ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

Pearl White

The awning has already gone from the South Darling and Oxford Streets corner site which had been a movie house since 1911. Originally West’s Olympia Theatre, seating two and a half thousand in its circle and stalls, it first showed The Power of Love, presumably the Pathé Frères Pearl White - Crane Wilbur vehicle.

Up graded in 1920, the building passed to Union Theatres and was later claimed as Sydney’s first suburban “talkie” cinema. Greater Union redecorated in the 1930’s and it was renovated and rechristened as Darlinghurst Odeon in 1954. Closed in 1960 it became part of Chris Louis’ Greek movie circuit till opened again 1969 as the Mandala Cinema, with an “alternative” cinema program.

The original theatre building was hollowed out and rebuilt into shops, offices, accommodation, cafes, and a Greek Orthodox community Center. The redevelopment included The Academy Twin Cinemas seating 478 and 291 people. They opened in 1973, with pictures of London’s Oxford Street Academy Cinemas on the walls to suggest its art movie aspirations. The dual auditoriums on street level had a new entrance on Sydney’s Oxford Street.

Following their acquisition of the Chauvel auditoria up the road in in Paddington Town Hall, The Academy Twin Cinemas were closed by then operators the Palace chain in 2010.

I felt connections with all this. In its days as the suburban movie house closest to the CBD, Greater Union showed no interest in competing with it’s city houses there and gave it over to Columbia second runs. I walked up from the park for Glenn Ford and Randolph Scott  double features and you can (could) still see the recesses in the street chip board display wall the shape of the then standard one sheet posters.

  Restored interior.

The Academy did Press Events for its festivals where I got to talk to Sandrine Bonnaire, Yves Angelo and Nikita Mikhalkov. Eddie Allison’s Russian Film events aired some of the best work of the time - Konchalovsky’s 1979 Sibiriada (Siberiade)  and Aleksandr Zarkhi’s 1980 Dvadtsat shest dney iz zhizni (Twenty Six Days from the Life of Dostoyevsky) among them. 

One of these opened a deep vein of nostalgia, with a stroppy gauntlet of hostile anti-Ruskie immigrants framing the entrance in the best fifties tradition. I suggested that Bob Gowland call the Herald but he figured that that kind of attention could back fire and let the free publicity go.

The Academy Twin also premiered my I Am No God (on a double with M. Hulot’s Holiday!) Nothing else came out that week so we actually got some press, even if Film News’ rep skipped the briefing.

When Palace shuttered it, I made a doomed attempt to have the Academy Twin made a Cinematheque - established central venue, right size. Clover Moore forwarded the proposal to the minister and nothing more was heard. I picture the established interests who would have laid down on the tracks in front of that one, if it was ever seriously considered.

You can still stand on the opposite side of the road, and note the profile of the 1911 picture palace. I suspect I’m the only one to see this as another loss for local movie activity and history.  They say the new hotel development will preserve the original exterior. We'll see.

West's Olympia runs It's Love I'm After in 1938

Barrie Pattison 2021.

Jacques Deval - who?

You’ll be lucky to run into someone who’s heard of Jacques Deval but he was, before and after WW2, the Neil Simon of his day. Possibly most prominent in theatre, he still managed to clock up seventy six screen credits including seven versions of his most famous play “Tovaritch” - filmed in Italy, Turkey, Hungary, his native France and most famously the splendid Warner Brothers - Anatol Litvak 1937 Hollywood adaptation with Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert.

Throw in a couple of the language editions of Pabst’s L’Atalantide and multiple adaptations of Deval’s "Kitty Gallante" and "Her Cardboard Lover." He also, pretty much as a sideline, directed three movies.

Deval himself made a first film of "Tovaritch" in 1935 with short-film maker Germain Fried and uncredited assist from Jean Tarride and Victor Trivas.  The lead white Russian aristocrat duo were played by long lasting André Lefaur and Hungarian Irén Zilahy who had filmed that year’s Quadrille d’amour with Fried. 

The plot shows the couple reduced from the splendor of the 1917 Russian court to a penniless existence in Paulau’s seedy Paris Hotel d’univers, with an icon on their wall next to Lefaur’s saber. They attempt to maintain morale while not touching the four million francs entrusted to them to restore the Tsarist cause. At a low ebb, they spot a Positions Vacant advertisement and, on the basis that they had once served imperial masters, they write themselves references and apply (“toi valet, moi femme de chambre”). The move proves a great success with the couple able to help Alerme’s boorish, rich family present themselves in society but things begin to unravel at a diner party where the bankers and aristocrats, who knew the couple in their former roles, face the leads.

Also in the cast and making a disappointing impression is Winna Winifried, the Danish actress who had registered with striking naturalness in Jean Renoir’s then recent La nuit du carrefour, though the deep curtsy she unexpectedly makes recognising the former Grand Duchess is possibly the film’s most telling moment. Lefaur at least gets to display his accomplished fencing skills.

André Lefaur - 1921

They all give it their best shot but it’s hardly surprising to find them eclipsed by Boyer, Colbert, Melville Cooper and co. in the later American film. The one French performer to impress is close cropped Pierre Renoir (La nuit du carrefour’s Maigret) in the Basil Rathbone part, the leads’ contemptible former jailer (“Il n’y a plus de Tsar!”) who persuades them to use the fortune to save the oil fields of the homeland (represented by one drab shot of hay stacks) from the offer by rapacious imperialist diner guests, montaged to intrude leaning into Renoir's close-ups.

