MARIO SOLDATI AND FRIENDS.

Our knowledge of Italian sound film tends to start when American movie critics like Arthur Knight were stationed there after the war. Perilous little Italian film from pre 1945 circulates abroad so I was pleased to find that You Tube, which is a bottomless well of untranslated Italian movies, had a run of the films of Mario Soldati with good English sub-titles.

Soldati (left) had a literary background and had spent some time teaching in the US before becoming one of that band of Italian movie directors whose careers begin in the thirties, go through the war and peter out in the wide screen era. The neo realists have already had their share of attention and some more, though the extent of Luigi Zampa’s continued output is a surprise. By and large I’m more interested in the later comers, people like Pietro Germi, Dario Argento, Sergio Corbucci, Damio Damiano and Gianni Amelio - if we reduce the country’s output to the work to a few directors.

Accordingly I’d never taken any real notice of Mario Soldati though a few titles had driffted my way. He worked on scripts for a couple of nice 1932 comedies, Mario Camerini’s Gli uomini, che mascalzoni... / What Scounrels Men Are and Alessandro Blasetti’s La tavola dei poveri / Poor People’s Table and continues through what we are assured is the White Telephone era to begin directing in 1938. In the fifties he managed a couple of British films, Her Favourite Husband and The Stranger’s Hand, ushered Sophia Loren, Gina Lllobrigida and Fernandel through unmemorable A features and fades away in the sixties.

I managed to score a VHS of his 1939 Dora Nelson a romantic comedy that is neither particularly romantic or particularly funny and we are assured, an example of the then celebrated caligraphist movement.

Like the contemporary Ohuls La Signora di tutti and rather better, it has a film making background. In the opening, star Dora Nelson (then celebrated Assia Noris) brings shooting on her historical movie to a stop because she considers her leading man not sufficiently aristocratic. She marches off the set, leaving the director in despair until crew members draw his attention to Pierina (Miss Norris again), the modiste who does a convincing Dora impression. The girl is whipped away from boxing hats and driven to the studio delighting all with the resemblance and her willingness, as she shoots in front of the process screen.

 Meanwhile the real Dora is expressing her allegiance to a Prince, announced by his flunky putting on a record of the National Anthem. He plans launching a coup from Cannes and Dora agrees to accompany his court in exile. Her absence casts a shadow on the daughter’s impending marriage and husband Carlo Ninchi begs Pierina to continue the impersonation through the ceremony. Her optician fiancé is bluffed by seeing the two Dora’s.

Ninchi is rapt and rides her round the markers in his sail boat. However in Cannes, the prince informs Dora that the revolution will fail because he can’t pay for the guns and she stomps up a 30,000 lire cheque. Scandal ensues.

The film is mounted on a large scale, with huge, modern sets, hoards of dress extras, sharp images, smooth editing. Noris differentiates the two characters expertly backed by ingenious cuts as to a double continuing her walk into the distance as the camera passes behind pillars, as well as good split screen. However the men are totally unimpressive, with the exception of chiseled featured Massimo Girotti as the fiancé, whose part could be given any juvenile.

What we got is polished, ordinary entertainment distinguished from routine Hollywood A features of the day by the occasional continental vista - the tree lined road with the comic’s car or the lights of Cannes. It’s nowhere near as winning as Signor Max an earlier De Sica starring doppelganger piece Soldati wrote for Camerini. It never seems to have been subtitled.

Our man and possibly his industry have matured by the time we get to Quartieri alti / In High Places, an A feature begun in 1943 and finished in 1944 after the fall of Rome and one of the subtitled You Tube features.

This one turns out to be accomplished, with strong leads and polished and quite imaginative production. Massimo Serato, (below right) the youngest I’ve seen him, is the con man gigolo who supports family and friends by his affair with a cheese heiress but aspires to romance with unspoiled student Adriana Benetti. He sets up an elaborate false identity to appeal to her but things aren’t going to plan on the night of their scheduled meeting.

The film is derived from the Jean Anouilh play "Le Rendez-Vous de Senlis" produced in the theatre by Andre Barsaq in 1941. This is both a strength and a weakness. The plot has considerable ingenuity and works up some tension over whether Serato’s schemes will come unravelled but the development, dialogue and relationships distractingly ring of the stage - the place put out at the rich peoples’ diners for an uninvited pauper, Alfredo Del Pelo’s chitarrista song at the Ulpia taverna. Soldati has attempted to deal with this by showing what we see as being observed by an audience - characters hidden in cupboards or outside windows and accounting for the theatricality of some of the older player performances by having the characters being former actors hired to boost the deception.

He has added cinematic flourishes - the opening title background of the Ecelsior Hotel revolving door runs till one of the character goes through and we follow him to the desk, the introductory glimpse of Serato hiding behind a door as the scene continues while a woman takes a bath in the next room, a cut to a spinning car wheel to account for a journey and showing both sides of the frequent ‘phone calls. However bits of undigested business are a give away.

The film remains quite modern in playing, pacing and setting but the theatrical feel does distract and the simple ending is particularly unsatisfactory after such a complex build up. Among the cast Jucci Kellerman, who did not have a great career, is particularly effective. (left -unhappy cheese heiress)

Two years later Eugenia Grandet is an ambitious costume movie, the last of (Alida) Valli’s Italian language movies before her launch into Hollywood and off-shore Hollywood. (below left) 

 

One of more than a dozen adaptations of the Balzac novel this one kicks off with the coach, carrying Paris based Giorgio De Lullo, delayed while he is attended by the Tours hairdresser. When they do set out (shot with the camera at road level among the wheels and hooves) they pass through the lands and properties which the driver identifies as belonging to De Lullo’s uncle and it is to his house in provincial Saumur where they carry the newcomer’s bags.

 

 There uncle Gualtiero Tumiati’s guests are in a Tombola card game which is abruptly terminated when the uncle takes their only candle to examine the letter the boy brings from his father. Tumiati’s sheltered daughter Eugenia, played rather passively by Valli at the peak of her European stardom, tries to make the new comer at home despite her father’s objection to the cost of a bed warmer and wax candles to replace his normal, smelly tallow ones. Middle aged peasant maid Pina Gallini is her accomplice, proving able to snap the firewood on her knee when the young man fails.

