SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Another Sydney Film Festival. This year a hundred and forty programs were on offer over eleven days. There was no way to see the lot and  making an informed choice was hard, with a lack of information on the more obscure offerings. Dividing them up into sections like Europe - Voices of Woman on Screen and Screenability didn't help. It's such a battle that I find it hard to understand why these fill up with the people that film societies and Cinematheques here failed to attract with better documented offerings.

First time Turkish director Selcen Ergun ‘s Kar Ve Ayi / Snow and the Bear is a nice and not all that common example of the way film festivals should function - a presentable item from a film culture that we know diddly about. Star Merve Dizdar made the cover of Elle Magazine Turkey and has been in four features and a TV series since Snow & the Bear was made. We  lost track of her industry back in the days of Yilmaz Guney thrown into the slammer or little Mujde Ar in her scanties, standing up for women’s rights.

In this one, Dizdar is a nurse determined to serve out obligatory service, despite her dad on the ‘phone telling her he can put in the fix and have her transferred. She has been allocated to an isolated Anatolian village to assist a doctor, whose transport has failed. Her own car gets stuck in a snow drift and she has to be helped by attentive local Saygin Soysal, who gets in there cutting firewood and showing her through the frozen forest, despite her doing hostile and independent. 

Soysal is on the outer with the locals in the oppressively close community, because he dobbed in butcher Erkan Bektas for killing a government protected bear. Soysal has a kind of Prince Mishkin mystic relationship with the bears after the voice-over related experience of his dad who faced off with one, which made a plaintive gesture to him with its paws when the man held a rifle to its head, and gored him when the piece misfired. In the winter, Soysal takes food into the trees for the animals, in smelly sacks which put off the locals. These include the women reading tea leaves, while the butcher’s teen daughter can’t wait to get away from the place. The faces of authentic villagers add conviction.

Then Bektas disappears. He's been antagonistic over the nurse interfering with the care of his pregnant wife, who she wants to rest. Suspicion falls on Soysal. The local Gendarmerie Commander has them in to investigate and leads search parties in the woods. The film goes on too long after an intimidating encounter with an actual brown bear but Ergun manages to effectively mix suspense, fashionable female assertive and eco themes, in blue tinted images. Location shooting cost them the first half on each of their twenty nine days filming, setting up in freezing conditions.

Hopes centered on Roter Himmel / Afire, the new Christian Petzold film, which proved rather subdued. Couple, chubby Thomas Schubert (Breathing) and black lover Langston Uibel’s car breaks down (curious echoes of the 1973 Phil Noyce short Caravan Park also shown in an interesting Film School retro.) on their way to the family chalet, facing them with manifestations of a distant fire. Smoke comes off boars running through the trees and a scorched piglet expires in front of them. They are assured that the wind from the sea will keep the flames away. 

  Rotter Himmel - Schubert & Beer

Getting to their destination, they find themselves sharing with Schubert’s mother’s cook’s daughter, the ever-appealing Paula Beer, already in residence with the noises of her make-outs with local life guard Enno Trebs coming through the wall.

They visit the village, where Beer (who is not what she seems) runs an ice cream cart and the beach. Relationships shift among the the group. Ash is blowing across the chalet and there is a red glow distant through the trees. This all combines to distract Scubert from working on his MSS. before the visit of his editor Matthias Brandt, who eventually spends the time chatting with the other residents instead of getting to the discussion of Scubert's work, on which we see he has crossed out complete pages.

The players are good enough to make the lack of action acceptable but the climax turns out to be Schubert's moment of truth - he makes his declaration of love to Beer, who has dismissed his writing - and she doesn’t even notice, concerned about rushing Brandt to the local oncology unit. The fire stays off screen with characters disposed of as interlocked burned hands and the finale turns out to be Brandt recuperating in hospital, with Scubert's new work, an account of the incidents we have witnessed, while Paula runs his wheel chair along the ward verandah. 

We feel cheated at being left with Scubert's not all that interesting self discovery as the film’s end product. Craft aspects are straight forward and performances superior. 

 

One let down was South Korean Jeong-Hong Lee’s first feature Goein / A Wild Roomer  (definitely no relation to the the same name Charley Bowers film) kicking off with a hint of mystery as a pair of renovators have trouble operating the key pad of a piano business, sleeping over where they will be working the next day and finding the toilet locked. 

Wild Roomer.