The editing is by Jean Delannoy and Henri Rust. The latter curiously also did Litvak’s version. It’s quite deft but can’t conceal the continuity errors with Lefaur’s pajama jacket. Close-ups reveal the on-set phone as a battered prop or emphasise the now useless cheque book thrown in the kitchen trash.

One is left with the probably correct impression of a cast of Boulevard theatre players turned loose in then busy designer Lucien Aguettand’s spacious, windowless movie studio decors.

There are untitled DVDs on this one but we do better with Deval’s 1936 Club de Femmes / French Girls’ Club, which is on You Tube in a passable copy with translation. It shows its director's familiarity with film form advanced. We open with yet another montage of converging train rails as young women with suitcases arrive in big city Paris. Mother Julienne Paroli tells her daughter to send money as soon as possible. However at the sleazy rooming house where the manageress assures the newcomer of respectability though the key to her door won’t be ready till the next day, a man’s feet are seen entering.

This situation can’t go on so a philanthropist whose statue adorns the entrance, sets up a guest house to be run by Eve Francis no less  (L’Herbier’s Eldorado) She has installed resident Doctor Valentine Tessier (Renoir’s Madam Bovary). Of the hundred and forty girls scampering around the pool and reading room in skimpy outfits, we get to know four.

Top billed Danielle Darieux, with twenty films already on her resumé at nineteen, is at her most pouty-winning. Easy to see why Henri Decoin and Albert Préjean were competing for her attention off set. She is determined to get her boyfriend into her room despite the no men rule and continues to be caught out by management. Francis reveals a soft heart demonstrated by carrying residents who can’t find the rent.

Club des femmes - Francis & Darieux

It’s one of our few glimpses of  Eve Francis who has an importance tangential to her acting career. She was the enthusiast to introduce Louis Delluc to movies, triggering his pioneering of Film Societies and Art Cinemas. I rate that as more important than her day job.

 Husband Henri Decoin & Darieux

Blonded Josette Day (Belle to Cocteau’s beast) is a steno who can’t spell so Else Argal, who keeps on getting gorgeous close-ups, intervenes. The actress was Mrs. Deval and would appear in only one other film, a bit part in Hollywood. She takes Josette in hand while reluctantly keeping those hands off. This is 1936 remember. The lesbian material, which is quite explicit if chaste, stopped the film getting registration in New York where it went on show anyway. Josette is a natural victim of the switchboard girl who is there to contact girls for her white slaver chums.

Australia’s own Betty Stockfeld (born in Sydney), then queen of the quota quickies, is  a willing customer of the operator. She came to Paris to exploit men who wanted her lovely white Norwegian (!) body - which isn’t anywhere near as well filmed. The operator’s underworld contacts have to buy her out of trouble when she tries to lift an American’s bankroll. She lands on her feet, about to marry the aging Lord Carringdale.

Smuggling the boyfriend in, got up as her girl cousin, past the remarkably gullible Francis and Tessier, means Danielle manages to meet her needs. The film gets by with only the one male character and for that poor Raymond Galle contributes a drag act that’s as plausible as Mrs Norman Bates. Meanwhile Day comes back distraught after some rough handling - a weeping naked in the shower scene. Argal determines to do something about it.

This sets up Tessier doing her “One day I will answer to the judgement of God though I avoid the judgement of men” complete with the prospect of joining a leperasarium and a nun on death watch - the only manifestation of religion the film manages. Club de Femmes is actually quite soft centered and moralistic despite its attempts to be scandalous. We get its “Je ne veux pas des chateaux” and final address by Francis in the snow.

The film form is increasingly assured as these plots converge with the squads of nubile young women making their way through the gleaming white decors that Aguettand has styled after the work of Lazare Meerson, who was also an influence on Cedric Gibbons in establishing MGM’s house style.

Prestige cameraman Jules Krauss and editor Jean Delannoy both get credits as director’s helpers. Like other celebrity writers - think Zane Grey, Robert Bolt, Sidney Sheldon and particularly James Clavell - Deval's movies are all but forgotten. He also did the 1950 Bernard Blier movie L'Invité du mardi - c'mon You Tube. You can do it!

The fact that the subject matter of Club de Femmes was considered sensational is one of the things that dates the piece but, like the conventions in which it is filmed, this also makes it one of the most accurate representations of thirties European popular entertainment and it does manage the shift from antique curiosity to attention grabbing melodrama. It deserves wider showing. 

If Deval's films are a footnote, they do make an intriguing one.

Colbert & Boyer 

 

 

 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2021.



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One from the Archive : Mauprat.

During the French lockdown, the Cinémathèque Française is putting vault items on it’s “Henri“ Site. Jean Epstein’s 1926 Mauprat was still there the last time I looked. This one is ripe Cinémathèque material. It’s been restored since 2003 but I’ve never previously got a look at it.

Mauprat is an Elaborate and handsomely produced costume drama made by Epstein following his departure from the Russian émigre company Albatross, after directingThe Lion of the Mongols there, what must be Ivan Mozjoukine’s worst film. You’ll find little connection with maritime subjects like La Belle Nivraise  and Finis terrae that are the director’s best work.