The film’s best scene proves to be Tumiati’s birthday present to Valli of a rare gold coin to add to her dowry. He radiates a contagious enthusiasm as he explains the history and purity of pieces in her little collection.

A newspaper from the capital tells them that the boy’s bankrupt father has suicided. Through the dining room window we see de Lullo on the garden bench struck down by the news. Tumiati only has sympathy for his brother’s defrauded creditors. At the same time he makes a killing from the Visiting Dutch wine merchant getting his order leaving the other local suppliers with nothing to do but sell Tumiati their stock at a favorable price. This he uses to make up his short fall on the Dutch order.

Drawn to the young man, Valli gives him her treasure to start his career in the Indies. He leaves with her a box with the portrait of his mother and the pair swear that, though they will be in different countries they will think of each other as they see the same evening star that they now watch from the bench in her garden - in the best Seventh Heaven Tradition.

We get a couple of brief glimpses of his life in the colonies as attention focuses on Saumur and Tumiati’s fury as he discovers his daughter has given the gold to the unworthy nephew. He locks Valli in her room permanently. However the health of his wife (Giuditta Rissone one time Mrs. Vittorio de Sica) fails and it becomes obvious that with her death he will have to pay levies and taxes in passing her share of the estate to his daughter. He brings Valli out and has her sign a document which will disadvantage her to avoid these. She complies.

Tumiati’s health fails too and he succumbs eyeing voraciously the precious metal of the crucifix held in front of him. Meanwhile De Lullo sets out from the Indies. On his way he encounters a Marchioness who puts forward a plan where he will marry her ugly daughter and be bought a title so he can be a functionary at court.

In Saumur, Valli looks longingly at the bench where she made her promise to her cousin only to have her dreams fulfilled as he appears there. He expresses his gratitude, pays back the money given him with market interest and asks for the return of the chest, uneasy at the prospect of her asserting his obligation to her. She lets him leave.

However De Lullo’s potential father in law puts an end to the scheme saying the son of a bankrupt could never be given a title. News of De Lullo’s fate reaches Valli and she buys up his father’s debts anonymously enabling the marriage to go ahead. Now she only has sixteen million instead of twenty one the Notary explains.

The film ends with Valli/ Eugenia at maid Gallini’s wedding in the church where De Lullo’s embroidered robe, which he had given her, now adorns the Virgin Statue. The novel’s coverage of her later years is notably missing.

The lead duo fail to involve and attention moves to the Grandet household grotesques. Tumiati’s pleasure in his trading is overwhelming while Gallini’s sympathetic peasant provides a balance. Opportunities for complexity are avoided beyond giving the unworthy cousin a rudimentary sense of obligation. There is no real comparison between the high price delights of Paris and provincial Saumur or comment on the legal and ecclesiastic structures. Despite Soldati’s flawlessly tasteful presentation there’s nothing as memorable as the walls of Miser Grandet’s counting room closing in on him in the Rex Ingram The Conquering Power.

Even lacking the florid decadence of Luchino Visconti’s best work or the flamboyance of the films of Vittorio Cottafavi, this one still remains very much a product of the European forties costume melo cycle, films like Christian Jacque’s Carmen or Cavalcanti’s Nicholas Nickleby, never approaching the standard of The Heiress or La Chartreuse de Parme.

Cesare Olivieri who plays President Cruchet here will become a long running Soldati associate directing second unit for his films in the fifties. Future directors Renato Castellani and Mario Girolami were also frequent collaborators.

 Two years later again in 1948 at the height of the realist cycle, we get Soldati’s Carlo Ponti production Fuga in Francia / Flight to France offering an unfamiliar view of post WW2 Italy. It centres on fugitive ex Mussolini government official Folco Lulli’s attempt to escape retribution. The structure, the flight of war criminals, recalls The 49th Parallel and may have been influenced by Michael Powell’s film.

When we first see Lulli, he’s wearing a priest’s cassock and entering a boarding school where head teacher, Cesare Olivieri again, reluctantly kits him out in civilian clothes, reminded of Lulli’s financial contributions to the institution. Lulli’s pre-teen son Enrico Olivieri is among the pupils and despite Lulli’s plan to leave him behind, he climbs into the seat next to him in the bus. Accompanied by itinerant migrants, ex-soldier Pietro Germi conspicuous among them, they travel to a border town stopping at the inn there.

Lulli’s one time maid Rosi Mirafiore, playing a character called Pierina (like Dora Nelson’s alter ego), is working there and recognises her former Ecelensia. Both fear the other. He begs her not to denounce him and promises a hefty payment. He has also pocketed his son’s clasp knife.  (Left Fuga in Francia Lulli and Cesare Olivieri)

Fearful she invites one of the traveler group to come to her room and they spend the night together. 

 When he goes, he leaves his striped scarf which she carefully folds and puts away but Lulli appears and murders her, placing the scarf to incriminate the itinerant.

Lulli then guides their group, taking them over the pass in the snow into France - the trip the migrants in Germi’s Il Camino della speranza will make. Avoiding the police ski patrol, they are overtaken by a snow storm and in the film’s best scene they shelter in a mountain hut where the troop’s accordionist recognises Lulli as the fugitive war criminal from his picture in a news paper on the floor and Lulli joins in his song desperately trying to recover the paper from under the musician’s feet.

He produces a pistol but Germi, the most embittered of the group, a soldier who had experienced reprisals against his town and been forced to join firing squads during the war, takes control intending to hold him for the police. Lulli wins over one of his captors but young Olivieri is injured in the the cold and pursuit is closing in.

This is one of the second wave of Post WW2 Realist Italian cinema, using real locations but now foregrounding them with professional actors. The school with it’s bullying, the maid’s sparse room, the unattended dam all suggest the country’s run down condition. The final scene’s ambulance is a made over baker’s van.

Folco Lulli had several leads in this period but is best known as the Italian driver in Le salaire de la peur / Wages of Fear. An effective enough character actor he doesn’t carry a starring role, particularly here one which lacks any sympathetic shading. Germi on the other hand emerges from the ensemble giving one of his best performances and the film is of a piece with his own serious dramas of post war anguish.

Best forties B&W production values don’t create the authenticity intended. An early Nino Rota score disappoints also.

It’s a bit much to expect a few films by a single director to stand in for a decade of Italian film making but these are a good match for the pattern of unsurprising craft skill that the few accessible films of this period reveal, more so than the description we get from contemporary English language critics - white telephones succeeded by unremitting veracity.

