It was a harmonic convergence of factors — a great film seen
in a great venue at precisely the right time of life.
The first time I saw Star
Wars, I hated it.
Now wait, let me explain. How could I have been such a
bonehead? Well, first and foremost, as a lifelong snob I have always looked
askance at the mainstream and popular. My taste serves as an inverse barometer
— if I don’t like it, it will be a big success. I have a great long list of
popular movies that make me screech, and another of guilty pleasures that I
love but that baffle the rest of mankind.
Star Wars became a
blockbuster entirely by word of mouth. Critical reaction at the time was
largely positive, but not ecstatic enough to justify what was happening, which
was that people were seeing once, then again. And again. It was movie as thrill
ride, and we were thrilled.
And if you were within striking distance of Denver, you had
to see it at the Cooper.
The Cooper Theatre was a magnificent modernist temple of
cinema. It opened in 1961, and was designed to show immense Cinerama and
70-millimeter masterpieces such as How
the West Was Won and Lawrence of Arabia
and Spartacus. It sat 800
comfortably in a spacious burnt-orange auditorium; such was the culture in
those days that smoking lounges — segregated, but significantly not sealed off
spaces in the back of the house and even a “crying child” room to which parents
with unruly young ones could retreat and still see and hear the film via glass
partition and remote speakers.
It was the perfect space in which to experience Star Wars, fast-paced and full of
special-effects wonders. The broad curvature of the screen encompassed our
fields of vision, so much so that viewers in the front were engulfed and
overwhelmed by the experience.
We didn’t go opening weekend. The friends that went came
back astonished to the point of catalepsis, and determined to get us in the
theater as well. So we all piled in whoever’s car and grafted ourselves to the
end of the long line of ticket buyers.
We made it at last and sat down front. The initial viewing
experience was overwhelming. Remember, animation and special effects hadn’t
really improved since 2001: A Space
Odyssey; the look of most of 1970s sci-fi was very cheesy, unconvincing,
and frankly dystopian. Outer space in Star
Wars looked great — Industrial Light & Magic, using newly minted
computer-assisted and digital techniques, helped to craft an extremely dynamic
and detailed imaginary universe. The elements weren’t there to push the plot
forward — the plot was there to push the elements forward. Star Wars was intoxicated with its own vision.
Once the show was over the complaining began. I recognized a
paste-up job when I saw one, what Pauline Kael referred to as “an assemblage of
spare parts.” It’s a compendium of B-movie film clichés, right down to the
Saturday-matinee wipe transitions from scene to scene. Here were moments of
swordplay right out of a swashbuckler, and dogfights shot and edited to mimic
the aerial combat of WWII films. There was the feisty heroine and comic
sidekicks (hello, Kurosawa’s The Hidden
Fortress), the rakish ne’er-do-well along the lines of Gable, Flynn, or
Holden, the men-on-a-mission ending. It was old-fashioned, a return to popular,
escapist film entertainment.
I went back a week later, this time on a date, and this time
I let go and just let myself get swept up in it. (It helped that we sat in the
back this time.) This time, I dug it — the fantasy and adventure elements
working together, the earnest energy, the bold-faced silliness, the video-game
editing, all crowned with an essential optimism and a surfer-dude philosophy
(“May the Force be with you”). Even the plainly derivative sequences were
fascinating, a game of referential hide and seek to be played by the viewer. It
was a nerd’s paradise.
We loved it, we saw it again and again. We memorized it. In
fact, we wrote and performed an hour-long radio parody of it when we supposed
to be doing our homework. Forty-some years later, we’re still watching.
Buster Keaton is not only my favorite silent-era comic, but
he’s one of my favorite filmmakers, period. What puts him head and shoulders
above more popular contemporaries such as Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd is his
unique and comprehensive eye. They perform in front of the camera; Keaton
performs with the camera. Chaplin and Lloyd make faces, trade in sentiments;
Keaton maintains a stoic impassivity, and inadvertently implements a
philosophy.