The Russian link is still firmly in place with cameraman Albert Duverger and star Sandra Milovanoff, appearing between her touching Fantine/Cosette in Henri Fescourt’s 1925 Les Miserables & in René Clair’s 1925 Le fantôme du Moulin-Rouge & 1927 La proie du vent. She registers as an engaging presence, even with her habit of addressing her lines straight into the camera. Admiring Mlle Milovanoff, you can ponder whether Gal Gadot will seem as winning in ninety six years?

Mauprat is derived from a 1836 George Sand romance and shot in the author’s original Saint Sévène district - also the village that Tati used to film Jour de fete. The noble Mauprat family diverges into branches headed by an upright nobleman and his dissolute brother, both played by Maurice Schutz. Despite the efforts of the honest brother, one of his nephews has been raised by the rogue uncle surrounded by a band of grotesque outlaws.

The nobleman’s niece Milovanoff loses her horse out riding and takes shelter in the bandit’s castle where she is protected by now grown Mauprat heir Nino Constantini. Smitten, he extracts an oath of marriage from her in return for his aid - compare Lon Chaney in Benjamin Christensen’s 1927 Mockery along with the other violated promise movies of the day.

Troops and peasants besiege the outlaw strong hold but Constantini gets Milovanoff to safety. The attackers are all set to hang him but upright Schutz reclaims his lost nephew. “Now I can finally make him a gentleman” Comic scene of Constantini being dressed and powdered. Milovanoff’s fiancé Knight of La Marche Halma shows concern.  

Mauprat : Schutz & Constantini

Returning to his bandit clothes after discovering he is unable to have the object of his desire (“Je me tueras plutot” Sandra objects) from putting together the pieces of her torn letter, Constantini goes off to the war accompanied by forester with a fake beard Alex Allin (later in Le chapeau de paille d’Italie and Jean Renoir’s Les bas fonds) who leaves his loveable dog with Milovanoff, after she despatches the retainer to protect Constantini.

When Constantini returns he is involved in the machinations of the vilainous uncle but Allin has spotted the village girl supplying a fake monk who steals Milovanoff’s jewels. He exposes the plot. The lovers are united.

This one can hold it’s own with comparable period pieces like Epstein’s Robert Macaire or Renoir’s Le tournoi dans la cité. Top marks for settings and particularly costumes. The performances are quite modern but the hokey plot denies the piece any real impact. The war happens off screen and the siege is a muddled affair. Characters carry and occasionally wave their swords but we never get a duel. The most striking elements are incidentals - the train of Milovanoff’s dress brushing the wild flowers, the four way superimposed close up, the torn face powder mask.

Production assistant Luis Buñuel’s couple of walk-ons are his first movie activity. He later did insets for Epstein’s Chute de la maison Usher.

There are other vintage French films I’d rather have watched but Mauprat is OK enthusiast material. It is represented by a clear, mute, monochrome copy running close to the right speed, with original French captions. 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2021

Old Movies

De Mille's Male & Female -Swanson, Daniels, Meighan & friend.

Card only box offices which were going in before Covid - no matter what they tell you -  combined with ragbag programming and Hollywood shuffling it’s prestige product to cable have meant my intake of theatrical first runs has dropped to a life time low. For better or for worse this has switched my attention to vintage material. I’m sorry I’m losing touch with the new face stars and film makers for the first time since I was a beardless youth. 

On the other hand, this new frame of reference is something that is welcome. The Talmadge Sisters and early De Mille hold no surprises for serious U.S. enthusiasts but for me this is catch-up time and by and large that’s good news.

De Mille’s silent Male and Female finally turned out to be grotesque and the 1930 Only Saps Work demonstrated Paramount’s bad judgement in believing Leon Errol could be funny for a whole movie but they represent the down side of raking through old Hollywood and even then you get a better grip on the work. On the other hand, as I’ve always suspected, received opinion was often not all that sharp. 

John Cromwell was an actor/producer who arrived in Hollywood from the East Coast with the wave of hopefuls drawn by the opportunities in sound film. Though the director proved winning in person, I’d never been all that enthusiastic about his movies, even though he managed to notch up a few like the Ronald Colman Prisoner of Zenda, Bogart’s Dead Reckonning and the out of character Ava Gardner portrait The Goddess. I’d like to see the 1945 short he split with Hitchcock and Elia Kazan. 

Accordingly  1930's The Mighty, Cromwell’s’s first solo director credit and near contemporary with All Quiet came as a surprise. It’s remarkable by any standard and extraordinary for it’s day, the work of people, for whom sound filming must have still been an intimidating novelty. The Mighty has a great central premise - Gangster George Bancroft is drafted and finds a front line unit is a great way to deploy his old skills. 

George Bancroft - Sternberg's Dragnet.

Bancroft had been conspicuous in silents, notably the James Cruze Pony Express. Von Sternberg cast him (third billing) in Underworld and he emerged the star with a couple more Von Sternbergs to come. A young Budd Schulberg thought he was a blow hard but Paramount featured him in their first sound films and, though Bancroft’s status declined, he was still personable in major films like Angels With Dirty Faces, North West Mounted Police and Stagecoach.  