It seems unlikely that there is a masterpiece hidden away among the unknown Soldati work (Eugenia Grandet is his most often cited film) - or a carelessly made one. You could do worse than explore these easily available titles to get a handle on the Italian film of their day. I found it rewarding.

Barrie Pattison 2020.

PAUL MUNI : Only The Valiant.

The sound films of the twenties remain an interesting study. Generally they are dismissed
as terrible, which isn’t far from the truth, but they do have the unique fascination of
showing Hollywood, which pretty much had the monopoly, going through the greatest
re-tooling in its history.

With this in mind then celebrated Jewish theatre star Muni Wigsenfreund’s screen debut, 1929’s The Valiant is a must-see item. As with the bulk of these, the opening is the most filmic part where a title describes “A city street where laughter and tragedy rub elbows” and we get the first of the film’s many moving camera shots down an apartment corridor to a closed door. A shot rings out and after a pause a round-shouldered figure emerges. A second glance confirms that it’s a young Paul Muni in a crumpled hat. (Muni - Above)

He makes his way onto the pavement where the beat cop is excusing the priest for parking next to a fire plug, news boys are selling and ranks of uniformed police pass as Muni goes into the local station house and declares “I have killed a man” handing over a pistol. Well that’s as good as it gets.

The rest is the cast delivering awkward lines on cue to follow Muni’s progress as he tells the judicial system that he and his victim will face the same God for his vindication. He refuses to give his name though he’s told that countless families will be wondering if the anonymous killer hobo is actually their missing relative. Judge Henry Kolker sends him up state to burn and he is, of course, a model prisoner in Warden De Witt Jennings jail.

Meanwhile a thousand miles away in Pennington Ohio the rather fetching Marguerite
Churchill (The Big Trail below) is tending the livestock in her picturesque farm while frail
mother Edith Murgatroyd sits on the porch approving as Johny Mack Brown proposes to
Marguerite. You’ve got to worry about Southern Gentleman Johnny who joins in washing
the Collie dog while still in his freshly pressed city suit.

The only thing that clouds their happiness is the absence of Marguerite’s older brother - Oh Oh!

He used to do Romeo & Juliet’s balcony scene with her at bedtime each night in a fuzzy special effect. Reading about the anonymous drifter facing execution, Murgatroyd stares at the newsprint photo and feels it may be her missing son. The way to calm her is for Marguerite to take the train across the country and face the man.

Meanwhile, Muni’s newspaper articles from the Big House have earned a handsome bundle of war bonds. Jennings urges him to see the girl who has made the immense journey and she is ushered into his office to face Muni who disclaims any connection. The heart of the work is the sustained scene between the pair (“I've been everything but a success”) which still plays like the original piece of theater despite all director William K. Howard’s attempt to break it up into two shots and induce natural delivery.

It’s unlikely that this stretched probability item carried all that much conviction in the first production of Holworthy Hall & Robert Middlemass’ one act play and whatever it may have had has been drained away by our exposure to ninety years of more sophisticated drama. However this is Paul Muni who would soon be the world’s most respected performer and we wait for any justification of his enormous reputation. We do find ourselves watching with him for a hint that Churchill has bought his fabrication of seeing the brother’s heroic death at Vimy Ridge and when, as we know he’s going to, he drops his pretense of being an uneducated vagrant, his brief Shakespeare reading does ring. It’s not much to wade through all the stodge for but it is there.

It's easy to understand the critics of the day who deplored the disappearance of the silent film. About the only hint that this talk bound melodrama is from the company that had just made Sunrise is the ingenious three plane Vimy Ridge effect of the final scene. What is notable is not the clumsiness of these first talkies but the speed with which they were replaced by the accomplished films we still watch with enthusiasm.

Barrie Pattison 2020.

GEM of THE SEAS

I always thought of Columbia as the most anonymous of the Hollywood “Golden Era” studios. However the sudden accessibility of their thirties product has made me revise that idea. 

The film that brings things into focus is the 1932 Washington Merry-Go-Round / Invisible Power. It’s full of material which evokes later Columbia elements like The More the Merrier’s Washington, designer Lionel Banks notion of high society living, all vertical lines, Talk of the Town’s corrupt officials, The Big Heat’s influence maker card game, the sharp talking girl insider represented by Jean Artur in her films for the studio. Add Wallter Connolly who was their resident character actor, like Frank Morgan at MGM or John Carradine at Fox.

Starting yet again with a (model) train roaring through the night, this one launches into a Columbia rom com set up with congress freshman Lee Tracy playing against character an idealist (“all front and no back - wears star spangled underwear”) called on to produce the letter from his signatory of the Declaration of Independence ancestor folded in his pocket for the pair of stereotype comic porter darkies. The letter blows into glamorous Constance Cummings’ compartment and she rips it up only to be told that it was worth fifty grand. Aunt Jane Darwell finds them both under the bunk scrambling for the pieces. The fact that such a valuable document wasn’t more carefully handled is a detail that irritates.

Rapidly Washington Merry-Go-Round shapes up as a first sketch for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. When they get to D.C., the rail station has a Temperance Women’s group lined up and marching scouts milling about. Tracy pulls up to gawp in wonder at the (back projected) Capitol Dome - one tacky process shot rather than the Capra film’s stiring Vorkapich Montage followed by the saver gag of Jimmy Stewart realising that the imposing building he wants identified is a movie theater.

However the earlier film immediately gets down to business. Tracy comes upon the the Ex- Serviceman’s Tent City Camp, living in squalid conditions to demand their promised Bonus. His former army commander Arthur Vinton (“You never could peel potatoes”) is running the show. When introduced to the crowd, instead of feeding them comforting platitudes, Tracy tell them he was elected on bought votes and canvases the mob on how many of them sold theirs in the last election. He tells them to go back to their homes and root out the corruption. “You call yourselves ex-servicemen. Well why don’t you become servicemen?” This gets some antagonistic responses, notably from one of the wives sharing the camp. The script by frequent Capra collaborator Jo Swerling and Maxwell What Price Glory? Winterset Anderson has already got my attention.

