Kiepura, Helm & Gallone.

Helm & scenery - The Singing City.

Another deep dive into YouTube reveals Die singende stadt/The Singing City a dimly plotted 1930 romance with music. When Italian veteran Carmine Gallone took on this German-speaking production and its parallel English language version Farewell to Love, he was fresh from directing what has been claimed as the first German talking film, the Conrad Veidt, Australia-set Das Land ohne Frauen, with its twenty-five minutes of dialogue.

Die singende stadt is an all-talking vehicle for the talents of the immensely popular Polish tenor Jan Kiepura but its interest value is in co-star, the glowing Brigitte Helm making her second sound film. At this stage her English was good enough to get her through the British version of L’Atalantide and Herbert Wilcox’ Blue Danube but they didn’t trust her enough and had Betty Stockfeld debut in the Helm part for The Singing City. Stockfeld was assured and winning but - come on guys – this is Brigitte Helm. They talk about the camera loving Gary Cooper but Gallone knew that he only has to let his female lead wander through the coastal foliage to quicken pulses.

If you're actually going to watch it, hold off reading this till you've finished. 

At ninety-four minutes Die singende stadt was then quite a long film. It kicks off with extraneous material of Italian urchin Franz Maldacea, who works the tourists with his limited language skills, passing himself off as a fellow national. This is backed with the unrelenting Neapolitan scenics – imposing white seafront buildings, fishermen working on nets, a goat herd playing his flute, small boats in silhouette against the reflection of the setting sun. There’s even a demo of the Capri Blue Grotto acoustics.

These interruptions were then, and maybe still are, a major incentive to watch the film but we do eventually get around to listless young widow tourist Brigitte. (“If only I knew what I wanted”) Her companion proposes sightseeing and Kiepura, who is in an informal family grouping with Maldacea and his sister Trude Berliner, works as a tour guide and is hired. This gives him chances to go into his act in a doomed attempt to be more interesting than the lovingly composed close-ups of Brigitte listening, the lighting creating a blonde halo.

Well, one thing leads to another and Brigitte whips Jan off to the bright lights of Vienna, where she promotes him as "The finest voice since Caruso." Jan and Brigitte are an idyllic couple, leaving the field with Berliner clear to visitor Georg Alexander, who starts educating the grateful kid brother.

Jan is told to rest up for his big opening, arranged for the next night, while Brigitte will resist the temptations of former suitors still pursuing her. However, tuxedo playboys, who lust after Brigitte in all her movies, prevail and she is lured in her best formal to The Jockey Club, with its black barmen, art deco styling and pop orchestra, which provides distinctive musical backing. 

Keapura & Helm

Meanwhile, Jan has been invited by doorman Carl Goetz to inspect the theatre, where he will perform the following evening, and the accompanist, who is rehearsing, joins in his "La donna è mobile." However, the fact that he’s only got the gig because Brigitte picked up the hall hire comes up and enrages our hero. He sets out to face her only to find that she has left for the Club, where they confront. Argument – champagne frothing in the bowl cut to waves and Jan is back in Naples, meaning that Alexander has to pack his bags, leaving Maldacea in tears. Well, that bit was mildly unexpected. 

Not only is Singing City an early sound film but it is one of the first multi-language sound productions, no longer a matter of cutting in new title cards. Only Kiepura and the non-speaking accompanist, who they never thank, are in both versions. Unlike the exact reproduction seen in F.P.I. Does Not Answer or the Garbo Anna Christie, one can spot odd differences between the German and English editions. The West End of London replaces Vienna as the bright lights. Marriage is not discussed with Betty Stockfeld. The English characters don’t invoke Caruso. Brigitte accepts the admirer’s invitation to join him on the sofa during Jan’s number while, being a nice British girl, Betty refuses Ralph Truman’s advances. Heather Angel never utters a note though singer Trude Berliner gets a brief chorus. London doorman Miles Malleson, who also worked on the English script, gets more of the exposition. Several of the English cast are beginning their film careers. The scene of his sponsor-lover seeing Kiapura’s unexpected appearance over the lip of her champagne glass is noticeably smoother in Die singende stadt, suggesting the common practice of keeping the best takes for domestic versions. Duping appears to not have been as advanced for these as it was in Hollywood and additional original shooting may have been needed.

The film was a challenge. Production company Isadore Sclesinger's ASFI had links to Tobis and British Talking Pictures which closed down that year after one more production. Decades later Associate Producer Bernard Vorhaus told Kevin Gough Yates about their dramas. Hungarian-German cameraman Arpad Viragh, died of food poisoning to be replaced by by Curtis Courant (Le Jour se level, Monsieur Verdoux). Three competing sound systems were tested - de Forest, Tobis’s own and, finally, variable density Klangfilm using a Westinghouse Kerr Cell. A month's shooting in Italy was junked meaning a restart right down to sound tests. In the final edit, re-mix and polish, five thousand feet were scrapped with single frames doubled up or cut to improve synchronisation. It's a tribute to the team that little of this shows in the remarkably polished end result.

The excellence of shooting, offering all the best European production values of the day, can’t disguise the much recycled plot, (at least five versions of the script) whose outline would become familiar -Alfred Piccaver and Nora Gregor in Adventures on the Lido, Richard Tauber and Leonora Corbett in Heart’s Desire on to Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine in Serenade. Editor-director Gallone tries to quicken attention with the occasional montage. However, the Italian appears to be unaware of the over-ripeness of English dialogue like "Do any of us know what we're really like?" or Betty reproaching Jan "You big baby!" Gallone’s most intriguing choice is to have Brigitte in constant movement through the film, even when she may only be reacting to the other players - until the final scene listening to the phonograph, performed motionless.

Brigitte Helm - Abwege

The director's English language career persisted with two Elstree based comedies with the totally irrisible duo of Arthur Riscoe & Naunton Wayne. First up was the 1933 Going Gay, retitled Kiss Me Goodbye (I wonder why?). The leads' attempt to make a star out of Romy Schneider's equally winning mother Magda ends with them piling into a plane, which sets up their presence in Signor Gallone's Italy again for the second film, For Love of You - this time Venice rather than Singende stadt's Naples.