Then we get two hours of them drinking together, discussing short apprentice ships and freelancing, putting up a ceiling with a nail gun, repairs to the van roof where a dark figure in the security footage jumped on it, having conversations with clients, suppliers and the builder’s sister sharing a suburban house. Highlight is a brief and I suspect unscripted visit by the tradesman, who points out all the things they are doing wrong.

Stop. I’m making it sound too interesting.  

The ending has the surprise refuge-raised squatter character visit and pick up the grocery bill. There is some novelty in always placing the characters in newly restored surroundings but not enough. The director attended the screening. The theme of rootlessness, echoes his earlier 47 min. film No Cave.

Finding Emanuele Crialese’s name on the Italian L'immensità attracted attention after his Respiro and the imposing refugee drama Terrafirma. It’s not that the new film is bad. It’s that it fails to deliver on its many promising elements, instead foregrounding those over-familiar characters the Earth Mother and the Heavy Father.

L'immensita - Penélope Cruz

The ever glamorous Penélope Cruz is raising a family in a lovingly filmed 1970s Catholic Rome. Attention settles on daughter Luana Giuliani, who her siblings deride for wanting to be the boy she dresses as.

One quite involving sub-plot has Giuliani making her way through the forbidden rushes on the vacant land next to the family apartment and meeting the girl from the transient camp there, with whom she begins an uncertain romance, only to find the area cleared by bulldozers.

Her story runs parallel with a sea side vacation, the break up of Cruz’ marriage to Vincenzo Amato  (“I hear dad beat mum”) and the stuffy society which such an (of course) free spirit finds confining. This is punctuated by dance numbers with Penny and the kids and Giuliani mesmerised by the TV’s gleaming black and white Amanda Lear routine, which foreshadows the character’s own final taking the microphone in dinner suit for a similarly lavish presentation, all choreographed by Blanca (le defi) Li.  Production values are first rate but it’s a disappointment to find such an ambitious attempt at significance working out less than involving.

After his savage Bacarau, anything from Brazilian Kleber Filho Mendonça was going to get my attention and his new  Retratos Fantasmas / Pictures of Ghosts promised nostalgia, movie fervor, and the changing face of cities. Unfortunately it sounded better than it is. We end with a film diary, cobbled together from his family movies documenting growing up in their refurbished Setúbal apartment in Brazil’s Recife, cross cut with stills of the changing streets and the odd news clip, like the back and white ones covering Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis and family visiting, complete with Jamie Lee swinging on her mother’s arm.

The film homes in on the maker’s fascination with cinema, which dominates the center section, where the city’s massive thirties movie palaces faced one another round a central square, with the German UFA chain (which had a cinema in twenties’ Sydney) abandoning its ambitious WW2  plans, and subsequent audience decline condemning the one time show places to life as run down malls, awkwardly still housing their projection boxes, lounges, even a left over 35 mm. projector shoved out of the way into a corridor. From the windows, the new retail heart of the town can be seen on the far side of the river.

Kleber Mendonça, taking VHS of the operator friend at work on his last day, along with  PR events and hand sketched plans and diagrams butted onto shots of the decaying buildings, is kind of dull and worse, only occasionally suggests the place, that these once thronged show places held in the life of their communities, paralleling Carnival.

The film recalls Mendonca’s 2012’s O Som ao Redor / Neighboring Sounds which incorporated the next door barking dog we see here montaged in videos, or his admired 2009 24 minute short  Recife Frio. Baracau star Sonja Braga’s 1976 hit Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos / Dona Flor & Her Two Husbands features in the posters that customers queue past.  Throw in a peculiar final episode with a mystic cab driver. 

These long 100 minutes contain material, which could compress into an interesting half hour - Mendonca’s notion of cinema marquee’s as place markers to history (“secret messages to people”), a King Kong craze, the story of the dictatorship restricting Hair to over eighteens, because it disrespected the military, or a national hero now reduced to selling off movie photos and the film copies themselves on the path outside their one time place of exhibition.

 

We're not all that far from David Redmon & Ashley Sabin's Kim's Video, following the fortunes of what we are told was a legendary New York East Village store, which accumulated 55,000 titles, an imposing figure by any standard. It was represented by fanatic followers as the best source in the city. We get anecdotes which stick in the audience’s memory - the Cohen Brothers’ six hundred dollars in late fees,  F.B.I raids filmed in black and white, as the operatives scooped out bays of unlicensed copies, only to have chain owner Yongman Kim re-stock them immediately, to the approval of the staff.  “We felt we were above the law. The law said, ‘Ownership matters.’ We said, ‘Film knowledge matters more.'"

