FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2023.

Well, it’s that time or times again. Palace seems to find their French Seasons to be their big earners and who’s to complain? That’s a year’s worth of French movies jammed into a month and on a theater screen with subtitles. There are always curious omissions but these programs, based on original Box Office, are usually much better than the festivals based on critical selections - with distributor whims playing into both. Doesn’t look like too many surprises this year - two Jean Dujardin, two Gerard Depardieu, two Benoît Poelvoorde and, particularly welcome, the new Michel Ocelot animation Le Pharaon,le sauvage et la princesse.

To kick off, writer Ivan Calbérac’s La degustation / The Tasting is French to excess - two so charming leads planted in attractive surroundings where they have alfresco meals surrounded by winning character actors.  Alcoholism, obsession and wasteful luxury are in there to give it substance. The films of Benoît Delépine & Gustave Kervern and a whole lot more operate on the same basis and The Tasting is a really nice example. 

Bernard Campan has been a star for decades without drawing our attention. He was  opposite Monica Belucci in Bertrand Blier’s 2005 Combien tu m'aimes? Here he’s spot on as the rural community liquor store owner, whose finances and liver are giving him simultaneous problems, when local midwife/ sage femme baby-obsessed Isabelle Carré comes into the shop. They are of course just what the other needs. She’s a suitable pupil for his fine wines instruction. She’s already complimented the priest on the communion wine. He sets up an in-store tasting for her, for which only his old chum Eric Viellard and the subsidised work experience intern Mounir Amamra show up. The kid prompts that Viellard has eyes for Isabelle, planting an extra tension in a comic scene.

The piece plays out with an off key choir master, lovable derelicts, a picturesque funeral, Spanish scenics, AA, a threatening Arab hoon and near a death experience. It all looks great. I’m sure even Laurent Aknin’s orchestra is beautiful. 

Carré has matured from winning jeune première to a star in the Danielle Darrieux, Annie Giradot, Juliette Binoche line. The sustained close-up where they play Sidney Bechet's "Petits fleurs" over her face is a formidable climax.

I feel invested in Arnaud Desplechin since I waded through a Paris retrospective, that even included his apprentice work with a young Emmanuelle Devos, and I rated his films among the best from the years two thousands, so I homed in on Frère et soeur / Brother and Sister from a script he did with regular collabotator (Jimmy P.) Julie Peyr. This is another of the director’s family re-union cycle, which here becomes opaque. They spend the film giving us clues to disfunction without putting them into any shape and incidentals, like Marion Cotillard freaking with the helpful black pharmacien (prominent in the trailer) or Catholic Melvil Poupard lost at the Jewish funeral, tend to protude from more significant material.

The opening gets attention with Cotillard in the rain, turned back from the gathering for the child’s death and the multiple traffic accident where the old couple find the teenager still alive but fearful after crashing her mother’s car. But we cut to the too peaceful rural scenic and the piece is already in trouble.

Siblings Cotillard & Poupaud continue to encounter during the film. We get her young, expressing an unexplained hatred of him with a grin, the hysterics when he presents himself in a bar at wife-to-be Golshifteh (About Elly) Farahani’s suggestion or passing out, when their supermart trolleys crash, and final reconciliation.

A successful actress (a Métro poster lists the season of classics of which she’s the star), Marion can’t forgive the descriptions of her in brother Melvil’s books.

Out of sequence passage of time is identified (none too successfully) by the length of Cotillard’s hair. The on-screen incidents cluster round the hospitalisation of their aged parents. Performances and dim imagery are polished (Farahani & shrink Patrick Timsit do register) without making any impact and this one is too long. It’s record of day to day French life - shops, bars, homes, is its best feature.

Michel Hazanavicius was riding the wave after his Jean Dujardin OSS117 movies and L’artist but his attempts to follow up seemed to have strayed off message. Well, Hazanavicius is back, even if he’s fencing his bets by re-working a runaway Japanese hit, the 2017 Kamera o tomeru na! which cost twenty five grand and netted twenty five million.

Hard to say anything about his Coupez! / Final Cut without revealing the surprise structure. It’s curiously like Babylon with it’s filmmaking film, three-part form. Sufficient to say that the A listers, including Mrs. Hazanavicius, knew what they were doing signing on for something where they appear in a single take (faked with whip pans) zombie cheapo. 

Grégory Gadebois gets a particularly effective gross out innings. Roman Duris does strenuous effectively and hold-over from the Nip original, straight faced Yoshiko Takehara, cements the tone nicely. The wannabe film student daughter with the Quentin Tarantino T-shirt also gets some of the best moments. This one just keeps on getting better.

 

Director-writer-cameraman etc. Quentin Dupieux seems determined to corner the market on weird, starting his career with a film about a murderous rubber tire. He’s attracted big feature talent to his work - Jean Dujardin in 2019‘s Le daim and Benoît Poelvoorde in the superior 2018 Au poste. Now, I’ll watch anything with Poelvoorde (currently on Netflix in Comment je suis devenu super-héros / How I Became a Super Hero eg.) so I try hard not to feel cheated when he’s only in the last few minutes of Dupieux’ new Fumer fait tousser / Smoking Causes Coughing.

Fumer fait tousser / Smoking Causes Coughing - Tobacco Force.