Carmine Gallone

It's Carnivale of course – location filming of Gondolas passing the Lion of St. Mark, gondolas with fire works, gondolas (yes) in silhouette against the setting sun, while they try to convince us that the film wasn’t shot in the Elstree tank got up with tilted striped mooring posts. Back projection has been added to the formula.

We soon settle into a bedroom farce plot with the English tourist duo booked into the suite next to Carnivale entertainer Franco Foresta (later a New York festival entrepreneur) and wife Diana Napier, on whom Riscoe moves, while Foresta is engaged with duties that surround him with girls in scanty costumes. Pearl Osgood, in her only film, homes in on him, meaning that the boys get to squire Napier but the headliner takes a break from doing numbers in front of the process screen and threatens to shoot Riscoe, who in the manner of these, ends up dead drunk sleeping it off under the couple’s bed, while Wayne tries to get him out of danger into their own space. About now Diana gets into her scanties and trousers start falling down.

Reasonably accomplished handling of a mix of location filming, white studio decors and unmemorable vocals Some curiosity value – miserably un-funny. I can’t spot Valery Hobson. Thorold Dickinson did the editing.

Now I find these bits of the film history jig saw fascinating but I will admit that I do start to feel isolated. Being a vintage movie enthusiast in Australia is an uncomfortable experience.

Barrie Pattison - 2024

Late Welles

Robert Random & Oja Koda

Looking at the current run of Movie Movies, where characters impersonate stars or go through the motions of making films on screen, it wouldn't pay to ignore the belated arrival of Orson Welles' last, chaotic project The Other Side of the Wind, finally available on Netflix in its posthumously completed edition. Some people, who saw an earlier version by an academic for festival showing, say they prefer that.

What ends up on the screen is surprisingly coherent. I get the impression that Welles just filmed as the mood took him, never expecting to have to deliver a viewable product and then got Peter Bogdanovich to promise on screen to finish the job. As in F for Fake, material is shot in whatever screen shape was on hand but here digital production means that a copy which respects all these formats is possible. The film within the film (lots of the then Mrs. Welles naked - striking features, big butt) is in widescreen colour and the framing incidents of the night, which moves from the party where guests assemble to see fictional director Jake Hannaford’s The Other Side of the Wind, is covered in whatever form happens to be available - Oscar for the laboratory work?

The restorers have managed to construct what is probably more narrative than Welles intended, as his retinue gathers at Hannaford/John Huston’s ranch party for the screening of his latest movie, which will follow lots of drinking and quote-intended dialogue exchanges among those assembled - one time leads like Edmond O’Brien, Susan Strasberg, John Carroll, Benny Rubin or Cameron Mitchell (first seen as a sound man being fired on camera), old associates Mercedes McCambridge, Norman Foster, Paul Stewart or later generation filmmakers like Claude Chabrol, Paul Mazursky, Henry Jaglom & Bogdanovich.

Huston, Welles & Bogdanovich

Hanaford is more a portrait of John Huston than Welles - casual about the hardships he creates for co-workers and his one-liners are less resonant (“Movies & friendship, those are mysteries”) than the ones we got from Welles in person. The film also has a truth coming at sunrise as in Huston’s Maltese Falcon and Freud. Huston the actor clearly relishes playing Huston the director.

Material that has no real place is included because someone must have liked it - the interview with Countess Lili Palmer, conducted by an off-screen Welles using one of his radio voices, the ice cube girl or the singalong with John Carroll. Dwarfs deliver liquor and dummies, to be used as targets at the party, and share transport with the actors. I can see Welles making jokes about critics attributing meaning to this.

His fascination with lenses and projectors is very evident with the battery of press cameras. The penile imagery is crude - the microphone introduced into the interview or the plastic-wrapped column in the film within the film material.

Film critics get more than a few sideswipes and Hanaford/Huston explains that it’s all right to steal from others but not from oneself - which doesn’t sit too well with Kodar’s slashing with the scissors in the way that the sword attack is done in Welles’ Othello. Can’t help wondering whether Edmond O’Brien prompted the line lifted from Pete  Kelly’s Blues (the producer who’s so crooked he has rubber lined pockets to steal soup) which commentators who aren't familiar with the Jack Webb movie now quote with relish.

Edmond O'Brien - Pete Kelly's Blues

In with all this, there is a hint of a plot about juvenile Bob Random walking out on Huston’s wide-screen color art movie where he partners with the bare-assed Ojar.

There is so much happening and so much of it resonates with off-screen activities that it is possible to be carried along with the flow. I enjoyed it but I still can’t help wondering whether this one should go onto the list of last films by celebrity directors that they should have pulled up short before undertaking - The Big Fisherman, A Countess from Hong Kong, the final productions of Maurice Elvey and James Cruze.

Barrie Pattison 2024

The 2024 Sydney Film Festival.

Well, we've just had the seventy-first Sydney Film Festival, twenty venues, two hundred movies they say. Include an IMAX spectacular about Russians scaling a half built Maylasian skyscraper and a live-scored Hellaraiser, at $69 a seat.  No one person could have seen the lot and it would be hard to find someone who wanted to. Is this really the event that started  at Sydney University as a one weekend grab bag of films? It's outlasted sixteen millimeter, film societies, home video, the porno and ethnic circuits and appears to be holding its own against streaming. The criticisms that could have been leveled at its predecessors still apply. They put a roof over work that comes distorted to fit festivals - esoterica from Lav Diaz, Miguel Gomez or Radu Jude. A competition that dangles a bag of money in front of this lot is, to say the least, suspect. Down the years when popular cinema filmmakers with a genuine connection to their public showed up (think Bong Joon Ho, Wagner Moura or belatedly Jackie Chan) we were able to watch festival regulars react with amazement.   