The Mighty opens as troops march down Broadway to an “Over There” accelerated to match the silent speed footage and Bancroft and Raymond Hackett are in the crowd watching. George has to be prompted to take off his hat as The Flag passes. In a saloon, the camera travels the length of the bar with him, picking up individual conversations as it goes. In the back room, Warner Oland’s mob are plotting and George showily tears up his overdue draft notice (Fort Fleming). A team of MPs arrive but the bar man says he’s never heard of George, who comes out at that moment. A bar fly calls out his name, fingering our hero, and four soldiers have to get stuck in with Billy Clubs to subdue him. 

Like Deer Hunter there’s no training material, just a cut and, courtesy Wings stock footage, we’re in combat, where tough guy George has made sergeant. Though indifferent to the patriotic ideal (“fighting for the democrats!”), he’s totally in his element, while his young, upper class Lieutenant Morgan Farley (personal best for the perennial bit player, later the minister in High Noon)  quivers with nerves, despite his convictions. ”There’s a yellow streak down his back you could parade a company on” George, now become Captain, observes. Comes the big battle and they advance (impressive traveling camera crane) across a limited but convincing front line, with shell bursts and soldiers dropping all round - the film’s only process work is included, with smoke in front of the screen to disguise it. Farley dies a hero in George’s arms - telling scene. 

The Mighty - Morgan Farley

George promises to visit the dead officer’s family - cf. Lubitch’s much inferior Man I Killed.  Repatriated bemedaled, George is with his Doughboy mates (include Edgar Dearing & Jack Pennick) on the troop train, when he encounters Hatton, noting “There seems to be a band at every station”. He’s amazed at his stop off to find the reception is for him following Farley’s letters home - great traveling shot through the station entrance to the car, where the dead officer’s sister Esther Ralston waits for him. Hacket hops off the train to lead the cheering, sensing opportunity. Welcomed to their home by stilted dad, Australia’s own O.P.Heggie, George finds himself offered the job of police captain, to use his military methods to combat the reign of post war lawless elements. (prohibition is not mentioned) He’s persuaded and Oland and his gang show up to harvest the cluster of town banks, which would make a suitable target once the local criminal competitors are eliminated, “the biggest take in history” cf. The Big Caper. 

The Mighty - Ralston & Bancroft

 Of course George is attracted to Esther, understandably as she manages an appealing blonde vulnerable but alert persona, handling dialogue better than most of the East Coast Imports around her. He puts forward his notion that a war is a confrontation of gangs driven by loyalty and she counters that George Washington was someone who rejected the old allegiance for something more important. The town mobsters are disposed of and Warner sees his chance to do the bank job on his own. A complaining woman customer is puzzled, when the tellers all raise their hands but faints when she turns in camera direction. Floozy Dot Revier (also good) is sent in to warn George that she’ll rat him out to Esther if he interferes. Action climax, where George ignores the threat and leads the cop cars racing to the scene, while he cranks the siren. Shoot out on the roads and in the dark room streaked by chinks of light. Things end well (if unconvincingly). 

The only original music is under the titles but the extensive use of source music is remarkable - parades, under montages like the “War Ends” headlines or the Heroes’ welcomes. The film anticipates Henry King’s 1944 Wilson in this way.  The mix of plot themes that will animate the better action films to come, effective battle, small town staging and full-on confrontation of the new sound medium make this a large piece of neglected film history. Dialogue is still quite awkward, with the pause for effect before last words, labored. Bancroft has trouble with the significance-loaded speech, once he’s abandoned his “Fighting Fool from the gasworks” character but he gives it a good try and his physical presence is commanding. The adventurous handling is the antithesis of Cromwell’s conservative later work and this appears to be the peak achievement of his first period. It was also a great year for cameraman J. Roy Hunt adding this one and The Virginian to his c.v. 

The Mighty : Bancroft & Ralston.

Unlike MCA and these early Paramounts, Universal were notably apathetic towards their early films, burning their silent negatives and not bothering to put into theatrical re-issue anything other than their ”Horror” films and a few westerns among their early sound output. The rest remain largely unknown though a few were made up in bundles for late night TV, some making their way to Australia in the sixtties. That’s how I saw the early William Wylers. 

Monta Bell’s 1931 Up For Murder comes out of this void. Bell had been a prestige silent film maker working with Garbo, Gilbert and Jeanne Eagles. The opening of his Personal Maid where they load the camera into a dumb waiter and take it up a tenement where residents are arguing with one another on every level is a great piece of imaginative staging. Unfortunately nothing else in that film is as good. By the time we get to Up for Murder, Hollywood’s re-tooling for sound is pretty much complete and the piece is surprisingly assured for a now totally forgotten early sound film. Working on the opening scenes’ real news paper presses, young (the film is supposed to end with his 21st birthday) Lew Ayres takes no interest when the switch board blonde comes on for him. He is hit up for a two dollar loan by drunken reporter Frank McHugh who in return suggests to editor Frederick Burt he should take Lew on as a journalist. Shown to a desk with a typewriter, Lew asks what he should write but Burt scornfully calls him “Kipling” and has him checking lists. His twenty dollar pay check is a marvel to Lew, stuffing notes into mother Dorothy Petersen’s cookie jar. 

 

There’s one brief scene of management laying out the edition to give prominence to the sensationalist stories. Bell had worked in newpapers. 