The film battles to maintain it’s maker’s status as a genuine crazy, mixing elements of Godzilla movies, Horrible Histories, Charley’s Angels and the interjected sub-plots in Au Poste - include the truth telling diving bell found in the closet of the holiday home.

After titles backed by the Serge Gainsbourg number about God smoking Havanas, the super hero team, who draw on the lethal qualities of tobacco to overcome monsters, are first seen battling Olivier Afonso in a Tortusse suit which would have fit right in a Ishiro Honda movie. Though gore spattered, their passing boy fan is rapt, despite his dad’s smoking, which lycra uniform team leader Benzène/ Gilles Lellouche indicates as a filthy habit. The slobbering rodent operator, voiced by Alain Chabat, has the justiciers’ service robot drive them to an isolated riverside group retreat aimed at restoring team spirit. They are delighted to find the underground titanium bed luxury resort , with its own closet supermarket staffed full-time by Marie Bunel, who indignantly rebuffs Méthanol/Vincent LaCoste’s advances. Nicotine/Anaïs Demoustier  and Ammoniaque/Oulaya Amamra overcome Chabat’s powers of seduction. They begin to tell scary campfire stories. Though family man Mercure/ Jean-Pascal Zadi doesn’t get to do the one he keeps on volunteering, this is continued by a talking barracuda which Lelouche has scooped out of the river onto the grill. However it looks as if it will be too late to save humanity.

The striven-for tackiness gets attention but really the gag needs a better punch line. I didn’t feel sufficiently intrigued to do Dupieux’ Incredible But True also in the event.

 

By accident we get the beautiful people of the seventies juxtaposed here. Isabelle Adjani and Gerard Depardieu  front a couple of the festival films. 

Constance Meyer's Robuste kicks off with a downwards shot that resolves into a close-up of an aged, puffy Depardieu in a biker’s helmet. Turns out he’s a wasted but still famous veteran movie star who’s being prepped for the lead in a period movie. He needs a minder to get him through the pre-production and his regular bodyguard Steve Tientcheu puts forward twenty-something black girl wrestler Déborah Lukumuena - no ingenue type this one. She’s as solid as Depardieu but all muscle.

The film charts the pair’s journey through the different experience that the association represents for both of them. Lukumuena has an inconclusive relationship with white athlete Lukas Mortier and is not satisfying her trainer, Florence Janas, as she competes in mat matches. Her East European gymnast friend, become bar girl, Megan Northam, is impatient with her. Then Lukumuena find herself injected into her employer’s luxury life, complete with a young child of his current divorce given a puppy, an up market home with a tank of ugly, luminous ocean bottom fish and an admirer waiting on call outside his door.

 

 

            Robuste - Depardieu

Gerard is not an easy charge. Déborah has to down some eco-terrorist muggers (what was that all about?) and rush him into care.

On her first feature, Meyer has used an initially attention-getting style, constantly introducing unexpected material - sheet ice breaking away, the sound of skipping rope - and with each new detail adding to our understanding. This holds attention for a while till it becomes clear that a coherent revelation is not going to emerge from this mass of information. Gerard deliberately injecting himself into his keeper’s unsatisfactory relationship with Mortier, at the Chinese restaurant meal, is the giveaway.

What we end up with is a chance for aged and wasted Depardieu to strut his stuff, floating bloated in his pool, objecting to the costume designer’s squirrel coloured top coat and cravat,  being coached by Comédie Française-trained director Sébastien Pouderoux in eight different line readings on the word “non” and finally doing his on-camera performance with all the authority his years of experience have generated.

The film works out as a composite of Kevin Kostner‘s The Bodyguard and Omar Sy in
Intouchables - odd rather than satisfying.

At least it's better than Nicolas Bedos’ Mascarade where, by contrast, Adjani is splendidly preserved when she heads up the great cast - Pierre Niney, who gets better every film, a weathered François Cluzet, Marine Vacth from the Ozon Jeune et jolie, Emmanuelle Devos, Laura Morante, Charles Berling.

Mascerade - Ninney, Adjani.

This one has had the big push - opening night movie, picture on the cover of the booklet, quite sympathetic overseas press. It turns out to be like the bad restaurant - the food is awful but there’s a lot of it - two hours and fourteen minutes in fact. They are telling us it’s part of that cycle of Riviera high-life movies, complete with a Somerset Maugham opening quote. In fact, Mascerade is a messy attempt at some kind of crime and message piece with the somewhat familiar female empowerment plot that leaves us feeling sorry for the blokes. Ninney is one time star Adjani’s fancy man and he meets good-time girl Vacth, when she drives an admirer’s veteran car into the swimming pool. They determine to scam Adjani and property mogul Clouzet, with the aid of grudge-bearing Morante. We pick this up from material dropped into a courtroom scene. Things get complicated but none too involving as the grand design is unveiled.

All writer-director Bedos’ attempts to enliven proceedings just make things feel more forced - a scoop of Sunset Boulevard, intercutting two bed scenes, having the characters appear twice in the same frame as they plan their exploits. This is also one of the most consistently nasty films about and it’s that most grotesque form of production - a sex movie without nudity.    

I was feeling quite kindly disposed towards the event until I ran into Mascerade.