Doing this event justice would have meant neglecting the regular film supply. I backed off.  The near random selection I did catch however showed familiar patterns.

Portuguese auteur director Miguel Gomes' Grand Tour is a classic example of a film that could only survive in the iron lung of a film festival, with maybe the odd escape bid into the Paris Left Bank. It's a third the length of Gomez' Arabian Nights but obviously from the same hands. We get the 1918 British Empire as bogus Von Sternberg studio period settings and present day location (everyone comments the motor scooter traffic backed by "the Blue Danube"), colour and black and white all alternating for no better reason than they happen to have had a crew about to shoot them during covid restriction. 

Gonçalo Waddington's Edward, a British white-suit official, who may be involved in secret government business, is on the Mandalay pier where they load bananas, to meet his fiancée of seven years but instead hops a steamer on the start of travels that take him through Myanmar, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Osaka, Tibet, Vietnam, Shanghai and Chengdu. Chirpy Crista Alfaiate, the dogged lady in question, takes off after him and we would follow their adventures if they weren't being interrupted by travelogue material - a Ferris Wheel with a handler acrobatically ducking the rotating cars, Raffles Hotel, street scene panoramas, opium smoking and puppet shows. These last are actually quite impressive - dolls imitating people and people miming marionettes. 

Along the way, there's a train wreck (they can afford to overturn one four wheel car) with a monologue by a woman we never see again, about the baseness of humanity, and diner at a Captain's table, where planter Cláudio da Silva is taken with Miss Alfaiate and offers her the no strings hospitality of his residence. There she partners with his companion Lang Khê Tran to continue her pursuit of Waddington, long since vanished from the screen. What happens to Reverendo João Pedro Vaz' donkey? This is punctuated by bursts of music - a Sinatra "My Way", the opera singer passenger who bursts out in an aria when the scene has played out and an on-screen needle drop of "By the Light of the Silvery Moon." 

Grand Tour - Crista Alfaiate,  Lang Khê Tran.

I quite enjoyed some of this the first time I saw it in sixties films like Antonio das Mortes or Pierrot le fou but I found myself checking my watch in this one, when it became obvious that the maker was totally indifferent to the attention span of his audience.

Radu Jude's Romanian Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii / Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World was also what the festival Audience would expect.

We follow blonde Personal Assistant protagonist Ilinca Manolache’s day, with her clambering out of bed naked (that’s all we have of that) and getting into her glitter scale dress to go off auditioning injured workers for her company’s industrial safety video, to be tailored to the tele-conference requirements of the Austrian Head office. At least they aren’t Americans or Chinese.

Director Jude (he of the lengthy titles - I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians )  revives more French nouvelle vague in the use of available light and shooting inside moving cars. He is relentless in his name-dropping – Goddard, Stanislaw Lec, Goethe, along with Uwe Boll who does a characteristic personal appearance as a bombastic visiting movie director using the film studio’s effects stage for a Giant Ant trash movie. There’s a murky TV running Casablanca with Romanian sub-titles.  

 The film’s unspoken subject is the dispiriting Romanian scene. Our heroine drives for ridiculous hours with a brief break for sex in the back seat. Early on there's a glimpse of Ceaucescu’s Bucharest palace distant and we think that at least they are not going to hammer the obvious. No such luck. We shift there to hear about clearing the suburb of Uranus to build the monster.

They  also evoke the sixties, opening with drawn-on-cards credits like Don’t Look Back. As with Putney Swope, the body of the piece comes in black & white with the material the on-screen filmmakers create shown in colour. This includes Manolache’s cell ‘phone created avatar Bobita, a bald and bearded trash-talking male with her voice deepened, along with a glimpse of green screen production and ending with a sustained, fixed-camera wide shot where crippled Ovidiu Pîrsan’s family get left out in the rain, while the unit demand repeats of his supposed to be spontaneous statement, as they assure him that they are looking after his interests.

 A film that legitimately uses the Festival Platform surfaced with the late entry of Mohammad Rasoulof's Seed of the Sacred Fig (I can't even find an original language title for this one). The director had been received as a hero at Cannes after his perilous seven-hour escape walk from a country where it had been decreed that he should be flogged and jailed for three years over the film. I suspect it sold out here more on news of Rasoulof's martyr status than from admiration of his exceptional Manuscripts Don't Burn, the last of his work to reach us and arguably the best of the Iranian films we've had the chance to see. Rasoulof's taped introduction preceded showings.

The opening gives the clues we need to this one's seriousness, with a description of the Ficus religiosa, its seeds spread by bird droppings settling on trees which they overrun and choke, The film centers on Judge Missagh Zareh who has just been appointed to the Revolutionary Court - the workings of which we could have seen more. The corridor with the life-size cutout figures in silhouette is already striking and sinister. Zareh is conflicted. His promotion means a more comfortable lifestyle for his family but he finds himself ordered by the prosecutor to sign death warrants without the  days required to consider their files

Cannes - Golestani & Rasoulof

 

He's been given a handgun to defend himself and his family. Wife Soheila Golestani (a real-life film director and protestor) warns their student daughters Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki that they must now be more careful but they still bring home university dorm mate Niousha Akhshi, when her accommodation is not ready.  The streets are full of demonstrators protesting the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, jailed for a hijab-wearing violation and the girls identify with the reforms they demand, though Zareh at diner thunders "God does not change." 

The colour has the limited palette of some of the Iranian film we've seen but performance and handling are assured. It all gains conviction from extensive use of alarmingly authentic-looking cell phone clips showing police brutality on mobs chanting "Down with Theocracy".

Things come to a head when Akshi is injured by the police - a genuinely disturbing scene of Golestani, with the streets not safe to call for help, having to treat the girl's buck shot riddled face. "They took her youth. They took her beauty." Tension is ratcheted up when opponents put the names and home addresses of officials, including Zareh's family, on social media. Suspicious characters are seen on the street outside the house.