When streaming wiped out the take home movie business, the question of what was going to become of the stock became pressing. Kim offered the movies free to a respectful home and, rather than N.Y.U., the winner was the remote Italian community of Salemi Sicily. The film crew set out for Italy to explore, waving their Kim’s Membership, which guaranteed their access under the deal, and they located the collection in an unlocked building, with a leaky roof - which no one ever visited.

Tracking down responsible officials, they got to be on chatting terms the Salemi Police Marshall  Diego Muraca and sought out Yongman Kim, immigrant film school graduate, who built his video empire from a laundrette operation, directed some girlie movies on the side and was somewhat bemused by their activities. The film makers undertook the re-location themselves and, under the guise of making a movie in Salemi, made off with about half the stock, while filming the team in action wearing movie director masks. One disturbing shot makes it look as if the ghost of Agnes Varda is participating in the heist.

A deal was struck, which included flying the Mayor of Salemi to New York and putting his team up for a week, so he could be thanked publicly for preserving the holdings. They finally retrieved about two thirds.

Kim’s Video seemed to go down a treat with the audience, while it irritated me. It took me a while to work out why.  They were trying to hit the ironic note of the Ross McElwee documentaries (Sherman’s March), which they reference, but the personality those project is more endearing. Also there’s a schizoid quality. They reference their work with clips of serious cinema - locating their childhood with Paris Texas and the activity with Videodrome or The Conversation but the box spines we see are usually tacky exploitation films. Now these may well be in more danger of vanishing than the prestige titles and a better indication of the taste of their audience but, if that’s what they mean, someone should say it.

 What we were seeing was only a detail of  the big picture - the wide belief that films are ephemera, the wasteful creating and scrapping of formats, the lack of  ownership by the audience who financed them (sometimes inadequately I know), the problems of degradation and access.

I’ve been there, once trying to save the Amalgamated library’s seven hundred sixteen millimeter prints, a much better record of productions going back to the twenties. The National Collection offered to house twenty five. The Herald printed a letter saying they weren’t even Australian ... but I'm getting nostalgic.

 

Homing in on the event's movie themed items did land me the pick of my selection, Chandler Levack's Canadian I Like Movies. This one, like  Cinema Pardiso before it, often makes uncomfortable viewing for a determined movie addict.

Lehtinen

Unprepossessing seventeen year old Isaiah Lehtinen has erected an elaborate ritual around his film fixation, doing a comic routine with fellow High Schooler Percy Hynes White to introduce their home viewings of Saturday Night Live and stalling their completion of the media course's end of year production, though White's dad wants his video camera back. 

Lehtinen makes a tentative move into adult society by taking a part time spot at Sequels Video in the local mall (using Vancouver's last Blockbuster), though it's so far away his widowed mum has to drive him. One way or another, his frail stability is undermined - not least by having to wear a sash reading "Ask me about Schreck Three" on the job. A new guiding light moves into his life, in the person of branch manager Romina d'Ugo. This however doesn't go too well, ending with a massively embarrassing session with the company's Human Resources guy. Turns out that d'Ugo has followed a trajectory not unlike the one Lehtinen has in mind, which came to a halt when a producer became fascinated by her panty line.

I watched these people, who are so good here that I couldn't help wondering whether they'd could do anything else. Turns out that d'Ugo, whose character justifies herself by demanding "Look up my IMDB page", has been on screen for decades and Lehtinen also has a string of credits. Music Video maker Levack has nailed the detail - Stanley Kubrick & Todd Haines, staff picks, Tisch School, sixteen millimeter, Toronto based comics. His uncomfortable accuracy has more than one commentator squirming. 

 

Throw in The Return of Becky, where our still teenage heroine, Lulu Wilson’s Becky, is back in a sequel to her previous run-in with the ratbag right. This time it’s the Noble Men (think Proud Boys) all set to arm an insurrection.

A nice set of strip 'toon titles and we open with Wilson smarming a new set of foster parents (“Good night, mom!”)  before she hits the road to find a haven with elderly black Denise Burse and get a job in the local diner. She fantasises about taking out a stroppy customer with the jagged edge of a broke plate. In come three hoons who give her a hard time, so she spills a cup of hot coffee in the crotch of body built Matt Angel. He and sidekicks Aaron Dalla Villa & Michael Sirow plot revenge, following her home and taking out Burse, when she interferes with a leveled shot gun - and stealing Wilson’s sleepy dog.

Kitting herself up in a scarlet track suit and shoving a pepper spray canister in her backpack, Wilson knows that the trio are headed to a Noble Men rendez vous and finds their standard flying in front of the nice ranch house of Stifler himself, Sean William Scott working on his image but not really coming over as a charismatic cult leader.

