ABLAZE.

Time was we were seeing quite a bit of New Zealand production and things like John Reid's Middle Aged Spread, Geof Murphey's Goodby Pork Pie and Murray Ball's Footrot Flats were lively and unexpected - better than the films being made in Australia. Well, those days are gone but the odd New Zealand film still makes it’s way onto TV here - usually in the middle of the night, like 2019’s Ablaze directed by Joshua Frizzell and crewed by people whose background like his was in series TV.

Ablaze - Bruce Hopkins, David Van Horn.

This one is a scaled-down disaster movie dealing with a Xmas 1947 fire which engulfed Ballantyne’s department store in Christchurch. It gets some attention immediately for being in black and white ‘scope and attempting accurate period.

However it looks as if the makers have overreached themselves in trying for a big store movie. What they put on screen is less convincing than Ladies in Black or even the Marx Brothers and Norman Wisdom, let alone the three exceptional French films of  Zola’s “Au bonheur des dames” - Julien Duvivier’s late silent, André Cayatte’s 1943 turn and Pot Bouille by Duvivier again in 1957.

The New Zealanders seem to be working too hard, foregrounding a snotty floor walker who snubs a visitor in shirt sleeves and isn’t above making off with stock, putting moves on the shop girls and having a quiet smoke in the store room. By contrast, dress maker Hannah Marshall is concealing her pregnancy and is relieved when her severe supervisor re-assures her that she’ll be re-hired after her confinement. The girls are shown to be exploited (“I’ve never been to the races. I can’t afford it”) The dressmakers and milliners are at panic stations because they have to outfit current Miss New Zealand Mary Wootton and the auditors are in, getting all owner Mark Mitchinson’s attention.

Despite considerable effort, we never have the feeling that all this is happening in a sprawling three story fire trap. The elevator with it’s light up indicator is clearly the art director’s show piece but it comes as a surprise a couple of reels in to find that the store has a spacious Tea Room.

However at the point where I was losing interest, we get the fire disaster, which does play effectively in character terms with the cast gradually realising the situation and reacting differently to the circumstances they find themselves in as the ingrained store discipline restrains them.

Parallel with this we get the fire service in shiny brass helmets struggling after an inadequate preparation. The warden has to use the street pay kiosk to phone the fire in and they discover

Alison Bruce, Janine Burchett, Jared Turner, Serena Cotton, Mark Mitchinson, Manon Blackman, Nick Davies, and Brittany Clark.

with alarm that the doors are being locked to prevent pilfering while the fireys are restrained because they need the owner’s permission to enter private property.

The actual scenes of rising smoke and corridors blocked by flames, while the characters we have been induced to make usually bad decisions, do hold attention not the least because this is not a Towering Inferno but a small retail business menaced on a scale beyond their anticipation. 

Even here the cut price film making limits efforts. Through the window we see the dress maker escaping on the roof opposite without watching the stunt jump which we are told landed her there. Shots of figures on the smoke-filled stairs don’t prepare us for the body count which is more effectively conveyed in a final title listing the names of victims.

The use of actuality of the building blazing, its flag still flapping in the wind while the fire crews pour water into the flames, and the subsequent memorial carry the real charge, along with the news that the Ballantyne’s fire led to major changes in regulations and, since they were introduced, there hasn’t been a comparable disaster.

Ablaze is sufficiently accomplished to make you wonder about the other current New Zealand films, including the work of the people that contrived this one. I should watch those other unsocial hours transmissions to check.

Ablaze - Hannah Marshall, Manon Blackman and Ella Hope-Higginson 

 

 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

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, 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 this 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

Chinese Movie Time.

Yi miao zhong / One Second is something of return to form for Mainland Chinese Cinema heavy weight Yimou Zhang, with his personal take on the Cultural Revolution front and centre again.

Yi miao zhong / One Second - Wei Fan & Zhang Yi.