Meanwhile conscience stricken prohibition official Wallis Clark is confronting boss Alan Dinehart, to be told that if he tries to go whistle blowing he’ll be the one that gets taken away leaving Dinehart in the clear. Dinehart, normally an inconspicuous performer (Jimmy the Gent’s “the biggest chisler since Michaelangelo”) asserts his menace without any dramatics, immediately lifting things. Clark is left with the open drawer containing a revolver (first time for this?) but uses Dinehart’s stationary, paying for the stamp, to drop a damning letter to Tracy in the mail chute before he offs himself - feet protruding from the elevator.

Tracy immediately faces hints of invasive corruption on the Washington Merry Go Round. “From the nickels in the street cars to the millions in the power trusts.” Congressmen have to use paper towels because defeated predecessors souvenired all the monogrammed linen ones. So-helpful Hotel manager Ernest Wood has already had temporary business cards printed for Tracy and all he wants in return is a Congressional page job for his nephew

Wood is whipped in to formally introduce Tracy to Cummings now sveltely glamorous in lamé at the hotel Dinner Dance. She’s with Dinehart and proves to be the grand daughter of amiable veteran Congressman Connolly who plays cards with the magnate. Facing Dinehart, Tracy shows him Clark’s letter. The South American Alcohol deal where they will have to send in U.S. Marines is in the air.

At the Congressional library, Tracy researches General Digger whose multi million dollar memorial bill is about to be passed and finds the man’s major accomplishment was stealing Indian land. Meeting Cummings he takes her to see the framed Declaration of Independence there, pointing out the name of his ancestor among the signatories. The group that gather applaud his comment that the men who signed were not afraid of losing re-election. There’s a nice balance between the pair. Tracy doesn’t buy her common people sympathies (”Why if you got in a covered wagon you’d ask for a chauffeur”) and she jokes about him having come to destroy the scribes & pharisees. The leads may be out gunned by Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur in a masterwork but they are still two of the most interesting players of the day here given substantial material to handle.

Constance Cummings

Tracy rehearses his maiden speech to Cummings (right), complete with a Lincoln quote, only for the film to cut to the House Floor with a pompous delegate voicing the same passage and when Tracy opposes the Digger Bill which is being passed without discussion, as a piece of blatant pork barrelling, he is not indulged by a sympathetic Chariman Harry Carey the way Jefferson Smith will be but thrown out by the constable on the instruction of dour Berton Churchill. A few of the members cheer him with big grins. A couple comment across the aisle, an incident to be repeated exactly in Mr. Smith. Afterward Cummings observes “Some of the applause was genuine.”

Similarly the power broker interactions between Alan Dinehart and Walter Connolly anticipate those between Ed Arnold and Claude Rains and, while we’re referencing Frank Capra, newbie politician Tracy’s orations can also be seen as a run-up for Walter Huston’s in American Madness which also features Constance Cummings, even if Connolly being bribed with his poker wins is less weighty than the Presidential nod being used to lure Claude Rains’ White Knight in Mr. Smith.

The Cummings socialite character is replaced (whatever became of Astrid Alwyn?) by Jean Arthur's girl reporter in Mr. Smith for a stand out Capra characterisation.

However, for Merry Go Round Dinehart is busily giving the big pitch to Cummings. “I have plans. Many plans. Never in the history of this country has there been a greater opportunity offered a strong man. Italy has her Mussolini, Russia her Stalin. Such a man will rise in America. A man, not a follower, but a leader. One strong enough to take the law into his own hands if necessary - a man of destiny.” This is the recuring, never realised leftist fantasy of an American dictator which is put forward with variation in Hollywood movies like Gabriel Over the White House, Meet John Doe, Keeper of the Flame or All the King’s Men - Columbia prominent in that list. However our ex-soldier hero confronts Dinehart precipitating an ending where the American Way is triumphant as it is in all of these films - count Mr. Smith, Mr. Deeds, Wild Boys of the Road, The Farmer’s Daughter on through The Best Man and All The President’s Men along with those other oval office features The President Vanishes, Gabriel Over the White House and the lighter The Phantom President, to produce a persuasive national self-image, one that many observers ridicule.  

 

Washington Merry Go Round, like David Harum or The Mating Call which I’ve previously commented, are all directed by James Cruze of Covered Wagon fame, whose sound career we’d all written off because the examples that were available were pretty punk - The Great Gabbo with Von Stroheim as a ventriloquist or Gangs of New York which they assure us is derived from the same piece as the Scorsese film and has Charles Bickford in a double role doing an early Sam Fuller script. As more of Cruze’s lost work bubbles to the surface, we start to sense a grossly under-estimated talent.

I was particularly aware of the Capra comparison having just watched that excellent 2 K restoration (James Stewart - right) of Mr. Smith,

the last film I’d seen theatrically before lockdown, a benchmark theatrical movie experience. While Washington Merry Go Round occasionally approaches the later film and, in a couple of places, excedes it (the veterans’ tent city exposition), it is finally overshadowed because Cruze’s technique has become limited (awkward cuts, reliance on studio and process) and the small scale ending is tame after this build-up. It’s high points, Tracy’s two orations, come early in the film where Jimmy Stewart’s is properly the finale of Mr. Smith. Both films rely on simplification and melodrama but Capra was a master film maker at the peak of his powers - not afraid to stage the re-energising of Jefferson Smith by the crusading girl reporter in the molded shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, where Cruze falls back on a straight forward presentation of the script content. Well that’s pretty good but...

You never get to the end of old Hollywood and that’s a big slice of what makes it rewarding. Researching these I was going to look at Constance Cummings in 1932’s Behind the Mask on YouTube but that proved (curses!) to be a second or so out of synch. 

 

Lee Tracy

For Lee Tracy I came across Power of the Press from 1940, one of the B Movies he was reduced to after his dismissal from Viva Villa ended his run as one of the most conspicuous and individual early sound Hollywood leads - think The Strange Love of Molly Louvaine, Hold All Wires Dr. X or Blessed Event. Well, the good news is that the copy on You Tube is excellent, probably lifted from the transfer used for the much admired Sam Fuller box set. Fuller gets story credited on Power of the Press which has no connection to the silent Capra movie of the same name. Hopes rise when we see it’s set in Fuller world of newspaper journalism throwing around the names of Horace Greeley, Henry Dana and Abraham Lincoln. 