Keaton was a natural clown. He was born to vaudevillians in
1895 and joined the act when he was 3 years old. The roughhouse comedic
acrobatics he learned from his father were the foundation of his unique
slapstick style. At the age of 21, he struck out on his own and decided to give
the fledgling movies a try.
He apprenticed under, served as sidekick to, and became
lifelong friends with, prominent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Through
the production of 14 short movie comedies with him over the course of two
years, Keaton mastered the basics. By January of 1920, he got an offer from
producer Joseph M. Schenk. His own studio, $1,000 a week, 25 percent of the net
profits, and creative control. The Keaton Studio was open for business.
His first solo effort, The
High Sign, displeased him and was held by him from release for some time.
After completing an outside feature-performance project for Metro, The Saphead, Keaton got back to work.
The result is his first released, completely original production — One Week.
Keaton was known as “The Great Stone Face,” a persona he
developed that stood in stark contrast to the mobile features of Chaplin or the
determined grin of Lloyd. Keaton’s frozen-featured equanimity makes him his
films’ straight man. With never a raised eyebrow and only rarely a blink, his
character absorbs the blows of random fate with a peaceful patience that begins
to resemble optimism. Still waters run deep.
Certainly he personally could cope with, and overcome, the
vagaries of chaos. He was a gifted mechanic and designer, who knew how to
construct big gags and pull them off. Even in this first “real” film of his,
it’s evident how developed his visual-spatial sense is. He knows what the
camera can see and what it can’t see, and he decides to play with that, which
means he ends up playing with the ideas underpinning cinema itself. His aim is
purely practical. He wants to make up laugh. But his craftsmanship reveals a
profoundly thoughtful sense of humor.
His outlook is cynical; everything that can go wrong will,
hilariously, and the humor doesn’t always overcome the downbeat in his films.
The world is not hostile to Keaton; it just doesn’t factor him in, and he must
get along as best he can on his own. Life rewards and punishes in abundance and
at random; social acceptance is arbitrary and fleeting. No wonder Keaton’s wry
gloom attracted the attention of “serious” writers of the period from Federico
Garcia Lorca to Samuel Beckett.
One Week moves in
circles. Wheels within wheels. Buster’s cinematic universe has three
ever-larger, intermeshing gears: the individual, the social, and the universal.
The natural world stands over all. It is unfathomably complex, but it does
operate in accordance with its own (mostly) immutable laws. Buster’s own plans
and desires usually succeed, but only when he submits to and works with the
larger, natural world. In between, fouling everything up, is the complicating
human world — imperfect, blind to subtlety, averse to truth, wrong-headed.
In his later feature films, Buster arrives as a misfit and
exits as a hero. He doesn’t change — he’s simply fallen into phase with what’s
going on around him, and, like some white-faced Zen monk, manipulates the
universe so that it sets him neatly down, unharmed, at the finish line. One Week doesn’t take this tack. It’s a
catalog film, a situation dreamed up to provide a (here literal) framework for
a series of gags, growing in scope and complexity to a culminating payoff.
The inspiration for One
Week came from a 1919 Ford Motor Company documentary short, Home Made: A Story of Ready-Made House
Building. The possibilities for what David Robinson called “an accelerating
merry-go-round of catastrophes” suggested themselves easily. The title is a
play on the structure of the film and refers to Three Weeks, a 1907 libidinous romance novel by Elinor Glyn that
was the 50 Shades of Gray of its
time.
The film opens with Buster and his new bride (Sybil Seeley)
leaving the church. Guests pelt hem with rice and old shoes; Buster stops,
stoops, considers a pair, and tucks it practically under his arm.
A car ride sets the plot in motion and serves as a little
circular gag. Buster’s rival suitor unaccountably serves as their post-nuptial
chauffeur — Keaton refers to him as “the villain” in remembrance, and probably
needed to shoehorn him in as his film needed an antagonist. He hands them an
envelope telling them they are being given a house and a lot on which to build
it. The three characters then execute a jump from car to taxicab to motorcycle
and back again, during which Buster gets his rival in Dutch with the cops.