Unfortunately they abandon that model and switch to James Jones' novel "The Pistol", source of the two Thin Red Line films. Zareh's character loses all sympathy and becomes an unshaded heavy father and unconvincing melodramatic developments pile onto one another. This didn't stop the jury giving the piece their competition's first prize. 

Up to this point, the film has built tension from the atmosphere of violence and Zareh's ambivalence. It bears a resemblance to Mauro Bolognini's 1972 Years of Lead drama Imputazione di omicidio per uno studente / Chronicle of a Homicide - Martic Balsam as a judge also faced with opposition from his own family and forced to question law enforcement. It would be interesting to know if Rasoulof was working from this prototype.

Documentaries about film directors made by film directors are a study in themselves – John Boorman on Griffith, a couple on John Ford by Terry Sanders and Peter Bogdanovich, George Stevens jr.’s exceptional account of his dad, Quentin Tarantino on Sergio Corbucci and now Martin Scorsese’s fronting Made in England dealing with The Archers Company, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

On the model of Scorsese’s earlier films on Hollywood and Italy, his Made in England (directed by David Hinton) is as much front man Scorsese's autobiographical account of being drawn into the movie experience but Scorsese actually went through the looking glass and involved himself with Michael Powell, who he had on staff developing projects, giving advice – and marrying Scorsese’s life long editor Thelma Schoonmaker. She worked uncredited on this production. Peter Bogdanovich tried hosting Orson Welles and Coppola got a movie out of Akira Kurosawa, so the concept is not new.

Interestingly Scorsese’s first encounter with Michael Powell was through the degraded TV copies, usually in black and white sixteen millimeter, which played on U.S. TV in his youth. The new film actually airs a few of those. British film had a large share of screen time in the early years there because Hollywood was holding out. Curiously, in Australia I did better because TV was delayed – it was said by industry objections – and original Technicolor theatrical prints continued to circulate. Scorsese talks about being surprised to see the Archers' target trade mark in colour and I remember a similar reaction to seeing it in monochrome. The restoration team have obviously tried to do justice in the duping for Made in England but the impression those original copies made remains vivid enough for me to recognise the shortcomings.

We see Scorsese sitting in a screening room and he gives a quick run-through of Powell’s early years. Can’t help feeling this is loaded, as in including the extended and unrepresentative footage from Rex Ingram’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but we get nicely reproduced Black and White clips from Powell’s The Phantom Light & Edge of the World - unremarked Soviet montage influence very evident (as in Powell’s more shonky The Fire Raisers from that period) The documentary hits its stride with Alexander Korda putting the duo together, providing Emerric Pressbuger as writer for The Spy in Black. Clips and descriptions of their straight man & side kick collaboration provide many of the piece’s high points. Success with The 49th Parallel ushered in their characteristic work. Winston Churchill disapproved sternly of their The Life of Colonel Blimp.

Even before Scorsese prompted the comparison I was struck by the resemblance of the Age of Innocence shot they air and Col. Blimp's stairway entrance. However I’d forgotten the way Blimp draws away from the highlight duel scene before its ending and Scorsese asserts that his halting the Raging Bull fight sequence mid-way was a derivation, to throw similar attention to the ritual preparation.

The film’s most compelling section, not surprisingly, is the coverage of the peak achievement trilogy of I Know Where I’m Going, Black Narcissus and The Small Black Room, which Powell confirmed was made after the home ground failure of Red Shoes and before it became the then most successful British film in the U.S. The first Royal Command showing followed.

Red Shoes largely did the duo in. It was a success they struggled to repeat – Tales of Hoffman, Oh Rozalinda! Powell decided Presburger sided with Korda in their disputes. The Elusive Pimpernel and Gone to Earth, a couple of Hollywood collaborations, bombed on them and they did the successful Battle of the River Plate to order. I told Powell I admired the shell cutting a glowing path through the bulkhead and he observed that it came from the only part of the project he found involving, the naval machinery. It turns up in Made in England  twice.

The partners never had an argument. A Presburger alone directed one of the many remakes of Erich Kästner’s “Das dolppelte Lottchen” for Korda, later writing Powell’s Children’s Film Foundation The Boy Who Turned Yellow and (under an alias) his Australian They’re a Weird Mob.

Made in England comes off the rails at this point, repeating that Powell’s appalling Peeping Tom (shown in the festival) was a major film which thick witted British critics didn’t appreciate. The brief clip included is a reminder of the film’s deep perversity. The story that his industry abandoned Michael Powell ignores his unmemorable The Queen’s Guards, which tanked after two years in the cutting room, along with his kiddie pic and an opera movie set up by designer Hein Heckroth.

Just as the end of the War had taken away the Archers' empowering incentive, Peeping Tom proved a cathartic experience for Powell. The stories of his aggressive behavior stopped and he arrived in Australia a charming, relaxed master of ceremonies. Everybody loved him and he accidentally kick started local production by demonstrating that it was possible to make money with a film that was shot here. 

Scorsese’s production endorses the familiar notion that English film begins with Michael Powell, with Alex Korda as a sort of warm-up act. It’s easy to emphasise Powell in the stodge that surrounded him. They offer a brief split screen – David Lean and Carol Reed Third Man prominent. British TV, critics and the BFI push the idea. Tough luck Maurice Elvey, who gets a couple of contradictory references in Powell’s autobiographies. Why do we hear about Alfred Junge (transcribed as “Younger” in Oz interviews) but not Heckroth, Moira Shearer but not Raymond Massey who we keep on seeing in clips and who set up Canadian Government co-operation, Alan Gray? Jack Cardiff? Chris Challis? 

If there is a truth in all this, it is that a cosmopolitan sophisticate, with issues and an allegiance to the riches of European cinema, was never going to be at home in disintegrating Empire Britain. His struggles to come to terms with that produced extraordinary, vivid work, which stood apart from the complacency that was expected. Powell resented that and it’s easy to empathise. Like him, we should be grateful that he got as far as he did.