 

We kick off with New York Gazette editor Minor Watson reading an editorial attacking the anti patriotic stance (“We are fighting England’s wars”) of his paper written by one time colleague jowly Guy Kibbee for his back water local sheet where businessmen pay for advertising space with sacks of unsprouted potatoes and the type-setter bangs the front page in by hand. Watson is about to denounce the un American interests of publisher and 45% shareholder Otto Kruger, yet another would be despot running “his own little private Gestapo” who has his hitman Victor Jory shoot Watson at the banquet microphone and manages to plant the blame on young “Radical” Larry Parkes, who Watson had fired leaving Parkes to struggle to look after his ailing mother.

Bottle blonde secretary Gloria Dixon (They Won't Forget) however has a letter from guilt- ridden Watson appointing Kibee the metropolitan paper’s editor and she waves a “photostatic copy” of it under Kruger’s nose. He steps back giving Guy enough rope but News Chief Lee Tracy has already plated a story about a dollar a year man hoarding wartime supplies, which runs. In the resulting riot and fire, stores intended for a secret government military operation are destroyed. Kibee is about to admit defeat but a Taxi Driver friend of Frank Yakonelli, who has been represented as jumping off the news building roof, shows up with the information that he had actually come to provide an alibi for Parkes and they deduce that Yaconelli too was a victim of Jory, only to find Vic. shot dead in his flat. The piece gains a little urgency when Tracy now conscience fired intervenes, giving this talk bound programmer a bit of a lift.

The piece keeps on pulling up short for propaganda harangues which is neither interesting or convincing. The phrase “fake news” is already being repeated. For a film extolling diversity all we get is Yaconelli with a fruit peddler accent doing an ethnic, along with endless WW2 references - “His son is with MacArthur in Australia.” Director Lew Landers often had a deft hand with these (Night Waitress, Under the Tonto Rim). His B Movie Seven Keys to Baldpate is best of four versions. Here he has no scope. The warehouse fire is done in shots of reporter Don Bedoe ‘calling it in from the drugstore pay ‘phone. Landers probably shrugged his shoulders and started preparing for the next of the eight films he made in 1943 never imagining that anyone would scrutinise his work three quarters of a century later as an example of his studio employer’s house style, while Sam Fuller used his pay packet to go on a bender before they shipped him to Europe.

Barrie Pattison 2020

More French Film Festival - How to Be a Good Wife.

La Bonne épouse.

I gave up on the French Film Festival too early. The best was still to come but all is not lost. Martin Provost’s joyful La Bonne épouse / How to Be a Good Wife looks like being carried over for a season.

Like many of his fellow French film makers, M. Provost specialises in films with strong female leads. He did the so so Sage Femme with Deneuve and Catharine Frot and a couple with Yolande Moreau, who turns up again here, but this one comes as a surprise.

This time it’s the nineteen sixties and the École mènagère Van Der Beck residential academy for turning school girls into suitable French wives is doing it tough - fifteen less takers this year. Matronly headmistress Juliette Binoche heads up a staff comprised of her husband, lecherous François Berléand, his sister Moreau and, in a splendidly ego free performance, militant nun Noémie Lvovsky who learned how to handle shot guns in the Resistance and is prepared to use the one at the Institute on young male “communists” who trespass.

When not being taught useful skills like needlework, grocery purchases and flipping
pan cakes, the girls discuss boys and clothes but the news of social change is seeping
though to them.

This already troubled situation is about to come under even more pressure with
accidental death, bankruptcy and suicide all requiring response from Juliette who has
never learned to drive the car or balance a check book. Fortunately help is at hand in
the shape of bearded banker Edouard Baer who appears to represent all the things
they warn the girls to be wary of as he lures Juliette to the shack-up resort on the hill.

The women expand into their suddenly found roles. Juliette discovers the rejuvenating
effect of slacks and Yolande overcomes her broken heart in a manner that delights all
her associates.

With the situation more or less in hand, Juliette gets the institute covered by a news
crew (in black and white four by three) in preparation for their participation in a Paris
Home Economics Fair.

Binoche & Lvosky - La bonnne épouse.

Their bus arives but it’s Le Joli mai and the roads are jammed. Now energised, Juliette declares she will not let the girls miss Paris. The Eiffel Tower hoves into viewon the sky line and they switch into a splendid musical number with the cast callingout the names of women role models as they dance down the roads. To Frida Karlo and Marta Hari, Lvosky riposts  Joan of Arc. They could have had Agnes Varda whowould have been at home in this one -  after all they’ve already cited Jean Vigo in apillow fight showering white slowmo feathers like the one in his Zéro de conduite.

That’s the second time this week for one of these musical finales, my having watched Jack Hulbert in You Tube’s 1936 Jack of All Trades where they put on the dancing shoes to wind up their straight material. It works a treat in films made seventy years apart.

This one’s a source of genuine delight, not the least from finding Binoche triumphantly at the top of her game representing that apparently inexhaustible line of French divas around whom their industry has been able to build a succesion of superior French A feature Women’s  movies - Gina Manés, Michèle Morgan, Annie Giradot. This one doesn’t preach. It celebrates its premise with contagious joy.

Unsurprising that it takes a bloke to make a good feminist movie.

Barrie Pattison 2020.

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL : 2020.

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL : 2020.

Well the French Film Festival, high point of the Art Cinema year, came back again after a plague break. I find myself considering it with some ambivalence. All my life theatrical movie screenings have been the thing I looked forward to. However their spot is gradually being usurped by the desk top. The experiences I share are more often film found on line. Now I sit in a near empty auditorium at risk of my life watching a twenty dollar (with piddling concessions) movies when I could be safe at home with a three dollar one from the Taiwanese event.

How the theatre chains react to this situation is going to be crucial. People used to say that there was nothing wrong with the movie business that better films couldn’t fix. I’d like to think that was still true.

What could be more typical of the traditional Film Festival movie than L'adieu à la nuit /Farewell to the Night directed by André Téchiné and extending the line of his 1998  La fille du RER / Girl on the Train and 1994 and Les roseaux sauvages / Wild Reeds, mixing issues with drama.

Adieu á la nuit - Deneuve

A big French A feature with their great female star and an important subject, Adieu á la nuit raises hopes for a major Téchiné-Catherine Deneuve collaboration. She’s gained the gravitas to carry one of these and still has the status to make it bankable.