They arrive on site. Someone is
dumping crates off a truck. “Here’s your house!” he says. It’s a do-it-yourself
house kit! The directions read, “To give your house a snappy appearance put it
up according to the numbers on the boxes.” The rival obtains revenge by
changing the crate numbers, and the fun begins.
The gags pile up. Buster saws off
the beam he’s perched on, taking a tumble. Whole sections of the house are
misplaced, or swing dangerously to and fro. When we step back to see the house
in its entirety, it is indeed a surrealistic nightmare of misshapen windows, a
canted roofline, and mismatching walls. A big, strong mover crushes Buster
under the weight of a delivered piano (he later glances back at Buster, who
hops in fright).
The trick house, though all
“wrong,” is malleable (a porch railing becomes in an instant a ladder). Buster
can heave the piano into the house through an easily removed piece of wall, but
his attempt to raise it with a block and tackle simply “pulls” the floor above
stretchily down, provoking a boomerang effect that catapults his hapless rival
in the room above through the roof.
As the dates are torn off the calendar, we move through more
mishaps. Buster falls through the roof into the bathroom. (Earlier, his bride
drops the soap, and leans out of the tub to retrieve it — the cameraman
politely puts his hand over the lens.) He opens a door and steps out into thin
air, executing a two-story fall. Keaton was an enthusiastic if untrained
stuntman — the fall
Finally, the day of the housewarming comes — Friday the 13th.
A storm comes, and it turns out that house is so unstable that strong winds
spin it like a top. As the guests are flung around the inside of the house,
Buster tries over and over to get back over the threshold. Timing his jump, he
leaps into the pirouetting building — and is flung out just as neatly.
The scale of jokes grows bigger and bigger. When the dawn
comes, it also turns out that they built their home on the wrong lot and need
to move it across the railroad tracks. Of course, the towing job breaks down
just as they move into harm’s way. A whistle blows — smoke appears — a train
approaches in the background! The two clutch each other and brace for impact —
and the camera pans slyly right, showing us the train missing its mark, on an
adjacent track. They sigh with relief when BAM! A train barreling the other way
smashes the house to flinders.
Now we’ve come full circle, and the house is just a pile of
lumber again. Buster hangs a For Sale sign on the debris, and the couple walks
away, hand in hand. Keaton would make 16 more shorts and nine feature films. In
One Week, he is already on top of his
game.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: ‘Within Our Gates.’
SOURCES
Eagan, Daniel. “One Week,” National Film Registry.
My Wonderful World of Slapstick
Buster Keaton and Charles Samuels
Da Capo Press
1960
Keaton
Rudi Blesh
New York: The Macmillan Company
1966
Buster Keaton
David Robinson
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
1969
The Silent Clowns
Walter Kerr
New York: Alfred A. Knopf
1975
Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase
Marion Meade
New York: HarperCollins Publishers
1995
Keaton’s Silent Shorts: Beyond the Laughter
Gabriella Oldham
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press
At last! The first great American adventure film hits the
screen.
The Mark of Zorro
Dir: Fred Niblo
Scr: Johnston
McCulley, Douglas Fairbanks (uncred.), Eugene Miller (uncred.)
Phot: William C.
McGann, Harris Thorpe
Premiere: Nov. 27, 1920
90 min.
I am so pleased to make it here after six dozens of chapters
on early American film. The decade of the 1920s was the first and the last
great one in silent movies, and The Mark
of Zorro starts it off with a bang.