Then in the first of the film’s hard to swallow developments, glamorous Society Editor Genevieve Tobin, who has lost her flair since she became publisher Purnell Prat’s Tootsie, needs to be squired to the Mayor’s ball and spots Lew at the back of the office. They get him a voucher from accounts to hire a diner suit (which fits perfectly) and he’s off in his top hat with Genevieve on his arm. Pratt with his family are in the loges and Polly Ann Young his daughter notes that Genevieve’s jewels are real. So rapt is Lew that he just has to write up an account of his big night and this gets scooped out of his typewriter and run next to Genevieve’s routine coverage. He comes on for her (understandable) and gets her to a picnic at the zoo, taking her to his favorite view point over the city. They go back to her flat and she emerges in her glittery cape over lingerie outfit but Lew is put off and leaves - thus winning her over. They plan on spending an evening together but Pratt wants her that night and she stalls Lew who turns up anyway with Pratt putting him in his place in the film’s strongest scene. ”Maybe you’ll pay her rent next month.” 

Up for Murder -  Tobin & Ayres in Charles Hall decor.

In a scuffle, Pratt falls hitting his head and dies. Genevieve gets Lew out and calls editor Richard Tucker who goes into fixer mode to protect the paper’s reputation, having the body transferred to the office and claiming he heard an argument in the next suite there. His attempt to square away the murder on an unknown is scuppered when Lew insists on confessing without giving details. Third Degree scene - (cops with Robert Emmett O'Connor prominent, assuring the kid “We’re your friends” while fiddling with the spotlight) and Tucker, who promises to get Lew off, arriving and adding in detail about Ayres and Pratt arguing because the kid was a dangerous radical cf. Rozalind Russell's great scene with John Qualen in 1940’s His Girl Friday or the Larry Parkes sub plot in Sam Fuller’s 1943 Power of the Press script. The judge reads out a guilty verdict and Lew is in the cells playing solitaire on his blanket as they march a condemned man on his last mile with the preacher - montage of close-ups of the other inmates, including yet another single black prisoner, all shouting “Take me!” 

At this point Genevieve cracks, precipitating a totally incredible happy ending. Pity this finale is so cursory because the simple handling in realist decors and the performances have held interest well. The film’s strength is a beautiful turn by Tobin managing just the right amount of world weariness to to go with her glamour. Attractive and having what we can recognise as the Broadway delivery then familiar from Helen Hayes or Ruth Chatterton, Tobin was a talent largely wasted by Hollywood. Her lively Mimi in One Hour With You is the character she has here, played for exuberance rather than resignation. She did co-star with Jack Hulbert in a forgettable English movie along with her dispiriting support roles in subsequent US productions. She and Ayres make an involving couple. 

Putting it where his mouth was comes WW2 and Lew Ayres, star of the great pacifist classic All Quiet on the Western Front, refused combat service and became an army medic.

Still the fresh faced Karl of All Quiet..., Ayres would manage to continue re-inventing himself, MGM’s young Dr. Kildare, Johnny Belinda, Battleship Gallactica. The playing is so good that McHugh and Peterson doing their type casting drunk reporter and suffering mum characters actually manage to convince - especially when they are on screen together. The handling is straight forward with even a few rough touches like an out of focus linking shot but the celebrity technicians manage to hint at their presence - Carl Freund, the light master of the German silent film and cameraman on Dracula and The Good Earth here at a point where he was about to launch his brief but intriguing career as director, contributes what looks like a snatch of hand held running in the dark street with Ayres while Charles Hall offers the high fashion decorating of Tobin’s apartment. Radio source music buts a snatch of what sounds like Bing Crosby onto an orchestral of Ed. Goulding’s “Mam'zelle” number. This is well on the way to being Bell’s most assured film. 

Old Hollywood - there’s more of this material than any one person can hope to see in a lifetime. Take my word for that. Discovering it is nearly as good as watching it.

Barie Pattison - 2020

HELLO MINI SERIES.

 

The Queen's Gambit - Taylor-Joy

While I was at the BBC, one of their Mandarins gave the explanation “Series are the same chaps doing different things; serials are the same chaps doing the same things and anthologies are different chaps doing different things.” If you follow his definition the newly dominant TV form isn’t mini series but serial. It isn’t even new. Hitchcock had Bob Stevens doing Alec Coppel’s “I Killed the Count” in three weekly 1957 episodes. (That one had already been a 1939 Ben Lyon Movie and a 1948 BBC play) I’m sure that earlier efforts could be found. These have been bubbling to the surface at regular intervals. Dan Curtis’ 1983 version of Herman Wouk’s Winds of War attracted attention as did Simon Wincer’s 1989 Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove or Josée Dayan’s 1998 Le Comte de Monte Cristo and 2000 Les Miserables. We’re up to four on Fargo. What is new is that an attempt to make streaming the dominant model of presentation has attracted a new level of talent and ambition. 