 

 

 

 

Coming over the bleak dunes, Zhang Yi (in Zhang Yimou's 2021 Xuan ya zhi shang / Cliff Walkers), the ragged lead gets into the dusty strip mall town in time to see an equally scruffy figure steal a reel of film from a courier’s motor bike left outside the bar. It takes some time to find out why this is so important while they fill  in the back stories of the characters.

The thief is Liu Haocun (also Cliff Walkers), one of those “My goodness - you’re a girl” characters familiar from the Kung Fu movies and earlier and wider. She’s a companion to Minzhi Wei  in Zhang Yimou’s best film, the 1999  Yi ge dou bu neng shao / Not One Less, both children called on to carry adult responsibilities with their Cultural Revolution backgrounds a key element of the plot.

Zhang Yimou

Along the way the purloined reel gets to to change hands as the protagonists flannel truck driver Yang Yu with conflicting stories and Newsreel Nunber 22 falls off a truck to be dragged along a dirt road.

The damaged reel is important for each of  the leads - income for the impoverished girl (lampshades made of movie films are trendy), his Mr. Movie  status and that of his tiny Community 2 for Town movie house operator Wei Fan (I Am Not Madam Bovary) and the powerful significance of one second (actually several) for Zhang Yi, who proves to be on the run from a prison camp.

The film’s most memorable passages is set in Wei Fan's undecorated district cinema where he involves the entire tiny community in the work of restoring the damaged film reel, preparing bowls of distilled water and drying racks to clean it while stressing to the stranger the importance of his work to his family and his community.

Heroic Sons & Daughters.

The film takes immense care with the technical stuff, finding a fifties hand joiner, utilising film cement with a steel blade and wooden applicator stick and contriving a looping set up, which Wei Fan proudly tells Zhang Yi his fellow operators are unable to manage, so you've got to wonder why the restored reel shows negative damage when it should have been black scratching marks. 

They have to wait till the house empties after Wei's regular showing of  Zhaodi Wu’s  Ying xiong er nü / Heroic Sons and Daughters  (1964) which the clips make look livelier than the few movies we get to see from that era. Wei explains that the audience will stay watching anything he puts on the screen with a hint of pride.

The security division are on the trail of  Zhang Yi and it is the film’s most poignant concept that neither they or Haocun Liu are able to understand when Wei slips frames of the image to the fugitive.

There is another tacked on happy ending, when the now scrubbed up and freshly clothed protagonist is given his liberty and returns to the village. It has been suggested that this tampering is the cause of the delay in the film’s release.

Not the least appealing aspect of the piece is it’s place in the line of movies lingering on the importance of the movie shows of the maker’s youth - obviously Cinema Paradiso (1988) along with  The Last Picture Show (1971), Etore Scola’s  Splendor (1989)  Australia’s 1997 Picture Show Man or the 2007 Hong Kong Lo kong ching chuen / Mr. Cinema. One Second is not disgraced in this company.

Barrie Pattison 2022

Walking.

Back in 1949, The Walking Hills was obviously considered one of Columbia's minor efforts - seventy eight minutes running time and black and white - a B movie knock-off of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (gold hunters fall out in the desert). 

I still had a full head of hair when I discovered this one and after decades it's interesting to come back to the film I rated a find - the first western by John Sturges, director of cowboy movie high points in my then expanding experience of film. I considered Sturges a big man after his The Law and Jake Wade and Bad Day at Black Rock.

 The film gets attention straight away. Rather than the old west, its setting is unfamiliar Mexicali on the then present day U.S. / Mexican border.  This registers as a scaled down version of Touch of Evil’s Tijuana (which was actually filmed in Venice California). Investigator John Ireland and agitated client Houseley Stevenson (Dark Passage's plastic surgeon) have followed young cowboy William Bishop, who pauses in front of Ella Rains' souvenir shop. The old man prompts that Bishop could escape them into Mexico without the one dozing border control officer taking any interest 

 Ireland follows Bishop, who takes his beer into a neighborhood bar’s back room two dollar poker game. There Columbia's resident genial character actor Edgar Buchanan (star of Sturges' Best Man Wins) is regaling the players with his account of the historic wagon train that got lost in the walking hills sand dunes. Card players, horse breeder Randolph Scott, young Jerome Courtland (later to direct series TV), sullen Arthur Kennedy and guitar playing Josh White aren't all that interested until their conversation alerts them to the fact that Courtland has stumbled on the location of the lost wagons and suddenly the room goes into lock down with the prospect of  “five millions in gold, already dug out of the ground” that loose talk could lose to a hoard of treasure hunters. Bishop warns that no one is going to stop him going through the door and bar man Russell Collins’ offer to stay silent is dismissed. They all have to keep together.