Predictable mayhem ensues. The action is staged with suitable comic glee - grenade in mouth, arrow through the cheeks, serried bear traps, a grenade launcher and, to keep things on ideological track, setting the dog on the Woke master villain whose vision is impaired by having a hunting knife planted between the eyes.

We can’t help noticing that all we ever get to see of Scott's planned uprising is a store of death dealing devices and a scrolling membership list on his computer drive. While it’s obviously not big budget, the film making in The Wrath of Becky is very pro and on target.

The festival ran to a hundred and forty programs. Time was I'd have tried to keep up with that. Even subtracting the ones that would rapidly hit theaters and streamers, there were quite a few more I'd have liked to check out but cost and time are limiting factors now. I missed the whole Amitah Bachchan retro, complete with a Yash Chopra I didn't know! I can only wonder how representative the films that I did watch were. 

Barrie Pattison 2023

Before Kurosawa.

Heinsuke Gosho

I'm a long time admirer of Japanese director Heinosuke Gosho,  His 1952 Entotsu no mieru basho / Four Chimneys / Where Chimneys Are Seen and 1954 Ôsaka no yado / An Inn in Osaka struck me as the pick of their Shomin geki or common people cycle, which was compared to the post WW2 Italian Realist films incorrectly. Nothing I've seen deals with the grinding poverty which dominates those. As he's not from the Blessed Trinity - Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu - which still dominate the discussion of Japanese film, I've never encountered a Gosho retrospective and have had to pick odd examples out of cultural events. However, Mubi now does a good selection of the later work and, raking through You Tube, I did discover a random lot of his earliest surviving material, with quite a number sub-titled. I'm up for that challenge, even when it means dealing with copies that are soft and washy.

All of Gosho's forty odd 1920s silent films appear to be lost (!) but his 1931 Madamu to nyôbô / The Neighbor’s Wife & Mine survives, considered to be the first all-sound Japanese film. We must take Shochiku Company's allocating Gosho to this project as a measure of his importance at that time. Their industry came late to talkies, allegedly under pressure from the benshis or screen-side narrators who had achieved celebrity influence in the twenties.  In Asia and Russia silent films continued to be produced in the thirties, when European industries had gone over to sound.

Tanaka & Watanabe

 The Neighbor's Wife... is pretty basic for a film of 1931, when comparative sophistication was expected in Hollywood product. It opens with an extended pan across fields, which reveals a local working at his canvas for the Imperial Exhibition, on an easel set up there. Bowler hat wearing Atushi Watanabe, later a farmer in 7 Samurai, happens by and their discussion develops into a comic brawl with the artist's palette smearing Watanabe's face. To clean up, he heads to the local bath house but is berated by resident Satako Date for using the women's entrance. 

Despite these set backs, Watanabe is so taken with the area that he buys a house there and moves his family in, wife teen age Kinuyo Tanaka no less, daughter Mitsuko Itsimura and the baby. At this point, the plot and the reason for the film assert. He is a playwright needing to complete a 500 Yen commission for his Tokyo theater and meet pressing bills. With as many sound effects as possible to demonstrate the Tuchihas Recording System, he is distracted from his work - a premise we will see in Hollywood productions like the Broderick Crawford sub plot in Del Daves' A Kiss in the Dark or the Tex Avery Sh-h-h-h-h-h.

Watanabe encounters a screeching cat, crying baby, the daughter waving a ringing alarm clock over him, a strawberry mark faced medicine salesman, Tanaka's sewing machine and finally the neighbors' jazz band rehearsal, where he goes to complain about the noise and is confronted by Date again.

This provides the film's most interesting element, the contrast between Watanabe's traditional household and the neighbors, who have their "Merry Jazz Band" banner in English next to a Ruth Chatterton Madam X poster and do the "Speed Generation" number, which our hero eventually joins. He goes back home where Tanaka has found his play-writing pad to be blank and he tells her that his work needs to incorporate speed. Unac-knowledged renditions of "Broadway Melody" and "My Blue Heaven" figure in the track.

No one could describe this as sophisticated. Scenes of the child peeing remind us that it is contemporary with Jean Renoir's On purge bébé. There is nothing here to suggest the complexity of Gosho's best work, though the film does finally become engaging as Watanabe and Tanaka fall in with the enthusiasm of their westernised neighbors.