...and I tipped the documentary and Animated Oscar winners. I should try horses.

Barrie Pattison 2023.

The CIA and Selected Shorts.

Ennio

 Generally our local viewers can only consider the Oscar winning non fiction and short films with curiosity. However this year enterprising distributors are putting them up on the screen for our consideration - as Variety puts it.

I got another chance to see Ennio, The Glance of Music, his former collaborator Giuseppe Tornatore's three hour homage to Ennio Morricone, a great companion piece to Ettore Scola's Che strano chiamarsi Federico / How Strange to Be Named Federico tribute to his late colleague Fellini. Too many of these giants of the Italian film are gone now.

Tornatore's film relies of phenomenal library research, interviews and extracts, rather than dramatisation. Coming from a musical family and training with classical instructor Goffredo Petrassi before his years with RAI, cameras were never far away as Morricone acquired celebrity status. His sound stage recordings were filmed, providing material to cross cut with the finished films, here often with fabulous effect. Their Sacco & Vanzetti montage is a highlight that few films could follow - but they do. The two sources of course play in time like  the interviewees singing or miming the scores. The scene of Tim Roth at the piano in Tornatore's Legend of 1900 cutting back to the actual pianist performing, is particularly arresting

Scored by Morricone. Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto - Volonte & Bolcan

.

When bombarded with so much information, only a few elements can register. We hear about young Ennio listening to a Stravinski recital through a door left ajar, watching John Cage perform and later explaining that a typewriter was part of his own orchestration. Dario Argento says that having Morricone score your film is like winning an Oscar. We get Joan Baez' finale “Here’s to You...” lyrics as a last-minute addition, become a chart hit, Morricone's last public trumpet performance being on the church steps for Pontecorvo's wedding.  His honorary Oscar was seen as a farewell tribute only to be followed by the real thing for Hateful Eight. Add the out doors pop concert throng singing along with one of his chanted scorings. Morricone jokes that it will take two hundred years to evaluate Tarantino's comparison with Beethoven. 

The film does run on to the point of being exhausting but the material is all so good, what are you going to cut? 

 

Daniel Roher's Navalny sits on the edge of conviction but is certainly remarkable as a piece of actuality film making, as we watch the subject fall victim to Novichok poisoning, we are told at the hands of Vladimir Putin. YouTube star Russian Opposition figure Alexei Navalny emerges as an agreeable protagonist. He speaks ironic English with just the right amount of accent, like his fetching blonde wife & U.S. educated daughter. The family is a gift to an indignation stirring film maker.

Struck down while flying ("I was on my way home.Then I died") Navalny is rushed to a Vienna hospital. His Russian doctor watches him taken away and says "Nobody thanked me." The star turn is the introduction of "one very tired Belgian with a laptop", who uses the dark web to break the 'phone records of the Moscow Signal Institute represented as a Domestic Assassination machine and puts Navalny onto the line with a gullible scientist from the photos on the wall, claiming to be one of the team on the job of murdering him. In the back ground, the reporter's delight, as his plot delivers, is visible

  Navalny & wife.

We get Vladimir Putin saying that if he wanted Navalny dead, he'd be in the ground by now but he's nowhere near as media savvy. The film carries us with it, in a purpose-fit climax of Navalny flying back to Russia, where he faces the risk of death and, despite diverting the plane, being greeted by a mob of supporters calling his name - alerted by social media. His opponents will say it's all a CIA stunt but the film does include Navalny's involvement with Russian extreme Nationalists. I wonder whether I would have finished with their  footage of him feeding carrots to a German donkey, but as a film and argument Navalny is immensely involving.

 

Two programs of Oscar finalist shorts are also getting limited screening. Applause, applause!   I miss the Tournés d'animation.

The animated ones are usually the highlight. This year we got an Australian entry, Lachlan Pendragon's An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Believe Him pitting Griffith Film School against Disney and the Canadian NFB. 

Our toaster telemarketer 3D hero takes in his stride that a fellow office worker doesn’t extend below waste level, but he has to find himself dropped into a tray of spare faces (the boss’ jaw keeps falling off), where a live hand intrudes, and get advice from an Ostrich in the elevator to understand the situation. 

A good dash of The Matrix or Free Guy goes with the spooky content that separates this one from the joke 'toons it resembles. Comic design and smooth technique. OK but this is the big league.

Similarly Amanda Forbis & Wendy Tilby's The Flying Sailor is fine but lightweight for the Canadian Film Board studios which once produced L'homme qui plantait des arbres and Ryan.

Deliberately crude animation covers a British sailor, caught up in the 1917 Halifax Harbour Explosion glimpsed in the background. He's blown into the air for over a mile to arrive unharmed but naked - except for his boots. The protracted semi abstract flight echoes 2001.

Ice Merchants

João Gonzalez’ Portugese, drawn Ice Merchants is a near abstract account of a father and son whose living is abseiling down from their high mountain home to sell ice to the people below. The design is unfamiliar and the illusion of dropping unrestrained down the cliff face is striking.

Peter Baynton &  Charlie Mackesy's BBC The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is the pick of the animation and indeed the pick of the year’s Oscar shorts, a top of the line childrens’ film that inhabits a curious territory between realism and fantasy.