Here mature Deneuve runs an equine center (harness racing, children’s riding lessons) in with her cherry orchard in the South of France. The symbolism (?) of the eclipse and the depredadtions by wild boor just protract what is a long and leisurely paced film but things focus with the return of Kacey Mottet Klein, the grandson she has raised since his mother died in suspicious circumstances and his dad took off to form another family about which the boy has no curiosity.

Catherine finds the kid secretly praying to Allah on a rug in the field, his return to the faith of their Algerian families coming as a surprise. She’s more at ease with his pairing with winning Oulaya Amamra and surprised that he doesn’t want to take advantage of her indulgent attitude to the pair if they want to sleep together in his separate flat.

Turns out his going off to Canada story is a front for the arrangements he’s made to join ISIS in Syria, taking the girl along. Trouble is they are short on the costs involved (they have to pay for their own Kalashnikov and weapons training). The young pair collect his internet mentor Stéphane Bak for an induction session cross cut with the cheery family gathering back at the ranch.

Klein resolves to steal the money and is amused and off put to find that it’s Amamra quoting scripture become the arbiter of his actions. Catherine springs them and recruits returned ISIS fighter Kamel Labroudi (in Un prophete) on parole, seeking him out playing with his little daughter in the park, his court ordered ankle bracelet visible. She forces a confrontation with the grandson but that doesn’t work out. "He won't come back" the veteran advises.

Adieu á la nuit - Kacey Mottet Klein

 

 

 

This one could use tighter handling to justify its ambitions, with the thriller elements (escape, chase, menacing fundamentalists) more involving than it’s core family drama. There’s no uncertainty about where the makers stand but the young recruits are treated with sympathy and some measure of respect. It’s a more mature work than a lot of what we have seen from Téchiné.

The incidentals are superior- the horse training, the elderly land lord wanting Amamra’s company, the mullahs counciling by facebook, nursing the aged patients in a singalong, the winning hijab girl explaining that it’s easy to get multiple husbands among the fighters. Production values couldn’t be beaten.

The festival also provided another run on Hôtel des ameriques the 1981 (!) Téchiné-Denueve study of amour fou in Biaritz in which neurotic relationships and uneven pacing are already present.

Dominik (Harry Is Here to Help) Moll’s  Seules les bêtes / Only the Animals is a handsomely mounted French thriller, contrasting poverty striken Africa and the snowy French countryside, another Colonial heritage piece.

First up young Guy Roger 'Bibisse' N'Drin is cycling on an Abidjan  road with a reluctant goat strapped to his back but we shift into French dairy country in where travelling insurance representative Laure Calamy (Claire Darling) is making it with edgy farmer Damien Bonnard (Dunkirk) who protests “I only talk to the animals and my dog.” Her own dairyman husband Denis Ménochet (Inglorious Bastards) is scornful but when he fails to feed his animals the plot thickens.

In episodes introduced by the first names of five of the principals, the story weaves back and forward over the same first inexplicable incidents which finally fall into place. The white car abandoned on the road in the snow belongs to the film’s most familiar face Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who doesn’t get to speak till well after her body has been found and hidden in a hay bale cave by Bonnard, drawing too much attention from his dog. She proves to be having an affair with sexy waitress Nadia Tereszkiewicz  half her age whose video likeness is being peddled by the African stolen identity internet scammer delighted to have gotten a taker so he can blow the money on his side of the planet sponsoring rave parties. There he re-encounters his winning childhood sweetheart and as it turns out the mother of his child but now the mistress of a French businessman visitor.

Calamities strike leaving young Gendarme Bastien Bouillon as baffled as everyone else and then the cops burst into the grubby shared room from which 'Bibisse' N'Drin is running his scam - but there’s more.

Seul les Animaux - 'Bibisse' N'Drin

It’s curious but the Young Africans on about reclaiming colonial debt again emerge as the most sympathetic characters, here battling poverty, first world imperialism and what the high rise godfather describes as a destiny that demands a split of the take.

The rotation of it’s multiple characters shows considerable ingenuity backed by strong film making and the required quota of sex, violence and hostile fate, which would have got a less coincidence-heavy film over the finish line.

Michel (The Artist) Hazanavicius’ Le prince oublié / The Lost Prince is an ambitious under -taking with elaborate fantasy settings and effects, a great cast and an interesting idea. Unfortunately it doesn’t jell into the kind of Wizard of Oz hit they obviously hoped for.

Single parent Omar Sy (nice to see him speaking perfect English in the new Call of the Wild) finds that as his daughter Sarah Gaye becomes a teenager, he is marginalised in her life and in the bedtime stories he used to tell her where he appeared as the Prince who rescues her from candy land perils by waving red swim flippers, his place taken by Néotis Ronzon the so blonde boy in her class.

Unrecognisable Francois Damiens' El Farto, the black wearing heavy in the dreams, guides Omar on a doomed attempt to kidnap the new prince and cast him into the pit of oblivion, with the fast fading Oubliés, the see-through toy characters who once inhabited the girl’s dreams. Neighbour (she always carries round her door in the limbo setting) Bérénice Bejo provides some comfort and when Gaye runs off to the misrepresented birthday party where the older kids deride her sketch of Ronzon, they have to band together with the new prince to save the day.

Despite Sy’s indestructible charm, some of his scenes are embarrassing as much for the audience as the characters. The design aspect has its moments. The knitted elephant is a winner but there are off putting déja vus - the walking inflatable with the goldfish inside like the manga Kimi to, nami ni noretara / Ride Your Wave and the ending repeating the last of the Toy Story films. Hazanavicius is trying to maintain his place on the cinema’s cutting edge and watching him is not without interest.

Films about the group are a characteristic French product - people who chose to spend their time together over the years. You can see the beginning in items like Duvivier’s 1931 Cinq Gentlemen Maudits / Moon Over Morrocco or 1936 La Belle équipe, already different to celebrated Howard Hawks comrade movies like Ceiling Zero, Only Angels Have Wings or Red Line 7000 from the ‘States. Claude Sautet does one of those in Classe tous risques (1960) before he makes the ultimate group movie Vincent, François, Paul et les autres in 1974 and they’ve been trying to get it right ever since. Actor Guillaume Cantet joined in with his also all star Les Petit Muchoirs in 2010 which I didn’t altogether buy.