 

Pick of the batch, 1933's Koi no hana saku Izu no odoriko/ The Dancing Girl of Izu is, not surprisingly, still silent complete with benshi captions and images of sound sources, as in the music performance. An immediately involving opening, has bicycle policeman Michitarô Mizushima telling the idlers that he is looking for a woman, who must have used the road to flee the local Yukawaro mine owner's house.  

Dancing Girl... Tanaka & Kobayashi

Outside the village, the family of itinerant players, headed by glasses wearing Tokuji Kobayashi, is faced by a sign reading “Beggars and traveling actors are not allowed to enter.” They are bailed up by the enraged locals till Student Den Obinata  intervenes. The eye witness account of a local kid confirms the family’s innocence and they are let go, the boy getting a slap from his dad who was one of the accusers. Obinata asks to join the troop on their walk to Shimodo Port.

Engineer Reikichi Kawamura spits - details add to the whole picture. He's come to approach mine owner Reikichi Arai who rebuffs his demands for compensation, when the worker had not supported them in their difficulties. Kawamura’s threats are seen as blackmail. The owner has to intervene when the retainer tries to see the disgruntled former employee off with a shotgun and he makes a token payment which Kawamura takes - “for train fares.”

On the road, we see Obinata buy a cloth cap to replace his student one, as he attempts to join the troop, but he is booked into a more suitable Inn than the one where the family stays.  

Their performance at the Inn turns into a shambles, with a drunken client snatching the samisen and the sword play dance, Kobayashi performs to distract him, interrupted in a struggle which puts the point through the screen separating the room from that of the engineer next door. Appearing sympathetic, he comes in and sorts out the rowdy before having a conversation with Kobayashi, whose family we learn sold the mine. He tells them they were cheated.

Kobayashi goes to new owner Arai asking for compensation (“I was deceived”) and is told the only way he will get support is if winning young sister Tanaka, in her best outing in this series, is sent to the mine owner’s home, taken to mean that she will have to become their geisha.

The student is understandably drawn to Tanaka and himself goes to see Arai, saying humbly that he feels the family is hard done by. The owner explains that he doesn’t believe Kobayashi is a bad person and that he will one day reform but the dissolute life the family leads is unsuitable. “There is not much difference between being a traveling actor and being a geisha.” The offer is to take Tanaka into his home as a ward, who will one day marry his own son. He has kept a bank book for her.

Obinata is now torn by his mutual attraction with Tanaka, who winningly throws stones off the bridge with him and runs up the bank to join him, when he walks ahead on the last stage of the journey. She sees the city as somewhere where he can take her to the movies but instead he goes to the ferry.

The film has the sustained and touching ending, where he asks for her comb as a souvenir and gives the brother his new cloth cab, resuming his student one. She asks to be allowed to write him and, in the suspense of the protracted scene, he finally discloses the mine owner’s plan, saying that it will provide security for herself and the family. They exchange gifts as he climbs onto the launch and she runs along the bank watching his ship pull out of sight. The question of his return the next year remains.

Her mother had brought the student a bag of persimmons for sea sickness, which she still
holds, unaware of developments.

This one echoes other prewar classic Japanese films - Souls on the Road or in the poem comparing the actors to floating weeds. European influence continually registers. The educated people wear Western clothes and smoke cigarettes while the locals still get about in kimonos. A motor bus passes the walking group. The student is admired for his short hair cut but a striking Japanese texture dominates - Shamsen & wood block dancers, the Go game,  charcoal brazier etc. Of the batch this still-silent entry is the film in which the director's mature personality is most evident.

In contrast, Gosho's under an hour long 1933 Hanayome no negoto / The Bride Talks in Her Sleep, again scripted by Akira Fushimi, is still an early Japanese talkie production. Basic staging in unremarkable studio constructions follows five male students, of whom only Tokuji Kobayashi  has graduated and married. The boys gather in a small bar. 

As they drink, his college mates are irritated that Kobayashi has moved on and now leaves them to return to new his bride (as it turns out Tanaka again). One gets a call from his dancer lady friend and goes off to join her, leaving the other three alone, so they resolve to drop in on the husband’s flat, finding him not back there and wife Tanaka uncertain. She locates the group photo and offers them hospitality - slices of sausage to eat with the wedding gift bottled liquor they volunteer to dispose of, as neither of the couple are great drinkers.

The Bride Talks... - Kobayashi & Tanaka

Kobayashi comes back to find the event advanced and reluctantly joins in. The friends are now pretty much out of it, so he and Tanaka go to their dorm room to sleep. Meanwhile bearded burglar Takeshi Sakamoto invades the house and ties up and strips the boys.