I’ve been watching this without great attention. Even the best ones had always tended to have a strong exposition followed by repetitive central sections and a rushed finale put together with an eye to a likely sequel. Think Paolo Sorrentino’s two handsome Pope series. Pieces by cinema celebrities like Martin Scorsese’s 2019 The Irishman or Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 Roma clearly played better in theaters and they take time that could accommodate several movies 

The Queen's Gambit - Taylor-Joy & Scott Frank

Netflix' The Queen’s Gambit was recommended to me and I wanted to watch Marielle Heller, the director of Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, in something. This one proved to be the most adept use of the format I’d seen. Show runner Scott Frank had a history as a movie writer which you could think of as solid rather than brilliant - Little Man Tate, Out of Sight, Wolverine. His break through appears to be the 2017 western Mini-Series Godless. He is credited with writing and directing all seven episodes of The Queen’s Gambit, drawing heavily on the original novel by Walter Tevis who also authored The Hustler. Stand-out in a gallery of superior performances is star Anya Taylor-Joy who takes over the central character from young Ilsa Johnson, as a teenager in the second episode. She got her experience being a scream queen in horror flix like Witch and Marrowbone. She’s so good in this one I should seek some of those out.  

 

The Queen’s Gambit has a lot going for it. It’s subject is meant to be chess and they put in a bit of effort on explaining the game with second billed institute janitor Bill Camp reluctantly teaching Johnson in the opening and sympa brothers Matthew and Russell Dennis Lewis briefing Taylor-Joy as she signs on for her first tournament at Henry Clay High School - Home of the Fighting Owls - and explaining to step mother Heller during the games she watches uncomprehending. One of the things that makes the piece superior is the way Heller however spots what is happening by seeing the audience reaction to the girl’s moves - her successes from intuition. This is the way the production works with the camera focused on the people rather than the contests. For the match with the Dutch champion we don’t even see the board. An understanding of the moves isn’t really an assist in watching the film. 

They do come up with some striking effects work - the motif of imagining the pieces on the ceiling, chessmen self animating on the board while the characters perform at normal speed and the screen as a checker board with characters and objects in the squares.

Taylor-Joy & Thomas Brodie-Sangster

The production’s achievement is that it fields a whole range of things that are as important and as involving as the chess. 

Most obviously is parenting, with the disaster of Johnson’s own incapable "trailer trash" mother landing her in the severe Methuen Children’s Home where religion cops the first of several serves in the film. While her friend Moses Ingram is left behind (“Too old, too black to be adopted”), Johnson is handed off to Heller, who is in a rocky marriage with Patrick Kennedy, shortly before he departs taking the family car, to leave their leafy suburb for Detroit. Their house, grotesquely over furnished with modern home items (“prints, copies not the real thing of course”) becomes another major element of the film. 

Marielle Heller & Taylor-Joy

It looks like Heller is going to screw up like Taylor-Joy’s previous mentors, sending her off to fetch the over the counter drugs that already have a grip on her and getting her school clothes from sale at Ben Snyder's, the local department store where the snobby school mate says she would never dream of shopping. This girl keeps on showing up, paralleling the lead’s life with her own conformity,

Heller’s character proves to be one of the piece’s strengths. A loser after she settled for less when stage fright ruined her chances of becoming a Pianist, she discovers that being a chess wiz is a way of getting ahead. (eating air plane diners while flying to a tournament has Taylor-Joy say “This may be the best Xmas I ever have”) Heller realises that her  way of living is no kind of role model and doesn’t try to assert herself. She’s not Mildred Pierce. Their brief negotiating a manager's fee is one of the film's nicest scenes. 

This is something new and a strong dynamic leaving us wondering how they are going to keep going without it. When we are settling in to the idea of the Kentucky home as a cage to escape, we get the Harry Melling sub plot contrasting with the cosmopolitan existence of fellow prodigy Thomas Brodie-Sangster (in a cowboy hat to point his participation in Godless), who was a celebrity at nine while Johnson was playing the institute janitor, along with Bodie-Sangster’s fashion model friend Millie Brady. The neighborhood druggist, treated as a simpleton, proves to have a shrewd notion of events. This is not a piece that lets you settle into comfortable expectations. 

It offers the multiplex big budget strategy of shooting in a variety of real and simulated locations - Kentucky, New York, Mexico City, Paris and Moscow which the characters discover as most of their audience will be doing. Uli Hanish's design is particularly strong - the conversion of the house, the imposing Russian interiors. 

 

We see Taylor-Joy’s Russian lessons setting up the elevator ride in the luxury Aztec Hotel and, when we think we understand the format, there’s that knife that Brodie-Sangster carries but  never comes into play - unless it is part of that material with Taylor-Joy as a blonde that hasn’t made it into the final edit. Keeping the Newman score for The Robe running under the break-in is effective but they do it again with the singalong. Did we really need the inset of the old man laying out pieces for the game in the Moscow winter street? 

Taylor-Joy, Heller and fifties decor

 

A major part of the package is locating it in the fifties and sixties (JFK magazine covers, big cars, pop music on black & white TV), shown as alarmingly ugly with tensions with the Russians for whom Chess superiority is part of the national honor. Brodie-Sangster fumes at playing with plastic pieces in high school halls while sports draw crowds of thousands and the Russians nurture their champions. “They pay people to play chess!” We learn that Taylor-Joy’s Christian organisation funding depends on her making a dim wit statement about the infamy of communism and the State Department sends along minder John Schwab who offers her the contents of his flask to top up her orange juice before telling her to lay off alcohol (“You just offered me a drink” “It was a test”), a nice contrast to the scene with Heller and the second beer.