Scott adds his associate, horse wrangler Charles Stevens, to the expedition. Stevens, still billed well down the cast, even under black folk singer Josh White, at least gets to do a rounded sympathetic character instead of his usual murdering savage or drunken Indian. Race is more sensitively handled here than most of what was done around it. Josh White’s colour is never an issue in the film.

When store keeper Ella Rains, who has a history with both Scott and Bishop, comes riding over the dunes following them, Kennedy, complete with a knife strapped to his wrist, objects to a further split, with shares now also including Stevens. Randy downs him summarily. "That's one way of settling an argument" Ireland observes.

 The most memorable segment has the party fanning out, digging in the sand radiating "like spokes of a wagon wheel." from the point where they found a vintage ox bow.  Throw in a heliograph and signals from the distant hills.  Further complications with Courtland injured and Scott’s mare foaling. The script gets away from the makers at this point. However when the action arrives, the film does assert with a striking fight using shovel fulls of sand after Ireland’s pistol is disposed of.

 Rains, Bishop & Scott.

 Randolph Scott is still a plausible cowboy hero here, even without his shirt. His stunt action is doubled by Jock Mahoney but Randy does ride his horse in the sand storm which couldn’t have been easy. Though he’s the star-producer, his character is allowed to lose the girl to a younger man. The way Scott gradually emerges to dominate the group is particularly skillful. His performance here is notably more plausible than in the run of his films under directors like Edward Marin or Bruce Humberstone and the difference must be credited to Sturges at the point where he emerged from the ranks of B movie directors, after his stark 1944 war documentary  Thunderbolt, co-directed by William Wyler, finally received distribution.

There’s a flashback to  Rodeo Rider Bishop winning   Rains (“All week I’d batted off cowboys with a short club”) and a nasty turn in a Denver rain storm which takes the film into the noir world of Sturges' crime movies. His The People Against O'Hara with Spenser Tracy was particularly deft. There’s a flashback to  Rodeo Rider Bishop winning Rains and a nasty turn in a Denver rain storm which takes the film into the noir world of Sturges' crime movies. His The People Against O'Hara with Spenser Tracy was particularly deft Sturges will go on to be be one of the promising fringe directors absorbed into Dore Schary's MGM, only to be let go. When they wanted him to direct Tracy in Black Rock, the studio had to hire him back at a substantially increased fee.

White gets a couple of his folk numbers which do add resonance. The music, credited to Arthur Morton normally an orchestrator, echoes White's singing "I Gave My Love a Cherry" in the background scoring.

Scott, Bishop, Rains, Buchanan, White, Collins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cameraman Charles Lawton jr. never achieved a major profile despite a long credit list that ran from the Marx Brothers to John Ford and Orson Welles. He worked regularly with Scott. His monochrome group shots immediately distinguish The Walking Hills from other films at it's level of ambition.

As with their previous The Gunfighters, the first of Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown's independent films, writer Alan Le May's work is both the strength and the weakness of Walking Hills. A western specialist, he had moved to scripting for Cecil B. De Mille, including Reap the Wild Wind, and Raoul Walsh on Cheyenne and San Antonio. We can see his struggles to solve the script problems. After we hear about the difficulty of moving a pack train into the desert and not attract attention, there's a cut without explanation to shots of the group riding in the Death Valley National Monument. The picture has set itself a big ask in providing so many characters. Le May has the work party conveniently divide during the storm, getting support players off screen. Giving multiple characters unexpected reasons to fear Ireland's connection with the law is clumsy. The production was able to secure A feature performers when Ireland and Kennedy tuned up on the lot needing work but was stuck with splitting the villain role between them. The script clearly should have gone through Le May's typewriter another time. He is now best known as the source of John Ford's The Searchers and the John Huston The Unforgiven.