We met Fairbanks earlier, in 1917’s Wild and Wooly. As Alistair Cooke observed, “His screen character
was in many ways a fantasy in which a suddenly jolted world could escape its
bewilderment.” He was a “personality” actor, one who played variations of his
vivid self. Fairbanks radiated energy and optimism on screen, and he quickly
became the hero of a series of romantic comedies that emphasized his remarkable
athletic gifts. By the end of the first World War, Fairbanks was the most
popular leading man in Hollywood.
In 1919, Fairbanks formed the United Artists film studio
with Charlie Chaplin, director D.W. Griffith, and “America’s Sweetheart,” the
successful actress and producer Mary Pickford. In 1920, he married Pickford.
Their union made them the first significant example of the power couple,
“Hollywood Royalty.” Everybody loved Doug.
It was Pickford who read the source material, Johnston
McCulley’s five-part magazine story that gave birth to Zorro, “The Curse of
Capistrano.” She pressed it on Fairbanks, insisting he read it as well. He was
drawn to the idea of making historical romances, costume dramas with
swashbuckling action. His ambition was to play Robin Hood, but he was concerned
whether the public would accept him in this kind of vehicle. Zorro, the
protagonist of his 30th film, represented a calculated attempt to
test the waters.
The plot device of the redeemed son was plainly taken from Shakespeare’s
Prince Hal, who in Henry IV is a
wastrel who reforms and becomes king. Even more to the point as an influence is
Baroness Orczy’s 1905 novel The Scarlet
Pimpernel, about a hero with a secret identity who feigns foolishness to
divert suspicion from himself. McCulley moved the setting from revolutionary
France to Old California in the early 19th century. Now the hero is
Don Diego de la Vega, the foppish son of a rich ranchero who, disguised as
Zorro (“The Fox”), in black mask and cape, fights for the oppressed and
downtrodden.
To date, movie costume dramas had largely been lumbering and
pretentious. By mixing together the lavish, detailed settings and the “reckless
gaiety” of Fairbanks, the result was a fast-moving, funny, and sweet adventure
tale with loads of derring-do. Audiences loved it.
In the film, Fairbanks plays Don Diego as a spit-curled
layabout, bored and easily fatigued, a disappointment to his father and society
in general. He does not impress his intended, the spunky Lolita Pulido,
daughter of a ranchero who opposes the corrupt local government. In Zorro mode,
however, he dashes, leaps, swoops, makes love, and crosses blades like nobody’s
business. His comic duel with the blustery Sergeant Gonzales is the first of
several that punctuate the action. Zorro's signature, scarring his opponents with a "Z", was invented by Fairbanks for the film; Zorro's creator McCulley incorporated it into subsequent stories.
To make the switch between identities, Diego has a secret
underground stable from which he springs on his jet-black horse Tornado. (It’s
important to match.) He has one faithful servant who knows his secret. These
traits would modified and passed down to heroes and superheroes in the future —
most notably Batman, but also the Green Hornet, Iron Man, et al.
Zorro has a nemesis, of course, the evil Captain Ramon. Much
of the film is classic melodrama, with hero and villain fighting it out, here
literally over the leading lady’s body. The bravura sequence is saved for the
conclusion, when Zorro leads the soldiers on a merry, stunt-filled chase that
reads today like proto-parkour.
The action is swiftly paced, and there are no subplots or
extraneous characters. Like Fairbanks himself, the movie exudes energy and
confidence. The framing, cutting, and camera movement is strictly functional —
it exists to astonish us. Often, the camera stands in for us as an amazed bystander,
transcribing the Fairbanksian derring-do as the flashes past.
In the end, Diego reveals his true identity, the corrupt are
overthrown, and the girl is won. The brash, upbeat swashbuckler was established, and in one
form or another its popularity has continued. Fairbanks’ embodiment of the
heroic spirit kept in the starry Hollywood firmament until he retired in 1934, at the age of 51.
It was exhausting being Doug.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: Buster Keaton’s ‘One Week.’
SOURCES
Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character
Alistair Cooke
New York: The Museum of Modern Art
1940
The First King of Hollywood: The Life of Douglas Fairbanks