This comes after we hear Russian master Marcin Dorocinski is planning on working on the girl’s character flaws and learn that the Russian female masters are never allowed to play against men. It all builds our anticipation of the inescapable Moscow championship game with Dorocinski and they even manage to work suspense and surprise into that. The final image with her coat the one white element in the desaturated frame is great. 

It’s not that elements of this one are predictable but that they field familiar situations and concepts in a way that we are not used to, managing to keep the viewers off balance without alienating them. It’s a show of considerable skill. 

Never since the nineteen tens has there been such uncertainty about not just the length but also the structure and pacing of movie entertainment. It will be interesting to see what kind of a reception Queen’s Gambit gets and whether it has an influence on the form in which it has been presented. 

 And before we leave this one, an observation. The film is all I know about the chess fanatics, complete with the unkind scene of Taylor Johnson telling the nerdy kid with glasses that he’s stereotypical. It keeps on referencing children whose lives chess has absorbed, getting the bug age nine, excluding other elements, social unease, impatience with conformist values. I couldn’t help making a comparison with movie freaks. It’s not a little disturbing in the same way that Cinema Paradiso is, under it’s much admired charm.

Taylor-Joy and Brodie-Thomas

 

 

 

 Barrie Pattison 2021

MOVIES 2020

  Film Going in the Year of the Plague.
  

Unforgivable Blackness

 I’ve now been sorting the films I saw for the first time in the year longer than most people have been breathing. I’m not sure whether that’s something I should be letting on to. I guess it’s not surprising that the range of choice was much smaller this year. Covid means I haven’t been out of the country and less material has been shipped in by people who don’t want to take the luster off it with release in empty theatres. 

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood - Rhys, Hanks.

Only about one in ten of the titles that make it onto overseas lists appear to have had a screening here which make you wonder about the festivals. The absence of big, English-speaking spectaculars can be put down to my taste and the low level of ambition of the films. Broadcast TV and limited theatrical releases fill the gap. I’d like to think that the small number of archival titles means that I’ve caught up the backlog more than the fact that the sources are drying up - good bye ethnic video! 

2020’s list sort of in order - Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (Ken Burns 2004 two parter), A HIDDEN LIFE (approachable Terence Malick), Quelque jours avec moi (A Few Days With Me 1988 via a Claude Sautet retro), BA BAI (The Eight Hundred, Guan Hu block buster), A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD (Marrielle Heller), HORS NORMES (Extraordinary - Olivier Nakache, Éric Toledano), DETROIT (Kathryn Bigelow 2017), LA BONNE EPOUSE (How to be a Good Wife Martin Provost) 

La Dea Fortunata - Stefano Accorsi, Sara Ciocca, Edoardo Leo, Edoardo Brandi.

LA DEA FORTUNA

(The Goddess of Fortune, Ferzan Ozpetek), Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg 2014), So Big (Wm. Wellman 1931), MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (Ed Norton), Il TRADITORE (The Traitor, Marco Bellocchio), THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND (Judd Apatow), INCH ALLAH (Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette 2012) Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi), Richard Jewell (Eastwood), Portrait d’un jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma), Wade (toon short - Kalp Sanghvi & Upamanyu Bhattacharyya), Moy Drug Ivan Lapshin (Alexei Gherman’s My Friend Ivan Lapshin 1986, at last) Boze Cialo (Corpus Christi Jan Komasa) La buena estrella (Lucky Star Ricardo Franco 1996) Trailin' (Lynn Reynolds 1921), The Accountant (Gavin O'Connor). 

 

 

 

 

 

Not a bad year but I don’t think there’s anything there I’ll regard with the awe that I can summon up for Wings, Le Diable au corps or Spirited Away. We’ll see.

Wade.

CURTIZ Né KERTÉSZ.

In the time since my publication of “The Man Who Ate Films,” the book I did with John Howard Reid on Michael Curtiz, a couple more of Curtiz' though-lost European silents have surfaced on You Tube. There’s nothing on show there to challenge my view that it was Hollywood which transformed Curtiz into the world’s most successful film director (that claim is verifiable) but they do offer a look at the virtually unknown Austrian pre-sound film industry and give us a hint of Curtiz’ development. To an enthusiast they are intriguing and they expand the Austrian section of the book.

Lucy Doraine

In 1921’s Frau Dorothys Bekenntnis / Mrs. Danes Connfession directed by Curtiz still Mihály Kertèsz and produced by Baron Sacha Kolorat, the cops are investigating a rather crowded crime scene in the run down British (?) Salfa hotel. We dissolve through the grill of a cell door to Mrs. Curtiz, Lucy Doraine/Miss Dorothy/Mrs. Dane locked away for the murder. However hopes for a proto film noir fade early - after the scene of the inspector arriving with the police car making its way through studio built side streets in pouring rain.

A series of colour-coded flashback follows the events that have led to her arrest.

Lucy is the despair of her wealthy uncle Otto Treßler, being interested only in sports - which we don’t get to see. A group of ruffians are outfitting themselves in kerchief masks to try to abduct her but Kurt von Lessen’s Harvey Horewood/Harwood is passing and helps her make her escape on horseback just missing the speeding train at the level crossing - contrived in editing.

Doraine & Fryland - gay.