Without the need for any explanation the young boy is lost in the snow. Joined by a cake-loving talking Mole, they search for the boy’s home. The menacing fox is redeemed with the film’s best scene, in the flooded river. An imposing, sad white horse, which provides another revelation, rounds out the group.  "Home isn't always a place, is it?"

... and separated from the rest with a caption about unsuitable content we got Sara Gunnarsdóttir's My Year of Dicks  putting on screen Pamela Ribon's somewhat incoherent, episodic, thirty years in production five attempts to lose her virginity on turning fifteen in early-’90s Texas. 

It drops into the styles of Robert Crumb, manga and the psychedelics to illustrate the lead’s adventures, running through Cool Bitch Party and a sex talk from her unjustifiably laid-back dad. The givers and takers turn out to be a dismal lot though an old friend does come through.

The live artist material proved unexpectedly more remarkable. At thirty seven minutes Le pupille / The Pupils barely makes it as a short film and it arrives with the names of heavy hitters on the credits - producers Disney and Alfonso Cuarón, with script and direction from Alice Rohrwacher, sister of  Alba Rohrwacher, the pair having previously collaborated on features Lazzaro Felice / Happy as Lazzaro                                   and Le meraviglie  / The Wonders. 

It's off-putting to note how few of the films of busy Alba have come our way. Her unusual looks and willingness to depart from our expectations of a major star, not to mention a considerable talent, justify more attention. Here again she registers as part of an ensemble of less well known players, in the glamorless role of mother superior at a penniless nineteen forties girls' school, a story spun off a letter Elsa Morante (“My Brilliant Friend”) wrote.

The prayers of the innocent girl pupils are particularly sought by petitioners, including a well off, red lipped  Valeria Bruni Tedeschi putting a whole 70 eggs into a luxury scarlet Torte offering, outraging parsimonious Rowacher, who psyches the girls into giving up their treat - with one exception. Alba contemptuously gives the hold-out a delicious looking slice which ends squashed in her hand, from which, safely out of sight, the girls greedily take crumbs, while short-changed workers carry off the cake.

Strong on tacky Catholic imagery, with the kids costumed and posed for the Xmas pageant by habit-wearing sisters in sparse surroundings -  washing mouths with soap and talk about the evil eye. Nice. 

Anders Walter & Pipaluk K. Jørgensen's Ivalu is a handsome but over oblique mix of folklorico and message piece. In Greenland, young Mila Kreutzmann’s sister Ivalu goes missing so her granny takes in the girl’s national costume for Kreutzmann to join a welcome to the queen. Inconclusive blip insets suggest misdeeds of dad Angunnguaq Larsen. Striking visuals like the downwards opening shot of a raven flying over the bleak landscape. 

Good looking film with OK performances and unfamiliar setting.

Cyrus Neshvad's La Valise Rouge / The Red Suitcase is a telling account of sixteen year old Iranian head scarf girl Nawelle Ewad, found looking for her red carry bag at the carousel at Luxembourg airport. When opened by officials, it proves to contain art materials, including portraits of her, hair spread. Though no one speaks the girl's language, the signatures on the paintings match her passport, asserting her claim to the bag. Turns out grey haired man Sarkaw Gorany she is avoiding, waiting with the bunch of roses, is her arranged husband now trying to trace her with his iPhone. She turns her pile of Ayatollah-face currency notes into about thirty Euros which the coach driver scoops off for her fare, only to have the angry husband-to-be search his vehicle and retrieve the red bag from the luggage space where she is hiding. 

A disturbing message piece which fits its eighteen minutes nicely, this one is smoothly made.

Tom Berkeley, Ross White's An Irish Goodbye starts with father Paddy Jenkins bringing scrapping brothers Lorcan (James Martin), having Downs Syndrome, and Turlough (Seamus O'Hara) come back for their mother's funeral and intent on selling up the family farm and planting his reluctant sibling with an aunt. Participation is made conditional on completing the dead mother’s hundred-item bucket list which includes sitting for a naked portrait and putting the urn of ashes into space with fireworks rockets.  

This one is an agreeable miserabilist two-reeler made appealing by the brother’s affection.

Pick of the batch is Nattrikken / Night Ride directed & scripted by Eirik Tveiten. Waiting at the Trondheim tram terminus on a freezing night, diminutive Sigrid Kandal Husjord is told she can’t shelter in the car while driver Øyvind Uhlving takes his break but activates the door while he’s away. A series of mistakes has her start the tram and picking up from a stop she over runs to the abuse of hoon passengers, who move on Ola Hoemsnes Sandum riding in the front. She proves to be in drag. Asked for the driver’s protection, Husjord leaves bully Axel Barø Aasen to drive and comforts the escapee on the roadside bench.

Best moment, the cop car lights passing them in pursuit of the tram. Feature standard production values.

There aren't too many nights like this available at the movies now. I enjoyed this one.

Barrie Pattison - 2023

Rider Hagard Sued

The Secret Spring - musician

The arrival of a nice tinted copy of Léonce Perret’s three hour 1923 Koenigsmark / The Secret Spring on La Cinémathèque Française’s Henri streaming site fired up my deja vus. It brought back the nineteen fifties week end when I threaded that dupey 16mm. of the silent Jaques Feyder L’atalantide on ABC TVs new Steenbeck editing table, the copy the Federation of Film Archives stiffed the National Library with, to sustain the illusion that they were looking after them and get them to subscribe. The Sunday shift gathered round, intrigued by an already decades old movie.  

