained alcove.

Our hero goes back to his disfunctional family on the boat but when he takes them walking on Potsdammer Platz, he leaves to squire Betty and we are back in Werner Hochbaum territory complete with a riverside Grosen maskenball offering phones on the tables, accordion music, a girl chorus line with Betty whisked off by a sailor leaving the Captain engulfed by streamers and girl revelers, to slump back by day light with gifts of chocolates and balloons for his family. That doesn’t go too well, with firemen rushed to the scene, and Heinrich is left stoically poling his ship through the shallows, his back to camera.

The film has not fully absorbed the conventions of sound film, retaining montages -  the seedy chorus line, passing the Berlin buildings and factory chimneys or the effect of quick cross cutting George’s glasses-to-eyes views of Amann and Drews. It is occasionally technically rough with jerky tilts and scene setting that outstays its welcome and it could be dismissed as gloomy ersatz Jannings melodrama. Outside of the interest it offers as an example of the undershown German cinema of the thirties it is particularly interesting as the one occasion we can now hear Betty Amann speak German, the language of her greatest successes. Her femme fatale role is quite brief but she registers as film’s most intriguing element - alongside the Berlin settings.

That pretty much leaves us with In Old Mexico which proves a routine entry in the redoubtable sixty six Hopalong Cassidys. Robert Mitchum recalled doing nine of these these as an agreeable living, shooting two at a time with the crew filming the studio segments of the first before going off to out doors location for that one and the next and coming back to do the remaining interiors. Mitchum shared billing on these with such celebrity participants as musician Victor Young, cameraman Russell Harlan, who did major Howard Hawks movies, and To Kill a Mocking Bird and designer Lewis Rachmil, who ran Universal Studios for a while.

Amann & William Boyd - In Old Mexico

However director Edward D. Venturini‘s most notable credit is the silent 1922 Will Rogers Headless Horseman. He’d been doing Spanish versions of Hollywood films at that stage. Paramount and producer Harry “Pop” Sherman had woken up to the fact that they were on to a good thing and pumped up the production values on the series adding music through out and not just on the action climaxes and taking advantage of the scenic possibilities of  locations like the California Joshua Tree National Park used here. Harlan is on top of his game with great trackings of riders against the distant mountains and even a few shadowed foreground compositions. Unfortunately Harrison Jacobs’ script - evil master of disguises Paul Sutton plots revenge on Hoppy and Rurales Colonel Trevor Bardette - is plodding in Venturini‘s hands with the action broken up by maudlin buddy comedy and Jan Clayton’s song.

Betty Amann takes full advantage of having the film’s one shaded part, before Hoppy sends her riding North because he doesn’t jail women. Even here she has authority and looks good. It’s surprising to finally hear her use the English of her New York childhood making her a pioneer of the club of foreign speaking movie stars who revealed English as a first language. Include Eddy Constantine, Maggie Cheung and Jeanne Moreau. By the time she gets to Edgar Ulmer’s awful 1942 Island of Lost Men, Amann’s given up. That’s a genuine movie tragedy.

Transit’s excellent transfer of Asphalt (right Amann with Freulich), a tinted Tugboat M 17 without sub-titles and a soso
copy of In Old Mexico are on You Tube.

Barrie Pattison 2022