Well M. Cantet and his celebrity cast are back again with Nous finirons ensemble / We’ll End Up Together which picks up the first film’s characters ten years later. François Cluzet is cleaning up his neglected coastal chalet when the gang arrive unsuspectedly to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Turns out there’s bad blood between him and Gilles Lellouche after their last meeting.  Some of the group have produced children who sit about texting, bored with the whole thing. Benoît Magimel has come out and brought a boy friend. Cotillard hair blonded manages to get attention with every appearance and Laurent Lafitte finds himself on Lelouche’s pay role as assistant. 

Turns out that Cluzet has split with wife Clémentine Baert and is turning the place over to her (following a disaster with “the Trocadero affair”). After a bit of raised voice dialogue they all move down the road reconciled but uneasy. When Baert shows up there’s the usual friction but neighbor Jose Garcia shows an interest in her, changing the dynamic.

Nous finirons ensemble

 

 

 

This is a very long movie (134 min.) and it looks as if it will outstay it’s welcome even with nice touches like the baby fingering Lelouche’s face or an outing to the disco but a boating disaster snaps all the threads back together (didn’t we see this in Palm Beach last year?) with a superior action scene where local boat man Joël Dupuch comes into his own.

Fielding the fresh French talent of the moment, Antoine de Bary’s Mes jours de gloire /My Days of Glory recalls the Truffaut Antoine Doinel films but this one is more perverse and more probing as one time child movie star Vincent Lacoste finds his late twenties slipping though his fingers without work, security - or sex - but as it rolls on we finally get something substantial.

Mes jours de gloire - Vincent Lacoste

He’s first seen calling out the fire brigade with a gas leak story to get into the flat where he’s lost the keys. It’s not long before he’s locked out again. Moving in with mum shrink Emmanuelle Devos and dad Christopher Lambert, whose major preoccupation is mixing tomato and vodka, doesn't make things any more secure beyond giving him the chance to pocket bank notes from mum’s purse.

His loser friends are no help and getting together with winning school girl Noée Abita (in Le grand bain), when he's having trouble getting it up, is bound to be a disaster - discussion about her first time ashamed of her small boobs. Erectile disfunction is impossible at 27 the cheery doctor prompts. Viagra jokes and the scene with the chum’s tot enjoying Vince’s virtual reality porno follow.

Vincent loses the leading role in a life of De Gaulle to the fellow actor who jokes about fear of nudity. They give Vince a make-up that makes him look like Adolph Hitler which they have him wear in the street.

Devos' reappearance gives the piece the extra substance it needs and then at the last minute they manage to turn it all around one more time.

First time feature director de Bary has expanded the film from the short he did with juvenile of the moment Lacoste. The excellent performances and film craft make it all kind of winning.

Vincent Lacoste is also in Christophe Honoré’s  Chambre 212  / On a Magical Night but I was less enthused. It launches with fortiesish Chiara Mastroianni refusing to be a Feydeau character and emerging topless from the closet in her young lover Harrison Arevalo’s student flat as he makes out with his Asian fiancée Clara Choï.

Greeted by a succession of younger men, Mastroianni wanders through the streets. Husband musician-actor Benjamin Biolay learns about all this from her mobile which he indignantly flings into the family wash – unreasonably the film suggests. After their argument she moves across the road of designer Stéphane Taillasson’s giant studio decor, to a hotel room where she can see into their flat over the Montparnasse seven screen complex opposite. We spend the picture trying to recognise the display posters - Kiss Me Deadly included.

Through the night Chiara is visited by corporeal versions of her past associations including Lacoste, twenty year old version of the husband, and Camille Cottin (again) who they desperately try to make glamorous though she’s only prepared to get down to her scanties while Mastroianni and Lacoste go the full Monty. Cottin was the piano teacher lover Chiara won him away from and she and Lacoste are quite happy to reconnect. She brings the twelve year old son they would have had if they stayed together which understandably intrigues Lacoste but this turns into a life sized doll when it looks as if Chiara will end up with the husband. The space fills up with mum Marie-Christine Adam, granny Claire Johnston-Cauldwell and a squad of Mastoianni’s young lovers. Lacoste punches out her cousin who he felt should have known better.

Things work out in the snow on the street below next morning in front of the Rosebud (!) Cafe. The piece has a kind of big budget, studiofied Jacques Demy look but a totally different feel.

All up it’s a bit tacky.

I’ve done better (a lot better) out of French Film Festivals but once again there's always the chance that, inhibited by the price, I missed the best items. Well we’re all waiting to see what happens next and not just to foreign movie events.

Barrie Pattison 2020

Koenigsmark

Storm Tossed Masses.
 

Elissa Landi

People think Euro Pudding movies appear with the Common Market and operators round The Continent scrambling to put together talent with name recognition who they might be able to flog as a bundle to the US. In fact the practice was established in the nineteen twenties and thirties and you might consider it as having a finest hour then when they all piled into England and France looking for a dollar income or escaping the Nazi threat.

The Germans Robert Siodmark, Fritz Lang and Georg W. Pabst found a home in Paris while Hungarians, Frenchmen, Russians and Czechs set up, slogging away in London next to Arthur Robison and Karl Grune, Raoul Walsh and Alan Dwan. The local British talent by and large took a dim view of this and during the war the Film Union organised to keep all these hand kissing foreigners out of their industry, though Duvivier and Edmund Greville did slip under the wire in the forties and fifties.

The 1935 Koenigsmark had always triggered my curiosity, a costume melodrama fronted by Pierre Fresnay and the glamorous Elissa Landi and directed by Maurice Tourneur. There at last it was in it’s English language edition Crimson Dynasty on You Tube and in not a bad copy ripped off the BBC too. 

I was prepared for the worst. These interesting looking pudding pictures are usually disappointments, with Robison’s The Informer and Alex Korda’s Henry VIII, Don Juan & Rembrandt notable exceptions. 

 

However Koenigsmark opens imposingly with Elissa making a forced for reasons of state marriage with older Grand Duke Alan Jeayes who never gets past her bed chamber door. His monocle twisting brother John Lodge, a pillar of pudding pictures, looks on disapprovingly. Royal wedding, lines of suits of armor, household cavalry and a grand ball are all displayed with the imposing imagery of Tourneur’s best silents. The visuals, script and performance are pretty good.

Then Pierre Fresnay brilliantined, coated with more Pancake 5 and lipstick than they are using on Elissa and speaking English with just the right amount of accent shows up for the spot of tutor to Lodge’s young son (what happens to him?) and things slide.