I remember thinking that was a testimony to vintage popular film. These were people who would have ignored Un chien Andalou.  

Koenigsmark and L’atalantide are both derived from novels by Academie Française member Pierre Benoît. He and his work inhabit a long past era. Rider Hagard once sued him for copyright infringement over the resemblances between “She” and “L’atalantide.” You could make a case for the Benoît plots as accounts of women in power, currently topical, but watching the The Secret Spring did seem like a chore, mandated to fill in that gap in knowledge of French film between Louis Feuillade and René Clair. However, as sixty years ago, I found myself sucked in.

I’ve already discussed the plot in my July 1st 2020 coverage of the 1937 Pierre Fresnay - Elissa Landi version Crimson Dynasty, which carries a credit to Perret for scenario, a holdover from his work preparing the sound re-make, halted by Perret’s death.

Koenigsmark 1923 / The Secret Spring: Huguette Duflos, Marcya Capri in decor.

 The silent Secret Spring clocks in nearly half an hour longer giving time to adjust to it’s tempo and frame of reference - extended stag hunt and and a more convincing fire sequence, without the obvious model work of the thirties film, and it contains the same peculiarities, notably the fleeting appearance of the Duke’s son. Clara Tambour shows up briefly as an exotic dancer for no particular reason. The hint of lesbian attraction to lady in waiting Mélusine de Graffenfried is clearer in the sound film, which was taken over by Maurice Tourneur no less.

There are a couple more later adaptations, one by Solange Térac with Silvana Pampanini in 1953 and a TV film by Jean Kerchbron in 1968.

In 1923 however, it was Comedie Française star Huguette Duflos (notable in the Marcel L’Herbier early sound  versions of Gaston Leroux'  Le mystère de la chambre jaune and Le Parfum de la dame in noir) here  forced into the mariage blanc with Henry Houry’s Grand-duc Rodolphe de Lautenbourg. This places her in the succession for head of state, putting out of joint the nose of Georges Vaultier’s ambitious Grand Duke Frederick. We get the hunt injury, a royal wedding and Houry’s leading an expedition to the Cameroun accompanied Vaultier's co-plotter Paul Vermoyal.  Poet Jaque Catelain is brought to the Lautenbourg palace as one of those commoner-tutors that front up these films - think the heroes of multiple versions of The Swan.  He is smitten with Duflos.  

Now forgotten, Catelain was a recurring face in twenties French melodramas and, here younger, he is a more convincing focus for our sympathies - though those plucked eye brows are still a bit much.

 Secret Spring - Duflos

Duflos’ glamor is more plausible as she displays the transition from the earlier decades’ ugly high fashion to the more presentable styles found in the French haute couture film cycle then beginning. She even has a miroir à trois faces.

Catelain’s midnight investigation of the “Hall of Armor” unearths the secret of Koenigsmark, complete with safe cracking and false identities. The bad hats resolve to burn down the East Wing of the Castle to cover their misdeeds, while a duel has Iván Petrovich, lead of Michael Curtiz silents, facing Catelain with pistols at dawn until Hugette reminds him that she bought Petrovich's honor as an officer along with his gambling debts. 

There’s still space for an eve of WW1 nocturnal flight in the white “Torpedo” car, flourishing dodgey safe conducts to border guards and a climax at the Arc de Triomphe - or not - depending on whether you get the happy end. These flamboyant plot complications work better here than in the sound films.

First off is the fact that Secret Spring, not unlike the Twentieth Century B westerns, is set in that curious period where mounted cavalry occupy the same world as electric light, telephones and automobiles. A more appropriate comparison is with the long lived costume melodrama esthetic of MGM efforts like "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "The Merry Widow", with which the French film more than holds its own. Performances are uniformly well judged.

Secret Spring - Duflos with toned feux d'artifice.

Perret’s Secret Spring is a big production with hoards of parading, uniformed troops, extensive location shooting and huge, elaborately decorated sets to fill out it’s three hours. Also, the Henri copy makes some of the best use of hand coloring I’ve seen - the multi toned cascades of Roman candles, the swerving car head lights red in the dark night. Along with the use of iris fades and the victims' montage which disposes of the aristo villain, these represent the technique of the day at it’s most polished and the copy, a reasonable dupe, show cases the work.

Until Pordenone mounted a season of his early work with muse Susanne Grandais, I knew Perret’s name only from obscure literature - an actor in Feuillade movies and a two reel comic, though there actually prove to be a couple of pages of his clips and shorts on You Tube. His touch, when a seasoned director, remains sure, after all this time.

We can understand why he returned to Secret Spring, which appears to be a center piece in his work. It runs to an on screen movie show, like the one in his 1912 Le mystère des roches de Kador, and the fireworks display repeats in his 1926 La femme nue with Petrovich. 

            Secret Spring -The wonder of 35mm. home movies - Capri & Duflos.

 A hundred year old, three hour movie with untranslated French language captions is not for everyone but, to a motivated viewer, it is one of the best ways to be transported back into the idiom of its film making and the mind set of it’s day. I’m delighted to find I can still enjoy that.