The wry ending does just about get by. “You know Shep would never be able to think straight with a hat full of money.”

Not unlike High Noon and Bad Day at Black Rock, with all its limitations I prefer The Walking Hills to it’s ponderous Sierra Madre model, where the shift to studio built desert is more distracting.  I can now see that the film has taken on board  Victor Seastrom's classic The Wind, drawing on the menace of the approaching blizzard, where choking sand will cover activity, a major dramatic element set up by the discovery of the Ox skull ground bare or the account of  the car high polished by the blown sand blasting away paint and trim.

Sturges & Lee Remick - The Halleluja Trail

 

As a record of the re-shaping of the Hollywood scene and emerging talents and for its  memorable central concept The Walking Hills deserves more attention than it has had. The film remains agreeable entertainment and occasionally more. It crackles with the energy of talented people getting a chance to escape their work routine.

The You Tube copy is excellent.

Barie Pattison - 2022

 Ready When You Are Mr. De Mille.

Mitch Leisen, De Mille and Kay Johnson.

 

 

I've already mentioned my satisfaction in finally seeing the early films of Cecil B. De Mille, after hearing about them for the better part of a life time. Thank you Pordenone, You Tube and import DVDs.

It's interesting to recognise the things I enjoyed in my early years of film going with the re-runs of his big sound epics. The same personality shows in his silent era beginnings. Doing these justice is a major undertaking. I'm not sure that I'm going to get through it. Consider this a down payment on the De Mille account.

De Mille was one of the few people (Jack Warner was another) who had the foresight to take a personal interest in archiving his work and the greater part of it does survive.

We are lucky that a beautiful tinted copy of 1921's Forbidden Fruit is still about though this is minor De Mille. More a curiosity, it fields all the crassness that De Mille is abused for, alongside sophisticated camerawork, overpowering design and determined miming by a cast of De Mille regulars.

We find Oil magnate Theodore Roberts (Moses in the silent Ten Commandments) with a wall chart with little derricks on it. Katharine Williams, whose busy career includes playing Cherry Malotte in the 1914 The Spoilers, is his “Mrs. Fix It” wife, also into visual aids, with name tabs on her diner table model. To further her husband's deal she conspires to keep independent oil man Forrest Stanley (The Cat & the Canary) around by promising him he’ll be seated at diner that evening next to the most beautiful woman in New York but their choice ‘phones in sick. (inset of pudgy girl with tooth-ache). However poor (of course) seamstress Agnes Ayres (opposite Valentino in The Sheik) is fingering the glittery Mitchel Liesen and Natacha Rambova costumes and they put it to her that she can be rung in.  Agnes gets the attention of hair dressers and maids to turn her glamorous.

What De Mille’s target audience will take as manifestations of luxury abound - giant cigars, meals with five forks, an art deco indoor ‘phone booth, “Clothes by Poiret, Perfume by Coty, Jewels by Tiffany." Servants include Ethel Wales, Julia Faye, uncredited Claude Allister and Theodore Kosloff  (“served the best families in NY but also two years in Sing Sing”).

Agnes is married to abusive (of course) Clarence Burton  (King of Kings) who is agro when she’s not there to make his evening meal and he has to put coins into the meter to light the functioning gas bracket. He cheers up when he sees the extra $20 that she brings home.

Forbidden Fruit - Ayres

Agnes and Forrest of course hit it off with her treasuring the orchid he takes out of the center piece to give her and Kathryn bribes her to come back so he will stay for the weekend. They watch the “Forbidden Fruit” play with Katharine Loomis and Conrad Nagel, from Robert’s velvet lounge seat box. The little band of gold, which Agnes removes to put on the finery, gets to stand for duty.