Made in England is one of a number of attempts to canonise its subject. For both adherents and the unfamiliar, it is full of rewards. If it means that Michael Powell now occupies the space that John Ford had in the fifties – all you need to know about his industry – we’re stuck with that.

Barie Pattison 2024

SITTING TARGET

 I should have gotten around to La Syndicaliste/Sitting Duck during the French Film Festival. It was one of their best offerings. It's getting an extended run so all is not lost.

Huppert faces the flics.

This one kicks off with the indestructible Isabelle Huppert as the hard hat union representative defending the rights of retrenched Hungarian woman power workers against their multi-national corporation. ("Since Fukushima, Nuclear has become a difficult word"). That's a lot of boxes ticked already and there's more to come. Back in the Paris Headquarters, a new male executive is displacing the female C.E.O. that Isabelle takes tea with. However, a whistle-blower has a copy document indicating that the company is making a secret deal with the Chinese that will eliminate thousands of jobs and cut France out of reactor production.  

It all comes with the best A feature values. We think we know what we are in for but writer-director Jean-Paul Salomé (Female Agents, Belphagor) is not just someone who knows his market. His subject is deception. Sitting Duck's special feature is that it repeatedly makes us doubt its central premise, just as his characters come to.

When she starts making waves, Isabelle gets disturbing 'phone calls with no one on the line. Then the housekeeper comes back to find her hooded, duct taped (Not "Scotch", as laid back, about to retire husband Gilbert Gardebois corrects) in a chair and gashed, with the knife rammed into her vagina. The filmmaking is so assured that after we have heard that described it still comes as a shock when the film plays on and we see what we already know.

The Gendarmerie provide protection but become dissatisfied and we get the reconstruction they demand - barking dog, jammed drawer, a clinical examination (menacing gynecologist's stirrups) and allegations of hysteria. Ah, but there's more!

This one has moved from agitprop to polar and joined the ranks of those superior political thrillers like L'attentat and Z: He Lives!, from half a century back.  It isn't disgraced in the comparison. There are a few odd choices like opening a scene on Huppert's conspicuous blonde chignon but for the most part, a substantial budget is deployed effectively - convincing settings, striking establishing drone exteriors and a strong cast with a few half-recognised faces mixed in with the unfamiliar players. Yes, that is Alexandra Maria Lara with her one key scene played in shared close-ups with Huppert. 

If they are putting factual material on screen, this is alarming and significant and, even if it's fashion-dictated fiction, it's still gripping. Sitting Ducks represents the class end of current film production and deserves all the attention it can get.

Barrie Pattison 2924

The Farrow Saga.

A new book about the Farrow family was pretty much inevitable and now we have Marilyn Ann Moss’ “The Farrows of Hollywood”. This joins Frans Vandenburg and Claude Gonzalez’ 2021 feature documentary John Farrow, The Man in the Shadows and Amy Ziering, Kirby Dick and Amy Herdy’s 2022 Four Part Mini Series Allen vs. Farrow dealing with oldest daughter Mia and her anguished marriage to Woody Allen. Sixty years after patriarch John Farrow’s death, attention is finally being directed to the Farrow saga. It has everything 

- celebrities, Hollywood, Hollywood celebrities, the Pope, the Queen, the Beatles, Oedipal conflict, the Black Dahlia Murders, WW2 and Australians.

Because of Paramount’s share of the market and gung ho re-issue mechanism, I saw just about all of John Farrow’s films in the local movie house double features of my now distant youth, four with Ray Milland, four with Alan Ladd, three with Barry Fitzgerald. Before I even recognised his name, Farrow loomed large. His 1947 California (prepared for Ladd and filmed with Milland) was a milestone, along with the Errol Flynn San Antonio, the models for the new cycle of Technicolor A Feature westerns, a large and agreeable part of post WW2 movie going.

I discussed this and put up my screening notes on California when I commented the Vandenburg / Gonzalez documentary in a piece for blogspotfilmalert  17 November 2021

Farrow's California - Barbara Stanwyck & Milland with extras in Edith Head outfits.

The new commentators see something mysterious in the lack of information on John Farrow and this is the point where I start to diverge from them. With the exception of the few name-above-the-title celebrities, it was rare to find material dealing with studio directors of the day. Try to locate biographies of Roy Roland, Lew Landers or Alexander Hall and the maybe a hundred more hard-working, widely circulated and usually highly paid craftsmen filmmakers, whose output kept the cinemas open. Drawing attention to them would not have been repaid at the box office and publicists were rarely nudged by people who had access to the public - fans, critics, their editors. My contemporary Australian enthusiasts thought it was all about people they read about in British material, think Luis Bunuel, Luchino Visconti or Alexander Dovzhenko - not that their work was being shown here. This would shift in the fifties with the auteurist critics, where Farrow, Roland and the rest dipped out again.

However Catholic and Australian Farrow was an irresistible target for John Howard Reid, who was just starting movie writing activity. His research blew the smoke off one of the first of the Farrow mysteries, Farrow's asserting a Newington education. The Reid biographical sketch in the Herald was reprinted in Fort Street’s alumni journal, confirming their claim to him as one of their own.

I have the Reid-Farrow correspondence. Bertrand Tavernier once expressed interest in acquiring that for one of his projects. When John started publishing, I suggested he put out his own Farrow book, which would have been unique at that stage. He hesitated, possibly just as well. Revelations that came after John Farrow’s early death showed our knowledge to have limits. Disgruntled children (and wives) underworld associations, and serial womanising pile on, along with remarkable acts of principle.

  Don Quixote - Farrow script. 

We have only sketchy information on John Farrow’s early association with film. After a spot as maritime advisor to a Hollywood location unit  (I proved right guessing White Shadows in the South Seas there), seaman Farrow jumped ship in San Francisco and found work as a screenwriter. In this period, his association with Robert Flaherty was followed by stints with his friend William Wellman, Cecil B. De Mille, Victor Fleming and G.W. Pabst. That must be the all-time greatest movie apprenticeship. It would be so nice to learn more about it.