Jaque Catelain in Le vertige.

Barrie Pattison - 2023

More John Ford.

 Time was John Ford stood in for the entire American Cinema. Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, René Clair and John Ford, and you were sweet. The rest was national local consumption or mere commercial product. It was a simpler era but vapors of sanctity still swirl about the great man. I must admit that my own admiration was second to none and was boosted as the films of the early thirties escaped the vaults.

However, though he’s on the way to being the most documented figure in film, the John Ford cult sweeps a lot of his work under the mat, his military moral boosters which include a sex hygiene movie, his silent cowboy two-reelers and his stumbling first ventures in sound. 

One of these, Born Reckless of 1930, another William Fox Company early talkie production, has bubbled to the surface of the U-Tube swamp in a just about watchable copy.

This was obviously an A feature with a decent budget and using the Fox company’s best personnel. At this stage it’s hard to tell whether they were Fox people or Ford regulars. Jack Penneck and Ward Bond show up briefly as noncom. Doughboys.

The plot  reads like a first draft of next year’s much better John Cromwell film The Mighty - gangster is drafted and, after distinguished service comes back home to sort out the mob. Dudley Nichols, who would become Hollywood’s most respected writer, largely through his collaboration with Ford, is responsible.

The opening is a good clue, with a striking silhouette shot of a team of safe breakers at work, framed by stilted dialogue and filming in a cramped studio street setting. The background noise comes & goes on edits.

The bulls arrive for star Edmund Lowe and, at headquarters, it looks as if the gang will be sent up the river until reporter (again) Lee Tracy suggests the mayor can win votes by having the members join up. “You  let these guys go to France and the whole East Side will be proud of you.”

Ed pals with fresh faced Frank Albertson with an eye on his sister Catharine Dale Owen but she’s got Randolph Scott lined up, in possibly his first speaking part. His couple of scenes are filmed to favor the other players but he comes across effectively as a well-spoken and dignified disposable consort. 

D'Avril & Lowe

There's labored military comedy with the fat corporal given the bat after a baseball has startled the officer’s horse or Ed working his way into the good graces of village girl Yola d'Avril with a bag of stores sugar. To remind us this is a talkie, the military keeps on breaking out in song. Things pick up briefly when the Boche bomb the column but we get back civy-side uncomfortably rapidly.

There our hero is torn between his old loyalties to Big Shot Waren Hymer and the gang and his clean record new start. A "Two Years Later" title dissolves to the awning with Ed’s name and he’s running an up market night club. However the mob kidnaps Dale Owen’s baby and outraged Ed goes into action rescuing the kid and facing off the low-lifes. He and Hymer stand hands in the pockets of their overcoats - exchange of shots in the dark, (briefer  than The Mighty but quite effective) and Ed staggers on like Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy or Jean Servais in Rififi. 

Hymer & Loew

Though this one is “A John Ford Production” it has a credit for staging and The Faithful attribute its shortcomings to Andrew Bennison who would quickly disappear from the scene. The comedy is feeble and attractive Marguerite Churchill wasted. The family material with Ma and Pa Ferike Boros and Paul Porcasi is particularly cringeworthy.

The shadow of Sunrise can still be seen with shooting on that film's swamp set and the occasional piece of Germanic lighting, as in the robbery and gunman shadow falling across the bar’s center opening doors but these fail to redeem the general clumsiness. Still it’s better than Ford’s   The Black Watch and his next film Up the River would be quite presentable. Our man was on a steep learning curve.

    

I see Ford's recently uncovered 1918 Hell Bent as altogether more rewarding. It's his number five feature as director and is full of things that we will find in his mature work. 

Remington

Ford

They even sing “Genevieve” (mute). This one makes explicit the connection with Frederick Remington by starting with the failing writer drawing inspiration from the Remington painting “The Misdeal” which they re-stage and bring to life. Throw in having an extended male rivalry horseplay section and featuring picturesque western vistas - the bad hats signaling from increasingly scenic peaks before they join up, Duke Lee and the Indian guide (one feather) against the sunset.

 We kick off with Cheyenne Harry Carey, presumably fresh from the incidents in the painting, producing the cards concealed all over him, on the run from a posse blazing away till he’s safe across the river in Gil county. Arriving in Rawhide Town he rides his horse onto the The Last Bet Saloon and Dance Hall floor and demands a room only to be told all the beds already have three men in them, except for the one occupied by Cimmaron Bill / Lee who won’t share, so Harry rides on into his room, where Harry’s horse munches on the hay in the mattress while its rider ejects the tenant out the window at gunpoint, into the muck heap below. Lee comes back and it’s Harry out the window but, before they shoot it out, they discover a mutual enthusiasm for song and buddy up.

Harry Carey

Meanwhile things are tough with serial queen, winning Neva Gerber and her no good brother Vester Pegg, whose ailing mother appears to have been cut out of this copy. Pegg tells Neva she's squeamish about taking the only jobs on offer as saloon girl. When she appears in her floozie outfit, she is terrified at being mobbed but Harry recognises her distress and comes to her aid before putting moves on her himself. Being a gentleman beneath his rough exterior, he  backs off.