Back in the tenement home with the sewing machine, Burton gets meaner and Agnes’ chirping tweety bird is victim. That’s going too far, with Agnes heading back for more high life with Forrest while Clarence heads out to The Happy Hour Social Club where they keep gin in a hidden bin. There he meets Kosloff, who alerts him to the house guest with all the jewelry. If Clarence steals it, he gets half. The characters converge and Agnes is humiliated. Tempo picks up in a tenement confrontation with bodies stuffed in the Murphy bed.

The main intrigue is simple minded and not helped by panel filling captions and labored Cinderella allusions, complete with with over the top inset sequences featuring see-through hoop skirt and glass floored ballroom but no slipper. Forrest putting a leaf from the table decoration over the saucy place marker at diner sets the tone. 

Performance is quite animated for this period but without any subtlety. The grotesque women’s costumes get attention and the camerawork is remarkably sophisticated - horizontal wipe between scenes, dollar signs appearing in Burton’s eyes well before Tex Avery, the shadowed menacing close up of him when Agnes wakes, the tiny live action figures of Cinderella and her Fairy Godmother vignetted into the lower right of the title explaining their scene.

This one is for movie history enthusiasts who will find their time repaid. The unprepared viewer possibly less so. 

Dynamite of 1929, his first sound film, is recognisably De Mille, mixing intriguing and preposterous at two hours plus. A few years back I was at a fan conference in the Tri State Area where they showed De Mille's Madam Satan (Kay Johnson in form fitting demon outfit and a zeppelin) The collectors there wanted to know if I'd seen this one which was thought inaccessible. My having watched his sound The Squaw Man on Oz TV cut no ice. Since then TCM has come to the rescue and a murkey copy of their version is on You Tube.

We kick off in court with Charles Bickford in his first screen role. He hears the judge sentence him to death for murder, watched by his distraught little sister Muriel McCormac. Charles is quite casual about it “These birds are only doing their stuff, OK.”

Meanwhile in a sky scraper office, the trustees of her grandfather’s estate are telling heiress Kay Johnson that the old man foresaw her irresponsibility and bad company and made a lawyer proof will where she only gets his fortune if she’s married by the age of twenty three - in a fortnight! Kay is skeptical. “Will someone please tell me what money will do with settling down?”

  Dynamite - Nagel, Johnson, Faye & McCrea.

Her idea of the good time is cutting it up at the Napewood Country Club. Entertainment there includes a sword swallower and a women in hoops race, which ends in the Club pool. They film synch. dialogue with  the female leads as rolling contestants - but not much. Kay has her eye on polo playing Conrad Nagel who is married to Julia Faye (Kay objects “I’ve only got the next option on you”) Julia in turn is squired by young Joel McCrea in his first major role. Kay and Julia are in negotiation about how much she gets if she lets spouse Conrad go. (“I’ve never bought a husband before”) Man of integrity Nagel resents this.

We cut to a track along Death Row, with the obligatory black prisoner in one of the cells and the guard playing the radio. There’s an abstract shot of hammers banging on the scaffold, which provides background noise for the scenes. Kay has read about Charles’ offer to leave his remains to science for ten grand to cover the up-keep of the sister after he’s gone and Kay spots an opportunity. They stage their wedding ceremony, complete with all the implied ironies noted by the condemned man.

Meanwhile Leslie Fenton is goading the real killer in a night club. (“The guards with three knives are taking their places” -  like Intolerance) This works out with released newly wed Bickford presenting at Johnson’s luxury home ("You sure make a swell widow”) where the aged butler is unsuccessful at expelling him and Charles rejects the prospect of the servants’ quarters.

The obligatory De Mille wild party ensues with Tyler Brooke’s comedy, “limousine sports” doing suspiciously well rehearsed variety turns  and “Kiss of Fire” playing in the background. “I never call anything informal while people are still standing up.”

Dynamite - Bickford, Johnson & Leisen mural.