They become an item, attending motor racing. However the uncle over powers a burglar who has entered by jamming a twig in the automatic door and finds on him a note, which he recognises as being in von Lessen’s hand writing. A call to the Delfine Engineering Works exposes the deception of von Lessen passing as the company’s director.

The burglar is caught with the uncle’s body in the room with the giant safe. The police decide “Your silence looks like an avowal” and convict him for murder. He doesn’t divulge his connection to von Lessen.

Lucy marries her rescuer and the pair attend a regatta with costumed rowers in long boats where aristocrat admirer Alphons Fryland asks her “Why are you so sad when the world is gay?” There’s an incoherent montage of horse racing, the regatta, the stock exchange and roulette, which is probably where the piece lost a reel in it’s English language release after re-editing by Don Bartlett as A Soul in Torment. Bailiffs reproach her. “Those who give such elaborate parties, should pay their debts.” She attempts to placate them with the pearls which were von Lessen’s wedding gift but they proclaim them false.

Lucy tells her spouse. “I have only been a pawn in your selfish search for wealth and pleasure” but he sees a way out. “The Duke seems to be very fond of you.”

Refusing to join his scheme to exploit her admirer, Lucy is faced with her husband’s suicide note, the auction of her possessions and squalor represented by working in a line of sewing machine girls. (“Poverty makes Dorothy realise for the first time the seriousness of life”) She collapses on the job and gives birth in the hospital where Duke Fryland lavishes comforts on her.

The burglar is released from jail and encouraged by von Lessen for not involving him and (green flashback) we learn that the Von suffocated the uncle by locking him in the strong room. Horewood lures Dorothy to the grim Salfa Hotel (“Let me in or I will shoot myself”) and manages to assert his old charm over her. “You went to him out of gratitude but you belong to me.” The Duke arrives also armed and there is a stand off but Dorothy now realises the danger Von Lessen represents to her baby and puts a bullet into her evil husband.

She is of course acquitted and lives happily ever after.

The unremarkable melodrama is chiefly an opportunity for Lucy Doraine to pose in attitudes of grief while displaying high fashion outfits. Her performance is as usual lamentable and the support (Fryland accompanied her in four of these at the start of his long career) fail to get our attention. Excessive eye shadow has to stand in for character development.

They are still using masking, with irises opening scenes and diamond shapes and horizontal rectangles around images. Curtiz’ technique is sharpening with constant cutting closer within the scene (leading to the occasional bad match).

Frau Dorothys Bekenntnis - Doraine

 Some compositions are recognisably his work - the arrival of the horse cart at the family home framed by the dark doorway, the swarm of girls in white engulfing the camera. The most interesting element is the high fashion costuming, to which add the vintage automobiles, including the uncle’s with it’s speaker tube to contact the driver.

Despite quite ambitious production values, it is hard to believe that  Frau Dorothys Bekenntnis ever commanded the admiration of audiences but it does have an interest to us as offering an indistinct version of Mildred Pierce, opening with the star’s murder of her unworthy husband and revealing his infamies in successive flash backs. The Cain novel from which Mildred Pierce is derived did not contain a murder.

 

Also surfacing is the Austrian Die Lawine / The Avalanche made two years later in 1923. This one is a weepy starting where Mary Kid, the new (and improved) leading lady of Curtiz’ company, is shocked to see a baby buried without a father at the hospital where her own child is being tended. In the retirement center, she seeks out the aunt of her lover Victor Varconyi,  a regular Curtiz lead. He had abandoned them and the aunt makes him promise on her deathbed he will claim the pair. This happens when Varconyi is in the flower decorated carriage on the way to his wedding to marry well with Lilly Marischka.

The reconstituted family set up in the icy mountains where Victor finds a job. However spurned bride Marischka follows him  to the ski resort Hotel and at the ski jump finals asks him why he persists when he could live in luxury with her. The two women confront at the rendez-vous that she has arranged on snow covered Hollen bridge.

Marischka has her revenge winning Varkonyi back only to leave him after he has taken her home (“You were always a gentleman, George”)  and then casting him aside. Meanwhile Kid is trapped in the snow and only rescued when her wonder dog brings a passing school teacher who takes her home and then follows the dog one more time to scoop up the child lost in the snow.

The brief glimpse of Marischka's palatial home, featuring checkered floor and wide staircase with drapes, livens up this unsurprising weepy.

Varkonyi strikes her down and the police are on his track for murder. His paternal urges are stirred by the little orphan match boy who visits his hideaway in the billiards bar and his escape takes him to Kid’s new home with the school teacher. (“For the love of God Marie, hide me. I killed a woman!”) She shelters him for the sake of their son but after a further ski pursuit with a leap off a bridge and a chase on the edge of the precipice, Varkonyi falls to his death and we end with the child placing a wreath on his grave.

Spot the shot framed in succeeding floral arches or the white iris, both recognisable from other Curtiz efforts.  Varkonyi manages to show a range of emotions and pass himself off as dashing without suggesting any great star presence.

This will have to stand in for the entire Mary Kid collaboration as it is currently the only one to survive - and in a nice tinted copy with a slightly abrupt end. She gets by, though not always attractively filmed.

Like some films from Greece at this time, the snow country material is contemporary with the similar early Arnold Fank Mountain Films which developed into one of the most admired cycles in silent film.

Die Lawine - rescuer & wonder dog.