Slicker Joe Harris recruits Pegg into his stage robber gang and, when Harry bails them up, he un-masks Pegg, making our hero retreat, to protect Gerber.

The gang is holed up in familiar locale, Beale’s Cut Newall County (the one they run the stage coach race through in the Tom Mix The Last Trail) where Harry sets out to rescue the girl and he and Harris end up taking rounds in a shoot-out in the desert (“you’ll cook with me”) leaving the one horse for Gerber to escape. Harris doesn’t survive the dust storm but Harry is rescued by Lee and his Indian guide and presumably lives happily ever after.

This one is not just a start point for the development of John Ford but in itself a lively depiction of frontier life, with cheated card games, rough saloons, stage bandits, pelting rain storms and the Pony Express rider racing through the main street with a delivery. Add a struggle through the desert that anticipates Greed. The cast inhabit their stock characters effectively.

Hell Bent - Duke Lee & friend

The film is better and more characteristic than the other circulating early John Fords and I enjoyed it. It gives the impression of being the work of people who liked competing with their great cowboy film maker contemporaries - with William S. Hart, Tom Mix and company. It's a quality that leached out of the bloated films of Ford's last years.

There are two copies on You Tube, an un-restored print up of an original tinted Czech copy with an awful organ score or a cleaned up B&W that runs too fast. You choose.

Barrie Pattison 2023

BABYLON

  Dominic Chazelle’s new Babylon offers something more intense, wilder and more probing than we are used to. You could see it as a ferocious response to the threat of streaming devouring the movie business,

They start as they mean to go. In the peak days of the Hollywood silent film, an elephant defecates over its driver on its way to the Hills mansion where a passed out starlet is found with the naked fat man movie comic in a side room to the full blast orgy. The camera races through a hoard of fornicating, coked-up, naked party goers, with Margot Robbie flinging herself into the action in her scarlet body-baring outfit, backed by Jovan Adepo’s black jazz musicians. Eat your heart out Gaspar Noé or for that matter the best efforts of the porno industry.

Trying to keep a lid on all this is movie-struck Mexican gopher Diego Calva (Narcos), who falls in with superstar Brad Pitt, come through the excesses of the night raring to get on with the next day’s shooting, and motoring onto the location past picketing sign holders and side by side movie sets. This is a career best performance for Pitt. 

Robbie has been recruited there looking confused until, faced with the camera, she snaps into action, dominating the moment and generating her tears on cue. (Morris Elvey was proud of his ability to do that) Olivia Hamilton, as the movie's composite of the era’s several woman directors who all but vanished at that point, is sharp enough to go with this.

Pitt & Calva

Calva has to pull a gun on knife-wielding skid row extras and the breath-catching hundred riders charge smashes the cameras, leaving him to steal an ambulance to race a replacement to the scene before they lose the fading light and capture a vista of crowd activity behind Pitt’s big romantic moment - embrace against the last rays of the sun rimming hundreds of costumed extras and exploding pyrotechnics.  The three hour plus film has hardly started.

Babylon is an evolved kind of animal. It clearly wants to extend the ongoing self-referencing history of the movies, invoking Gloria Swanson star of Sunset Boulevard, pivoting on Singing in the Rain, fronting the stars of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and ending, a bit anti-climactically, with a sustained classic images montage. Gianni Amelio’s compilation on the history of the Italian silent film for the Turin museum is better than this one.

Calva and Smart in hat.

Even without considering the content, Babylon is an extraordinary-looking film.  Shot on thirty five millimeter film by Chazelle's regular cameraman Linus Sandgren, Babylon comes full of complex single take travellings and period tableaux. Jean Smart singled out her authenic recycled Erté-era fanned feather head piece among the fifteen hundred costumes Mary Zophres provided the film. Shots of charging warriors or vintage luxury cars running level with the camera pump up attention. I’d have had a buzz out of seeing a tinted twenties Paramount mountain on the front, if the Wings restoration team hadn’t done that already. All this (include the final montage) must have strained the schedule and the budget.

Babylon centers on the late 1920s arrival of sound, sidestepping the format of the familiar Star Is Borns in favor of a narrative coloured by the versions in the sixties Hollywood TV series from David Wolper, Kevin Brownlow and the BBC. 

Though "serious" critics are one of the few groups they don't find space for, this is one of the rare times that anyone probes the relationship between high art and movies, with Twelve Tone music, Bauhaus, Alexander Scriabin and Eugene O’Neil dropped into the dialogue and silent film star Brad Pitt turning on his theater actress current wife and extolling the movies that, from the Nickelodeons to the picture palaces, have enriched the lives of people who couldn’t afford her work - let alone understand it. This is something different to that line of putting up a competition between American popular entertainment and European art. For a more relevant comparison look at l998’s Leap of Faith with evangelist Steve Martin touting his tent show as offering the entertainment value of the up-market Broadway productions his hick town audience will never see.

We do get the film’s vivid representation of melting pot America - Calvo ”crossing the border at twelve”. There are effective hints of the Great Depression in the margin - a Forgotten Man with a “Will work” sign, murderous hobos or the run-down homes the protagonists escape into their world of luxury. 