 

Maurice Tourneur's fun La Main du Diable Noël Roquevert & Fresnay

Fresnay could be an imposing actor. Think Le Courbeau or even the thirties Man Who Knew Too Much but his “comic little French professor” is a feeble pivot to put next to Jeayes broken hearted aristocrat, Marcelle Rogez' maybe lesbian confidante and Frank Vosper’s loyal henchman who is not what he seems.

An expedition to the Congo disposes of Jeayes and Elissa, in what looks like Marlene Dietrich’s cast off outfits from Scarlet Empress, declines to be a passive executor of his legacy. Pierre uncovers a sinister plot for which Lodge torches the (model shot) palace and Elissa calls in some old  favors before taking to the Swiss highway in the big white Rolls.

Two things ultimately do this one in. While it’s crucial that action unrolls in the tangled web of pre WW1, it screams 1930s, particularly in the clothes of the romantic leads. Second, it’s all so British. We can’t help feeling that the parallel French version for which they summon Antonin Artaud and Jean Debucourt to back up the stars, would play better. This is the thing for which Hollywood historical films were constantly derided by British critics put off by American accents. From this distance those U.S. films play better than their British counterparts.

All up, this one can hold it’s own with the similar films Greta Garbo was putting out at the time, even if it’s not in the event against Mayerling.

Beyond it’s ninety minutes as uneven entertainment, it has the appeal of it’s companion cosmopolitan ventures - include Swede Victor Seastrom’s  Under the Red Robe, German Luis Trenker’s The Challenge, Czech Karel Lamac’s They Met In the Dark, Frenchman Edmund Greville’s Mademoiselle Docteur, Russian Eugene Frenke’s A Woman Alone. It’s more interesting to see people who knew how to do it thrash about than to watch later home grown British talent like John Harlow or Arthur Crabtree plod though assignments.

Maurice Tourneur's sound career is miserably documented in English film literature. Inconsistent, it does have peaks with the war time La Main du diable and early sound Au Nom de la loi. I'd really like to do a quick run through. Put it on my to do list.

Barrie Pattison 2020

Wild Bill

Wild Bill Wellman.

Wading through the video swamp that is You Tube I noticed Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick - The Life and Times of William A. Wellman, a 1999 feature documentary portrait of the  director on whom my attention has focused since I discovered him all those years back in my first, teen age burst of serious movie going. A whole film about Wild Bill Wellman. Count me in!

The documentary, rightly I think, brackets him with Frank Capra and John Ford as the most important figures of “classic” Hollywood. Tough luck Howard Hawks, Cecil B. De Mille, Lewis Milestone and Michael Curtiz. It’s produced by Wellman’s son and directed by Todd Robinson, son of Edward G. and director of the 2006 John Travolta Lonely Hearts. These family connections seem to have facilitated getting an impressive list of interviews. Though It’s unfair to pick among the production’s rich selection, particularly interesting are the subject’s twenty year younger wife Dorothy Coonan Wellman, star of his 1933 Wild Boys of the Road, James Whitmore, Gregory Peck, Michael Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Sidney Poitier. (I had to think about him - the answer is 1956's Goodbye My Lady).  This is both the production’s strength and limitation. 

Robinson & Martin Scorsese.

Not unlike Kevin Brownlow’s work, this one foregrounds the material representing the interview subjects. The coverage of  early years lays out material already often familiar -  WW1 Dawn patrols with the Lafayette Escadrille and detail on the meaning of his two “confirmed kills”, Wellman's horrendous plane wreck or landing his civilian flight on Douglas Fairbanks' polo ground next to the star's open air party. Less familiar is detail on his association with alcoholic director Bernard Durning or his first marriage to forgotten movie star Helene Chadwick whose mail he would subsequently find himself delivering as he worked his way up through the ranks of studio gophers.

There’s the giant gamble represented by Wings and it’s success making him throw off the restraints of a safe Paramount contract, realist films at Warners, block busters for Selznick and a deal with Zanuck which had him barter making The Oxbow Incident for his unwilling services on Thunderbirds and Buffalo Bill, followed by programmers at MGM with Nancy Davis /Regan providing surprisingly articulate recollections.

Then we settle in for a blow by blow on the fifties Warner movies which had Clint Eastwood, Tom Laughlin, Tab Hunter, Mitchum, Poitier and regrettably briefly Jane Wyman on hand to comment. These are discussed in detail though even here an Ernest Gann side bar omits Island in the Sky, the best of them. 

Island in the Sky - John Wayne.

This documentary just isn’t about to comment the fifties fall-away in Warner quality which left new faces like Elia Kazan and Jack Webb scrambling to make important work in an environment which had drained people once studio masthead talents - Roy Del Ruth, Raoul Walsh, William Keighley, even Curtiz. There's a telling interview with Henry Blanke in James Silke’s studio history “Here’s Looking at You Kid” which discusses this decline in standards.

These final, compromised films get detailed coverage while major early Wellman works like Beggars of Life (1928) or So Big (1932) just don’t figure. Heroes for Sale only scores a passing reference.

Ox Bow Incident - Fonda & Harry Morgan

The production does field some interesting insights like an excellent montage where foreground objects obscure key moments - Fonda reading the Ox Bow letter, Anthony Quinn’s Buffallo Bill death - and seeing Wings, Public Enemy, Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred, Beau Geste, Ox Bow and G.I Joe butted together confirms Wellman’s extraordinary status. Alec Balwyn’s self efacing delivery of the commentary is exemplary.

OK, there are a whole lot of William Wellmans, not omitting the one who alarmed Eddie Bracken with his sadistic practical jokes. This film puts on screen someone very different to the assured, sardonic retiree I’d met twenty years before Wild Bill was made. He had the London National Film Theater hanging on every word and, as a wind up, declared he was going to recite a love poem, taking out a sheet of paper from which he read an embarrassing lachrymose verse. The organisers were studying their toe caps before it ended “and there’s the love of a child for it’s mother/ but there’s a love that surpasses all other/ the love of one drunken bum for another.” They adored him - me too.

This film’s Wild Bill Wellmann, with rough edges removed, was maybe not the most interesting but it remains a welcome addition.

George Brent, Barbara Stanwyck and Wellman Shooting Purchase Price 1932. 

 

Barrie Pattison 2020