 

 

 

 

 

Charles throws the party people out with Kay distraught at him ruining her social status, and punches in the door she locks against him (“Stop it you brute!”) before returning her ten grand and  leaving - if Dynamite finished there, it would be one of the more presentable of the twenties sound films, comparable to the Norma Shearer vehicles.

However there’s more - lots more. Cut to the wide shot of Bickford's home town where Charles has gone back down the mine. Sitcom developments present when Kay turns up in the jazzy roadster he insists she lock in the tool shed for the duration of her stay. She explains she has to be cohabiting with him for the Trust Fund to pay out. He agrees on the basis that she undertakes wife duties - “You don’t mean?” “No, not that” - and we go into joke mode with her failing to make a cake from a cook book like Dorothy Dalton in De Mille's Fools Paradise, both anticipating Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, and Kay having trouble with the hick neighbors like the problems he had with the nobs. Compare Theodora Goes Wild.

There’s a mining disaster (ahah!) but it happens off screen. Then little Douglas Frazer Scott is in a road accident (also off screen) and Kay, whose fault it was in the first place, saves the day by crashing the car out of the shed and bringing back the specialist in record time. The Towns-women bring her flowers.

Conrad shows up to take her home and, being a man of integrity, he insists they go down the mine to face Charles. “A woman in a mine means trouble” and sure enough there’s a cave-in (OK) trapping the leads in a diminishing air pocket (lamp dims as Charles lifts it) while it will take weeks for rescue to arrive. (“You can pray if you know how”) Master miner Charles plans on blasting through the wall into the next chamber but whoever hammers the dynamite home will be wiped out in the explosion. Both men declare their love for Kay and don’t want to be the one stuck with her remembering a heroic admirer.

Dynamite - Nagel, Bickford & Johnson underground.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who is going to survive? Despite all the Pre-Code daring the matter is decided as always in favor of the marriage knot. By this time the film’s qualities have sunk in a mire of formula plots and unreadable dialogue. (“You know a lot about coal, don’t you?”) De Mille rises to the challenge of the new sound format with only a few lapses - the view of bar stools being re-arranged which doesn’t belong in its sequence. Dialogue shots that look as if they were taken in succeeding runs in the sound proof booth are smoothly edited for the interiors. However his ambitions and crassness defeat a production which would have played nicely at half the length.

The leads are assured and occasionally impressive, with Bickford and Johnson (Mrs. John Cromwell) on film for their first time. She had quite an impressive career at this stage with her  De Mille leads and her husband's films - but twenty three - c'mon! The De Milles must have thought rough-hewn Bickford played well opposite elegant leading women. Brother William De Mille fielded him with Kay Francis in Passion Flower a year later. Julia Faye is awful and McCrea doesn’t have anything much to do except look young. The one who does register is designer Mitch Leisen and his modern decors - the pan round Johnson’s lavish flat where Bickford inspects the abstract murals before tasting the bath salts. However Leisen's know how defeats some material, as with attention being stolen from the killer by the patterned fabric of the dress an extra passing in front of him is wearing.

Passion Flower - Francis, Johnson, cleric, Bickford and Lewis Stone.

 

It wasn't till he got back to putting the wrath of Jehovah on display again at Paramount that Cecil B. De Mille resumed his dominant position in Hollywood, but these MGM early talkies have a fascination of their own. Dynamite is particularly striking as much for its excesses and missteps as for the pieces of staging that showed its director asserting himself. I enjoyed it.

Barrie Pattison - 2022.

STATE OF THE ART.

It’s not since before World War One that we’ve had a situation like the one today where the forms, content and particularly duration of movies have been so fluid.  

The traditional two hour dramatic production, modeled on live theatre, no longer dominates. The take home version of it and other items hang around in forms like disk viewing and set time Free To Air programing, sustained by events like news and sports broadcasts, and the smart money is going into Streaming Series which, despite the celebrated removal of restraints like length and censorship seem to be settling into a rigid form,  the one hour episode format of the first features and the thirteen chapters of the theatrical serials that only petered out in the fifties.