Li Jun Li

The leads are camouflaged versions of Clara Bow, John Gilbert and Bugsy Siegel, (along with that hint of Roscoe Arbuckle). Li Jun Li, their slinky-glamorous bisexual Anna Mae Wong character has been composited with her Shanghai Express co star Marlene Dietrich, getting to do Dietrich’s Morocco number. There’s no evidence to confirm that the personable Anna actually wrote intertitles for her films and was the only one around who knew how to handle being rattler-bit but one of their nicest touches is a cut to Li acting as a star’s dialogue coach.  Similarly, being a Twenty First Century production, Adepo’s black musician character (“I think you’re pointing the camera the wrong way”) gets developed in welcome depth. He is the one to survive the story's events with the least damage.

I recognise an urge like the one behind the Spielberg Ready Player One, a compulsion to explore the mechanism of movie enthusiasts. Babylon reacts against the fake euphoria of fandom and awards. Celebrities destroyed by excess are familiar but here we also get the scene of desperation as the characters adapt to the new disciplines of recording with sustained panic - Robbie repeatedly struggling with memorising her lines and missing the one mark that will accommodate the microphone, the tyranny of the sound man over-riding the director and lethal working conditions. Compare the similar footage in 1934's gentler It Happened in Hollywood.

Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons weren’t about yet, so Jean Smart’s gossip writer is near to called Adela Rogers St. John. Publicity assures us she is supposed to be Eleanor Glynn. People who they actually name - Garbo, Irving Thalberg, mainly represented by a business card - are largely off screen presences. Figures who coasted through that transition without the cloud of substance abuse - Ronald Coleman, Loretta Young, Wally Beery - don’t figure.

As substantial as the panoramas of excess, which bookend the film, is once supremely confident Pitt’s despairing “why did they laugh?”, coming with Smart’s cockroaches monologue about the pictures that will linger for audiences who will be born and die after the filmmakers. “We’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.” The writing and the actress’ delivery of it should enshrine that next to “We had faces then” or "Film is truth 24 times a second." The argument is taken further when we get Singing in the Rain set dismissively against the incidents we have seen Calvo experience first hand. I never did like that one as much as the other Kelly-Donen musicals, a collection on which writer-director Dominic Sayre Chazelle clearly fixates. 

Damien Chazelle & Olivia Hamilton.

Coming from a family of academics and being a one time drummer,  Chazelle looks frighteningly youthful. He took the status of all time youngest recipient of the director Oscar from Norman Taurog.  Chazelle has snuck up on us. There was nothing in his First Man and Whiplash to suggest he’d become a major film maker and he has been lying dogo since the extraordinary success of  La La Land came complete with Oscar night live drama over its award - possibly Warren Beaty’s greatest performance. Chazelle’s pilot eps. for The Eddy don’t register but Babylon can’t be ignored. There’s very little that is as resonant and attention getting, even with some dodgy choices. Did we really need to see Clara Bow throw up over Marion Davies and William Randolph Hurst?

The film flirts with the past the footlights space in a way that most viewers may miss. There’s a Harvey Weinstein lookalike. Spike Jonze figures in a bit part as a director and the movie’s producer Mark Platt plays a producer. The composite female director is performed nicely by Chazelle’s own wife.    

One good question is how those sustained take sequences of hedonistic excess, which bookend the film, are going to effect its future, with shifts in taste and censorship (here represented only by one forlorn sign holder picketing the location gate).  Notice that Margot Robbie gets plenty physical but, just as in films like Dusan Makajevec's W.R.History of the Organism, the leads never go bare assed, leaving that to the extras. Robbie has mentioned that. While we see a stuntman impaled in the battle scene, I didn’t spot any dead horses either.

When the makers make such effort to get things right. It’s irritating to spot when they don’t. It’s particularly grating that their re-staging of the Hollywood Revue of 1929 chorus is done in the shades of orange of surviving faded copies and not the original two color Technicolor palette. One of the things that gave Scorsese’s Hugo its charge was seeing Meliés lobster men and fairies against their backgrounds in the full range of tones, not those of the inferior copies we’ve been looking at for so long.

Jovan Adepo's accompaniment - "The camera's pointing the wrong way"

Gentleman's Fate - Gilbert, Marie Prevost & Louis Wolheim 

 I’ve just read a review that repeats the Furphy of John Gilbert’s career destroyed by sabotaged films. Gilbert’s sound movies were in fact mounted with all the know how that a major studio could bring to them, like those of his peer group, Antonio Moreno, Ramon Novarro - and Buster Keaton. Gilbert wrote one, as he always wanted to, and the excellent Gentleman’s Fate was the proto-type for the mammoth Godfather franchise. The owners of His Glorious Night, the Gilbert film, which supposedly provoked the audience laughter we see simulated here, keep that film's big part of the puzzle out of sight. I’ve always been curious about it. Gilbert’s fall was more plausibly brought about by insecurity and the inability of MGM to incorporate the Depression era changes of taste to which Zanuck at Warners had proved more alert. Babylon’s adding a God-is-not-mocked response brings a fresh dimension.  

 So far most of this is sailing past public and press. The returns in the 'States have been miserable and reviews often negative, an alarming response for what must be the most ambitious attempt yet to make sense of cinema as phenomenon, eclipsing written criticism, documentaries and previous dramatisations. Maybe people just don't care anymore. I'd find that scary.

Barrie Pattison - 2023.