While it is extraordinarily difficult to see his work from this period, during which sound arrived in Hollywood, the examples that are accessible suggest that the movies that John Farrow wrote are by and large more interesting than the ones he would go on to direct. He did not take script credit on his later films but there is an obvious match between his interests and the subject matter on Two Years Before The Mast, California, Alias Nick Beal, Submarine Command and Botany Bay. Farrow’s one Academy Award win would be for writing, on Around the World in Eighty Days, though Moss casts doubt on his participation.

Farrow married MGM's Maureen O’Sullivan, whose career could stand some more consideration in itself. As well as being Tarzan's Jane, her status as the resident juvenile in the studio's big literary adaptations of the thirties, including the Fanny character in Port of 7 Seas, the MGM filming of the Pagnol original, her contract regularly placed her in nice production line efforts - with Joel McCrea in Woman Wanted or Charles Laughton in Payment on Demand. Let’s overlook Bonzo Goes to College. The Farrow marriage union would produce seven children.

It is hard to believe that his new chroniclers have viewed their way through all those Farrow productions that filled my early Saturday afternoons. Moss gives up on the pre-Paramount films but does try to provide a paragraph each on the later work. However, she repeats the now familiar furphy that presents him as a film noir specialist, listing out The Big Clock, Alias Nick Beal, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Where Danger Lives and The Unholy Wife. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that these all come from in his ten film collaboration with Farrow friend, fellow Catholic dignitary and established thriller writer Jonathon Latimer, whose Crime Club novels also provided the basis of three of the Universal series.

You can make a revealing comparison between the l935 George Raft-Frank Tuttle film of Dashiel Hammet’s The Glass Key and the Allan Ladd-Stuart Heisler version, scripted seven years later by Latimer, who livened up the sit-down ending by having Ed Beaumont/Ladd play on the murderous tensions among the heavies.  What is being singled out is Latimer’s input. 

In fact, Farrow hit his stride in the westerns, California, Copper Canyon & Hondo (forget Ride Vaquero – he had other things on his mind there), to which we can add his scripts for Victor Fleming’s Wolf  Song and William K. Howard’s White Gold. 

When a twenty-year-old original Technicolor print of California unexpectedly surfaced for a split week at London’s Cameo Victoria, I pointed the Films & Filming crew towards it and they were unanimously surprised by its superiority to the John Farrow films they knew. John Wayne, shrewder than people give him credit, attributed the success of Wayne's Hondo to his westerns-oriented Batjac Company serving it up ready to go, while with his other Farrow film, draggy The Sea Chase, the director was on his own. Watching A Bullet Is Waiting recently, I was reminded how boring Farrow titles like Commandos Strike at Dawn and Where Danger Lives had been.

Farrow directed The Hitler Gang - Bobby Watson as Der further.

Let’s also note another aspect of the record that doesn’t fit, the picture of John Farrow as grim martinet, whose heavy paternal hand biographers want to see in the torturous outcome of daughter Mia's marriages. John Farrow’s sense of humor was one of the things that made Maureen O’Sullivan persist, despite his being unlikely husband material. He is the Catholic notable who used to make his obligatory confession to a Spanish-speaking neighborhood priest, one who couldn’t understand a word of what he was being told, and Farrow slipped a shot of Randolph Scott and Cary Grant in with the one of Gable and Lombard in the audience of his Technicolor rodeo short. The one outlier in his career, the Betty Hutton musical Red Hot and Blue, is actually quite funny.

John Farrow, little known Hollywood movie director, did abruptly acquire the high profile of father of celebrity daughter Mia, then an unconventionally pretty young woman in whom we can see both her parents’ features (the abrupt cut to her gone sun-bleached Beachcomber in the Jan Troell re-make of Hurricane, is one of the great movie moments). Mid-sixties, Mia became New Face of the moment with the Television Peyton Place series and cemented her status as the lead of Roman Polanski’s best film, the 1968 Rosemary’s Baby - and with a marriage to Frank Sinatra  Let’s note in passing that even prettier daughter Tisa made an acting impression in the sixties Coogan’s Bluff and Fingers and her sister Prudence stopped over with the Maharishi getting a Lennon-McCartney song dedicated to her. 

About now things start getting turgid. Eternal Seducer John Farrow had had an affair with Sinatra’s then-wife Ava Gardner while they worked together on Ride Vaquero. This is moving out of my area of interest but it’s revealing how Farrow’s new secondhand fame distorted the perception of his movies. The plot would thicken with Mia's marriage to Sinatra followed by Andre Previn and Woody Allen, with allegations and counter charges about which the couple's son Ronan Farrow published widely, becoming pin-up boy of the Me Too movement.

Pray for Rosemary's Baby.

As for the other characters of the saga, the disfunctional Farrow clan - children official and otherwise, discarded spouses and lovers, if I had to pick out a subject for my sympathy, I’d elect Mia's adopted daughter Soon Yi Previn, who can be glimpsed, during her subsequent marriage with Allen, in Barbara Kopple’s 1997 Wildman Blues documentary. She only broke her silence when the politicals hit fever pitch, saying that she rejected the “Mommie Dearest” model but...

So the John Farrow profile remains blurred, Hollywood movie director, author, famous father, famous father in law, famous grandfather, Catholic and Australian – you could say in that order of importance. It now seems unlikely that we’ll ever get a connected picture of someone who is probably this country’s most widely seen filmmaker. I remain curious. It’s too big a piece of the jigsaw to have missing.

                John Farrow selected this studio portrait.

I don't think "The Farrows of Hollywood" is going to be the last word on Sir John Villiers Farrow, career filmmaker, author, submarine commander and determined inventor of his own legend. His life provides fascination often missing from his films. I'm still waiting for someone to reconcile the two.