Streamed dramatic series have developed built-in faults. All the best ideas go into the first episode to get the audience in, this is followed by repetition and reworking till an inconclusive ending which leaves another series possible. Addictive watching, not new, is now codified as binging.

I watch all this a little bemused. I’m not the target audience for what is being produced and I find a lot of it unsatisfying. I recognise the familiar generation gap which published criticism has never mastered. Movie critics in particular have been decades older than the people for whom who their stock in trade was made and who frequently knew it better than they did. 

 Where does this leave the old film freak with his allegiances to Soviet Montage, John Ford and giallo?

One effort which consciously attempted to merge its markets was Marvel’s Jessica Jones serieses (2015-2019) now already in the rear view mirror.

Jessica Jones - Krysten Ritter

Lead Krysten Ritter plays a character inherited from a minor strip cartoon original, a private eye who used to be a super hero(ine). They reveal her setup in stages. Jessica Hecht, as a character who bears a grudge, after the Mighty Marching Marvel Super Heroes  trashed New York in a previous chapter, puts a round into Ritter’s arm and seeing the blood comments - “Hm - not bulletproof!” 

Jessica Jones - Coulter and Ritter.

Our heroine has a drinking problem, at one stage getting thrown out with the bar garbage. She is indifferent to her appearance and surroundings, taking the first few episodes to get the smashed glass repaired in her “Alias Investigations” office door and having Rosario Dawson, guesting in the  (2015) Smile episode where she has to tend to injured Mike Coulter’s Luke Cage in Jones/ Ritter’s flat and comment “Your girl friend’s a slob!” Jessica ridicules Susie Abromeit‘s print dress and is told she’s being rude to her, coming back “I’m rude to everyone.” At one stage, she holds a helpless woman in the path of an oncoming subway train - Anyone remember Union Station? One of their devices is to give her a perpetual scowl. When the plot finally calls for her to smile the effect is starting.

They place Ritter in a studied film noir night time city, with heavy leanings towards Edward Hopper, and against deep focus Naked City-scapes for the day time. Interiors are shot deliberately without gelling the windows, so that the characters’ faces are darker than the the ones we sometimes see  in the mirrors. One episode goes all Cameron Menzies on us with large areas of the screen left black. This is not a series TV look.

Adult elements are piled in. Carrie Anne Moss (at last a familiar face) is our heroine’s lesbian lawyer involved in her own messy divorce. Rape and abortion are plot elements as is drug addiction. Eka Darville’s habit misleadingly indicates him as a lesser character but he gets a surprise, and not all that convincing, instant cure half way through. Particularly striking is beat cop Wil Traval who comes on as a bit player there to do a bit of biffo with Ritter but re-appears in one of the series strongest scenes, where he shows up at her friend radio talk show host Rachael Taylor’s fortified flat, proving to have brought a weapon for her protection, and they have a conversation through the intercom with him on the other side of the foyer gradually winning her trust and having her open her door to him. The writing allows her and Ritter to have different perceptions of the character.

Unlike the traditional mini-series with all the exposition jammed into episode one, they introduce key elements down the track, We don’t get a good look at Svengali villain David Tennant till Ep. 3. or hear about Ritter/Jones's childhood till the end. Impressively built Mike Coulter comes on as Ritter’s series squeeze but a plot development removes him from the action early on with the question of what he’s up to hanging over the next episodes.

All this tampering with the form - and the content - suggest Marvel are trying to break the mold to produce something that will satisfy their old fan base and the Twenty-First Century viewers. However they make compromised choices. The characters may find themselves in adult situations and curse but they never do full frontals. One of Jessica Jones super powers is having sex with her pants on. I can’t see admirers of Sidney Lumet or Alex De Iglesia coming away from this one satisfied. Maybe there are surprises in the later seasons but what I’ve seen has been run up to appeal to twelve-year-old boys who are curious about elements found in films for Big People - or Big People more at ease with material for twelve-year-old boys.