When the couple come back home they find them. The gang go off in borrowed kimonos. Tanaka’s talking in her sleep has been witnessd by the fourth member - pretty slight as plots go and no one gets a chance to make an impression.

The picture of contemporary urban Japan is muted. We only get out of doors for the views of entering or leaving the premises and a few model shots of the one car train distant at night. The slightness and constricted settings irritate at first but they generate the piece's style as it progresses. Gosho made a follow-up Hanamuko no negoto - The Bridegroom Talks in His Sleep in 1935.

 

Another Akira Fushimi script, Gosho's Jinsno ei onimotsu / Burden of Life was also filmed in 1935. Here control is developing, though the work still lacks assurance. 

It’s a family study, misleadingly opening with beret wearing artist Kenji Ôyama painting wife, a topless (on the canvas) Kinuyo Tanaka again, when his brother in law, who shows interest in having a look at Kinuyo, drops by. The visitor’s wife has gone home to mother again. Preparations are in hand for a third sister’s wedding and attention shifts among them with domestic squabbles (“He gets upset when I come back with shopping bags”) and the women manipulating their husbands with “Reverse Psychology” like those irritating leading ladies of British TV series.

 Burden of Life : Yoshikawa & Saitô

However the focus rather belatedly shifts to the sisters’ retirement age parents Tatsuo Saitô and Mitsuko Yoshikawa  and young Masao Hayamason, the son they unexpectedly had at fifty. The boy plays with the neighbor’s children and eats at the kitchen table with the maid, trying to avoid his father, who is given to drinking and singing at meals.

After the briefly shown wedding (line of town cars on the road) his mother accuses dad of not caring for the boy, who he considers apprenticing rather than paying for schooling now that the expenses of his sisters’ marriages have made them sell off a couple of the family properties. No one seems really short of money in this film, with all the households retaining maids though peniless artist Ôyama is interested in touching relatives for a loan.

Yoshikawa leaves, taking her son with her to a new home he doesn’t like as much as the old one and is further from his school. This brings up Saitô short. He goes clubbing in the pleasure quarter where a couple of his employees happen to be visiting and they make up an uneasy drinking circle. A hostesses makes off with one of their felt hats, like the more rowdy girls in the Kurosawa Ikiru.

When the boy happens by the house next day,  Saitô calls him in and the maid is sent for his favourite bean paste sweets. He is feted by his father, signalling a new warmer relationship among the re-united family - and that’s the end of the film. Put it next to Poil de Carotte and this one is slight. The subject matter does anticipate Gosho's more substantial 1957Yellow Crow / Kiiroi Karasu.

Gosho’s technique is developing but still self conscious, posing people to make studied edits or create less conventional groupings. A liquor bottle is placed in the foreground and there’s a three shot montage of the bar lights. A track in on the father is butted onto a track in on the boy. Scenes end with an image already seen, as punctuation. Music is sparse. The director seems largely uninterested in the settings, which are the most significant element to present-day viewers with western clothes and furniture again alongside traditional Japanese items. The film is quite agreeable but never fields the issues and situations that it continually seems to be about to investigate.  

In Gosho’s Shinsetsu / New Snow, the qualities of his major work are now coming into focus.  Made in 1942, it was the Daiei Company’s first major commercial success. This one runs more than two hours.  

Michitarô Mizushima, The Dancing Girl of Izu's bit player postman has become the school teacher lead, presented for our admiration. He stands apart from traditional Teachers College trained instructors in the classes he runs for his National School kids and argues with his fellow teacher, who has given a low mark to a student who draws a train as an abstract. Another scene has him being pulled across the playground by a line of his young class members, while lying on a wheeled platform. The exact educational benefit of this exercise is not explained.

New Snow

Mizushima also runs civics classes for the parents, where the feedback includes “When you are educating them, you are playing with them.” One military type criticises Mizushima for putting his hands in his pockets while lecturing. The message content of this film is near opaque. It really needs to be seen several times and backed with historical research. I don’t like it enough to do that, so we will have to rely on a first impression. 

It is clearly a WW2 propaganda production and there’s no pretense otherwise. Mizushima tells his pupils that they are learning to be good servants of the Emperor. When a member of his class’ bald headed dad abuses him, our hero calls him “Churchill” and, after we get a reference to the Yasukuni Shrine, Mizushima ends the film in military training joining the granfdather who still practices his archery skills in a traditional robe.  However Donald Richie tells us the authorities were unhappy that the director had turned the approved message making into a romance and it was only Gosho’s ill health which prevented reprisals. Despite severe TB, Gosho's career would continue to 1968.