Barrie Pattison 2024

Slaughter

 
Coming off a Dario Argento retrospective, films that are stylish, master crafted and occasionally shocking, I was faced with, another shocker specialist, whose work was none of those things. You Tube fielded a nice, reduced-aperture transfer of Todd Slaughter's 1948 The Greed of William Hart, under its re-issue title Horror Maniacs, a reel longer than the abbreviated version that has been circulating.

English melodrama specialist Tod Slaughter is someone who has been hiding in plain sight for the better part of a century. After down market first runs, his film output never figured in theatrical re-issue or TV, film society or cinémathèque showings. You’d have to engage with sixteen millimeter distribution, VHS or DVD to reach it. There's a thirties Sweeney Todd movie in there. 

Slaughter established himself post WW1 doing blood and thunder pieces with his Elephant and Castle company and  touring regional British theaters. He appears to have made himself the front runner in an established British tradition.  His 1935 Maria Marten: Murder in the Red Barn film was preceded by four movie versions, including a (now of course lost) 1913 Maurice Elvey film shot in the actual Suffolk Red Barn.

Slaughter’s films played to the audiences who had hissed and jeered his characters on stage, as he delivered lines like “I’ve got my eye on yer, William!” or “There’s queer folk about at night.” Mainly directed by the largely forgotten George King, these were mounted functionally on modest budgets and the playing was relatively restrained, without the rib nudging and nods to the audience we see when such work is simulated in later productions.

Tod Slaughter.

Slaughter is sometimes compared to Charles Laughton and it is not hard to imagine either actor being assigned to the other’s roles but, after the relish which Laughton brought to The Island of Dr. Moreau, Jamaica Inn or even The Strange Door,  Slaughter’s avuncular fiends are outclassed. 

The Greed of William Hart is another Body Snatchers film, made in the wake of the 1945 Robert Wise-Val Lewton movie and appearing about the time Dylan Thomas wrote  his “The Doctor and the Devils” script that was finally filmed by Freddie Francis in 1985. William Hart writer John Gilling would return to the subject in the 1960 The Flesh and the Fiends fronted by Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence, this time identifying the historical characters whose descendants had demanded the family names be changed for the Slaughter version. Retooling the sound track to rechristen Burke & Hare as Hart and Moore consumed the funds intended for the film’s music track.

Slaughter’s support cast is headed up by the admirable Henry Oscar (The Four Feathers, On the Night of the Fire, Murder Ahoy.) Oscar is a perfect foil, blending in impeccably without showing up the other cast members, though he deserved better. Presentable juvenile Patrick Addison made only this one film and Slaughter’s wife Jenny Lynn is an imperiled heroine. Director Oswald Mitchell also did The Old Mother Riley films. Confined to the small Bushey Studio, though photographed (there is no D.P. credit on the print) and edited on film, this one has the look and feel of then contemporary early TV drama.  

 The Greed of William Hart - Aubrey Woods, Slaughter and Oscar

Slaughter and Oscar arrive in Swanson’s Tavern, as the mist swirls outside, and angrily reject proprietor Hubert Woodward’s attempts to palm them off with “Yer Highland muck” instead of real Irish whiskey. Conversations reveal that the citizenry are becoming restless about frequent disappearances of locals like one of Slaughter’s hovel tenants. We hear the leads and young Aubrey Woods discuss their business arrangement about delivering boxes to Arnold Bell’s  Doctor Cox.

A drunken woman bar fly is murdered by candle light. No blood - nasty rather than shocking. However, after the doctor has removed the head off screen in his dissection class, it’s impossible to identify the body.  Addison finds tall hat Sergeant Dennis Wyndham reluctant to act without catching the ghouls in the act. There’s another murder and Slaughter is undone, when the body is revealed in the cupboard. An angry mob has gathered.

While vigilante-ism is endorsed in some American films (versions of The Virginian, De Mille’s This Day & Age) their cinema also fields imposing criticisms like They Won’t Forget, Fury and Try and Get Me/The Sound of Fury but it’s hard to find something comparable in British product - Captain Boycott and they do read the Riot Act in Fame is the Spur? Also notice that the privileged class doctor is given a speech about the need to advance science, while his menial associates are motivated by sadism and greed. There’s a lot that’s uncomfortable viewing in British film.

Slaughter’s product lacked the imaginative dimension that made the parallel American “Horror Movies” captivating to successive generations.  However, they do manage creepiness like that found in Edgar Ulmer’s work. The word “evil” was common in the films of the day. Think Gainsborough’s forties costume melodramas, particularly ones by Leslie Arliss. I’d always noticed those as the departure point for Hammer’s Horrors and it’s been pointed out that Slaughter represents an earlier cycle that both feed off. There it is, a straight line through some of the tackiest British filmmaking.  

I’ve been seeing Tod Slaughter films at twenty year intervals. On reflection that’s about the right rate.

Barrie Pattison 2023.

Capra & Vidor

So This Is Love is near to the last missing piece in my viewing on Frank Capra, something which has turned into a lifetime project. I’ve still got The Donovan Affair to go but the YouTube copy of that is foul, while their So This Is Love is a beautiful lift of the T.C.M. transmission, running at the right speed - even if it is watermarked and mute.

Capra’s number eight movie shows him already established as a maker of assured program entertainment. The audience, who saw it in their neighborhood movie palaces in 1928, must have thought that one was pretty good as they gathered up their shopping and exited past the posters of next week’s attractions. The notion, that people would be streaming this made to order item into their homes nearly a Century later, would have seemed fanciful.

In So This Is Love, Greenwich Deli waitress, one time Edison star Shirley Mason, is first seen peering admiringly out of the store at local champion, toothpick chewing Capra regular  Johnny Walker, who is intimidating main street merchants into buying tickets for the up-coming Boxer’s Ball, with his associate pug uglies standing by to throw rocks at the windows of anyone unwilling to pay. She makes Walker a special Deluxe chicken sandwich but he’s dismissive, saying “She ain’t got It.”