Jessica Jones - Sin Bin ep. - Moss

In all this group effort (nine writers are credited on the final episode of series one) we have to wonder what the contribution of directors, traditionally the auteurs of movies, may be. Well, I couldn’t avoid noticing the upswing in tension of episode 12 - which is the one credited to John Dahl (1994’s The Last Seduction). Is Carrie Anne Moss going to unleash David Tennant’s evil power there? Dahl has been devoting himself to TV eps. including characteristically Dexter.  Is it still possible for directorial style to assert?

By comparison look at the new Wes Anderson The French Dispatch, aimed at people old enough to remember Bill Murray or even Luis Feuillade. It pivots on the idea of publishing a little-read supplement to the Kansas Evening Sun (we get a pullback through a corn field) which bears a peculiar resemblance to The New Yorker Magazine and covers events in France’s Ennui sur Blazé community. It tries for funny rather than puzzling. 

There is something you could consider order and form concerning a final edition, where sections of the film seem to correspond to recognisable magazine features - an obituary, a travel guide, and three lead articles, as dictated in the last wishes of Editor Murray (“He brought the world to Kansas"), whose advice to his journalists was “Make it sound as if you wrote it that way on purpose” Murray operates out of an office with a “No Crying” sign on the wall. 

The French Dispatch - Wolodarsky, Murray, Wilson at work.

Owen Wilson bicycling on a treadmill gives an introductory tourist coverage to the town as scenery is pulled past him, highlighting the Le Sans Blague Café, and the pickpocket’s alley then (staged B&W photos) and now.

The first feature story is commentated in full colour by a glamorous Tilda Swinton at the lectern as a writer and art expert giving a straight-faced slide lecture entitled "The Concrete Masterpiece” about Moses Rosenthaler / Benecio del Toro, a genius modern artist serving a life sentence for murder and dismemberment. In prison, he goes on working and Lea Sedoux his full frontal model doubles as his severe, uniformed prison guard, who slaps him when he gets touchy-feely.

French Dispatch - Seydoux, Del Toro

Dodgy Art Dealer Adrien Brody concocts a scheme where he buys Del Toro’s output (“You can see the girl in it” they comment on an abstract) only to be frustrated by the painter working on the masonry wall of the recreation area. It gets the whole Ken Russel treatment, cutting to colour shots of the art we’ve only seen in B&W.

Next item "Revisions to a Manifesto" deals with student revolt where young activist - chess master Zeffirelli (Timothee Chalamet) pairs with the paper’s correspondent Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), who is soon completing her piece from his bed while Chalamet wears a gas mask.

Third up "The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner" gives us writer Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) guesting on a Talk Show where host Liev Schreiber has nothing to do. In the 1970's. Wright / Wright was a James Balwyn having total recall on every line he'd written. He recites an episode in the career of famous chef Nescaffier, played by Steve Park who we see sustaining Commisaire Mathieu Almaric during the gang abduction of his young son.

Deliberately perverse, Anderson uses recognisable celebrities in walk-ons. It’s the opposite of
Adam McKay's new Don’t Look Up, where its well-known cast are there lured by each one getting a big scene (Tyler Perry was stiffed). Here Elizabeth Moss is only glimpsed at an editorial meeting correcting syntax and jailbird Willem Dafoe complains that he’s being neglected.

Not only does the screen shape and use of colour change for no obvious reason but the climax action of the police siege, accommodating a circus strong man, goes to full animation.

The elimination of perspective with sideways movements of camera and scenery, the irrational changes in format seem to go against film form but there is nothing uncinematic about the piece.

It’s impossible to imagine a major film like this emerging from Hollywood up to this time. Hellzapoppin' or Norm Abbott’s 1966 The Last of the Secret Agents edge towards it, like Zazie dans le métro or the 1975 Grand Magic Circus movie La fille du garde-barrière but this one is the extension of Anderson's previous experiments, the full enchilada unapologetic. It’s where Anderson has been going for all his career and it will be interesting to see if he can get even further - and he does it in single feature running time to be shown in theaters.

Maybe the morphing form is going to be as interesting as the productions themselves.



Wes Anderson

 

Barrie Pattison 2022