New Snow's personal material also qualifies as inscrutable, though it’s rather more winning. The antagonist-father, now called Dhama, becomes a friend when Mizushima doesn’t tell his son about the indignant visit to the school. The leads are too reserved to pursue the romantic attractions they feel but discuss them with work mates, though at one stage we do get a visualisation in the form of photos falling out of a scroll letter. The people certainly  emerge with much more sympathy than those in Mizoguchi’s overtly didactic 1941 Genroku chûshingura/ 47 Ronin, which is four hours about the glories of dying for your country. Well, Metro’s The Human Comedy pushes a similar message. Oddly Gosho is often compared to William Saroyan.

The climax has Mizushima called up for military service. There’s a nice farewell dinner where the characters edge towards letting their feelings be shown.  We then see him drilling in the way he had his classes perform and he writes back to say how much he values the experience. 

The cast often had long careers in Japanese film without coming to our attention.  Mizushima figures in the support of a few of the Baby Cart series. They mesh into a plausible ensemble. The film making is curious. Gosho is claimed as a specialist in editing. The cutting is notably choppy but you can see an effort to deal with problems through montage. An image of the child’s train drawing goes to a real train with the performers in the shot, which is followed by a closer view of their feet and then to them in the studio replica of a street, easing the transition between the two backgrounds. Trains are prominent, with the night time studio simulation of  a cityscape coming with a model railway running through its background.

New Snow - art classes.

The setting is particularly interesting, again showing the country’s advance towards westernisation. This gives New Snow some interest straight off. Both men and women dress in kimonas but they work in military or hospital uniforms. Their houses are still divided by screens but these are solid timber and glass affairs and not paper. It doesn’t match any other Japanese films I’m aware of, possibly through the inaccessibility of War Time material.  The Occupation Authorities were said to have got in there burning negatives and the You Tube copy is from a worn projection print, though the transfer and sub-titles are good.

Watching progress in this random selection of Gosho's early work, we can observe his development both as a technician and a commentator. That's already intriguing and makes a great introduction to his major films. 

 

Barrie Pattison 2023

The Salomy Janes.

I tuned up Raoul Walsh’s 1932 The Wild Girl without knowing anything about it. Sometimes being a diligent film freak plowing through the margin entries on U-Tube comes good.  This has been the high point of my recent viewing. 

It's another of the William Fox Company films that have been allowed to vanish. I was at Walsh seasons in London, Paris and Edinburgh in the sixties, when he was being canonised. None of them came up with this one. That was the time I heard Sam Fuller, fronting his own retrospective, ask why the organisers were fooling about with him, when they could have invited Raoul Walsh.

Right from the get go, The Wild Girl has your attention. The titles are presented like a family photo album come to life, as each panel shows one of the performers in costume delivering a line to explain their character. (“I like trees better’n men. The’re straight”) It’s a pity this device didn’t catch on. It works better than the simulated page turnings the film uses to link scenes. Norbert Brodine, the cameraman who Elia Kazan thought had never done anything of note, catches the big trees environment imposingly, even with a few unobtrusive glass shot skies, at a guess, dropped in there to conceal distant roofs and telegraph wires. It doesn't do any harm either that New York’s MOMA has made this beautiful restoration. I notice that a few, of the small number who saw the original screenings there, went on record to announce their delight.

Wild Girl - Joan Bennett

The film is an adaptation of Bret Harte’s short story “Salomy Jane’s Kiss” and the stage presentation derived from it by Paul Armstrong Jr. This had been filmed in 1914 and again with Jaqueline Logan in 1923, a lost version by George Melford from a scenario by De Mille writer Waldemar Young.  De Mille’s 1917 Romance of the Redwoods repeated the California Sequoias setting in a similar plot about a young woman saving her man from a vengeful mob, allegedly spun off an obscure German piece. The success of films of Owen Wister’s 1902 “The Virginian” would have endorsed interest in the lynching plot. 

Walsh’s film  opens endearingly with twenty two year old Joan Bennett’s blonde urchin child of nature frolicking in the big timber, sharing the frame with deer and bear cubs. She goes skinny dipping with the settlers’ children and hitches a ride in driver Eugene Palette’s Angel’s Gulch - Red Wood stage, only to encounter gropey town boss Morgan Wallace, who she evades by clambering onto the top of the speeding coach. The tricky stunt climb looks like it was doubled but Joan does do the ride along on the bouncing roof.