So This Is Love - Mason, Jean Laverty & Walker

William Buster Collier Jr., whose career would shortly hit a peak with parts in Little Caesar, Street Scene and playing the Cherokee Kid in the 1930 Cimarron, plays Local dress maker William H. Strauss’s assistant. He has eyes for Shirley but is too timid to move, so Strauss gives him a discount on the ball tickets he was forced to buy, and our hero works up his courage. Shirley thinks she is too mousy for the ball but he gets her up in the shop’s best regalia and the pair make an attractive couple. Now glamorous, Shirley catches Walker’s eye and he cuts in on their dance, with Buster unable to reclaim her as the bruiser moves her into the back room.

Buster’s pal, familiar face Ernie Adams, alerts him to the situation and the kid bursts in to find Walker molesting the girl. This is surprisingly explicit.  Buster’s intervention just gets him thrown into the street derisively and when Shirley follows appalled, she finds his flat full of his drawings of her (compare Brigitte Helm in Pabst’s Abwege of the same year) and Walker flattens Buster for messing with “his” girl. Addams tells Buster he’s yellow for not reclaiming Shirley from the obnoxious bully and starts training him but the kid, dismissed as "a hemstitcher", is humiliated again. This is the best passage of the film.

  So This Is Love - Mason & Collier.

Comes the night of Walker’s big fight and some stretched plausibility gets young Buster into the ring with him, after Shirley has done her best to sabotage the tough. There’s the hint of a better film in the way the leads use their everyday skills to get them through. Think Steve Martin in The Three Amigos, telling the Mexican villagers “Sew like the wind!”

The stars are appealing and Columbia’s modest budget is enough to put together a convincing studio representation of a working class Jewish (they don’t use the word) community. Capra moves it along nicely, even with some misjudgments, like the comic dress fitting for the fat woman or the repeated entrances of the towel wrapped fighter. It echoes Capra’s great The Strong Man.

Collier and Walker had also appeared in the fringes of King Vidor's now all but forgotten 1924 The Wine of Youth, which turns out to be a significant jumping off point for the main-line Metro product to come. The film registers the input of author Rachel Crothers, the most important woman playwright of the day.  It looks like the prototype shaping MGM's deluge of A feature women’s pictures, not just Crothers adaptations like this film, When Ladies Meet or the two versions of her No More Ladies.  One of those was by George Cukor, who also did her Susan & God for them. Stand these with all those Greer Garson, Joan Crawford, Roz Russell weepies engineered to showcase their female stars in no sex romances.

Wine of Youth shows three generations of women, all named Mary, sharing the same home in the Roaring Twenties. The film works at filling in their characters with flash backs to the courting of both Gran Gertrude Claire and Mom Eulalie Jensen. This pair are uneasy with the fast life style of flapper daughter star Eleanor Boardman, then Mrs. Vidor, who features at the extended party sequence, where suitors Ben Lyon and William Haines are putting moves on Eleanor, while the jazz babies indulge in cigarettes, the contents of a bottle labeled Ginger Ale and riding in fast cars with boys.

Wine of Youth - Haines, Boardman & Lyon.

 In their best evening clothes, the leads come into the party with its jazz band and women’s bare knees visible. The film's young stars, at the beginning of their careers, live it up. 

Boardman worries about her predecessors, questioning the role models they present. She determines on the social experiment of going off camping with her two suitors, her comic brother Robert Agnew and his squeeze the animated Pauline Garon. This would scandalise the olds -  and sure enough Billy Haines starts undoing the ties on Boardman’s tent flap.

So far we could be watching one of William A. Seiter’s social comedies, taken with a bit more seriousness. The pay-off comes when mum and particularly dad, the little known E.J. Ratcliffe who was in the silent Four Feathers, discover that their kids have overstepped the norms of their polite society. Back at the house, the parents decide that their relationship has been a disaster and prepare to separate in the presence of the youngsters. This scene has an intensity which marks it off from the work being done around it and may make the film the then most substantial work celebrity director Vidor had done.  

Wine of Youth - Boardman & Haines.

 

Wine of Youth is dominated by elegant Boardman’s presence. Completely the star, she is presented in a succession of glamor outfits, including shape defining one piece bathers which she fills impressively. Co-stars, later prominent Billy Haines, Ben Lyon and William Collier, are little more than interchangeable elements in her surroundings.

 

 Production is ambitious with the design of pre-Gibbons Metro, in the hands of now forgotten Charles L. Cadwallader - large scale but unremarkable. Director Vidor was already established but this appears to be the most accomplished film he had then made. His collaboration with producer Louis B. Mayer would go on to be one of the most important in American film and include The Big Parade, The Crowd, Lillian Gish's La Bohème, Hallelujah and Arthur Knight's favorite movie North West Passage. Around the edges we find items like their less prominent but in many ways more appealing The Stranger's Return or H.M. Pulham Esq. - a filmography that neither Mayer or Vidor was able to sustain on the same scale by themselves.

The film’s portrait of flapper world and high society is as manufactured as its morality but the artificiality, which would continue to be taken for realism by a large sector of its audience, still intrigues. As in its successors, the outcome is determined not by character and circumstances but by the need to endorse the believed values of its family audience, with a little bit of titillation and high life thrown in - the Metro formula. 

The on-going dominance of the Hollywood film meant this value system would be visited on Inuit seal hunters and Darjeeling Muslims, sometimes generating resentment which has never fully subsided. Add to this, dissatisfaction with its Andy Hardy mash up of concepts like the only game in town and  father knows best, creating an environment where much of its industry's best product features a reaction against it - White Heat, A Place in the Sun, The Hustler, The Manchurian Candidate, American Beauty and the a whole lot more.

Frank Capra and King Vidor would both go on to erect their own recognisable visions of  America - different, questionable but impossible to ignore.  These early films help bring those into focus. Even if they weren't so involving in themselves, it would make them essential viewing.

Barrie Pattison 2023