She’s the only eligible female about (like Lois Wilson in Victor Fleming’s great To the Last Man). Wallace’s purity league has had Mina Gombell’s saloon girls run out of town, though they were the basis of his success. Young Joan, is unsure how to handle her multiple suitors.  She disconcerts Irving Pichel (later to direct the superior Destination Moon and Martin Luther among less notable titles) by telling him that she’ll marry him if he kills off the offending Wallace for her. Silk hat gambler Ralph Bellamy (excellent) is also interested.

Wild Girl - Bellamy & Bennett.

Complications arise when Pallette’s stage is robbed and stranger Charles Seventh Heaven Farrell, still in his tattered Confederate uniform, rides into town looking for Wallace, who wronged his sister. Farrell gets bad notices for his performance here, doing a gentle soul twisted out of shape by his need for violence. Think Brian Ahern as a cowboy! He’s a lot more acceptable than he is in say the Borzage Liliom.  Charles is minimally distracted by the sight of Joan swimming bare-assed. He tracks down the villainous Wallace, after giving him a pistol to defend himself, and smashes through the timber door to put a couple of rounds into the  fleeing blackguard. Gombell watches delighted.

 This is actually another transition western, again with minimal shooting, fighting and fast riding and a strong on character plot. The only other shot fired in the film takes down a critter. Setting, story and performance carry the piece nicely.

  At this point the Bret Hart plot asserts with the locals forming a lynch mob to dispose of robber Willard Robertson (his best role) and killer Farrell. (“Those Vigilantes is allus clingin' and hangin' onter some mere scrap o'the law they're pretendin' to despise”) The film’s strongest scene is (of all people) Sarah Padden’s outburst, seeing the posse about to kill the father of her children. Stirred in, we get the Harte story, with Bennett’s Salomy Jane lifting onto his saddle and kissing Farrel, when he’s about to hang.

The Wild Girl - Farrell & Bennett.

Along with the sub plot of the local laying for her father James Durkin, we get Bellamy acting chivalrously to provide Bennett’s happiness with his new rival. He switches boots with the fugitive, confusing craven Pichel’s pack of blood hounds, with the nasty spotting the deception too late.

Wild Girl is a delight with its great piney woods visuals, excellent performances and well thought out plot but it's not flawless. No matter how appealing Walsh’s regular leading lady Bennett may be, with plucked eye brows and wardrobe department blonde ringlets she's never going to be the convincing frontier woman. We can recognise the director’s style - Pallette running up to deliver a line in close up, as part of the Walsh excessive knockabout. I never thought I’d be writing that we saw too much of Eugene Palette in a movie. A giggling Louise Beavers, replacing the Indian family of the original, is booted by Joan and slapped with a twig and I couldn’t spot Iron Eyes Cody - but I still find the film irresistible because (and appearances can be deceiving) it feels like the work of people who loved making movies for people who loved watching movies. This element will fade in the later Raoul Walsh films, though Gentleman Jim or The World in his Arms still retain traces.

However Wild Girl offers the director in full flight and is a project that stands among the best of its day. It really is a rare and genuine treat.

To get a better grip on the film I checked out Salomy Jane, the 1914 film, made contemporary with Birth of a Nation, as one of the first feature length productions and better adapted to the long form than most of the surviving examples.

Salomy Jane - Mabel Hilliard, Fred W. Snook, Peters, Nigh, Michelina, Ernest Joy and Jack Holt Behind Peters.

This early version already contains the add-ons to the Bret Harte plot found in later films -  rival admirers including the gentleman gambler in his silk hat, the feud (clearer here), Red Pete’s children, his daughter with the giveaway bracelet, the Sequoias. That looks like the same hollow giant redwood but this one has also found a truck size tree stump to use as a foreground object.

Middle aged Latina Beatriz Michelina, with her hand clasping gestures, is not much of a Salomy Jane but clean cut House Peters (senior) cuts a dash as “The Man” and the support are adequate. Long serving B movie director William Nigh plays one of the suitors and the film is a bit schizoid - a division between the imposing exteriors - the vigilantes gathering in the clearing or their horses kicking up water as they ride distant into the river in pursuit of the foreground lovers - alternating with the performers miming out the action in drab studio interiors. 

For an early feature, the pacing is quite sustained and there is Parallel Action though the only close-ups are of inset objects - the sister’s picture, the feuding relative’s letter. I'd rate the handling by Nigh and co-director Lucius Henderson (Sapho 1913) as respectable for the day.

While this is an agreeable curiosity, we have a long way to go to get to the standard of Raoul Walsh’s so nice Wild Girl.

Barrie Pattison 2023.