Wednesday, July 27, 2016

From the files: ‘Do let’s be brave’ – Lean directs Coward

Lean converses with Coward between setups on "In Which We Serve."
I was fortunate to write up the Criterion Collection's excellent four-film set of David Lean's direction of Noel Coward's work in his first outings as a director for Film International in 2013. It has only seen print to date -- 

“I loved its follies and apathies and curious streaks of genius,” wrote Noel Coward of his decision to return to England when World War II began. Had he not, the rise of David Lean would not have been deterred, but it may not have been as swift or as assured.

Coward provided Lean with writing that was strong and well-structured; Lean, as an already accomplished editor, knew how film worked. He could eliminate the extraneous. He had a keen sense of how to breathe cinematic life into a flat concept or character. Lean serves the material; later he will serve himself, with ever-more preposterous results.

Their mutually beneficial relationship is captured definitively in Criterion’s new box set. The first film in the series, the breathtaking World War II propaganda film “In Which We Serve,” was written for the screen; the next three – “This Happy Breed,” “Blithe Spirit,” and “Brief Encounter,” are stage-derived. Lean solves the problems put to him in two out of three cases by the plastic limitations of the material, at best with “Encounter,” but to middling effect in “Breed” -- and comes up empty in “Spirit.”

When the war began, Coward was in a unique and ambivalent position. A tremendously popular entertainer, he was a prolific songwriter and playwright with a reputation as an effete, cutting drawing-room wit whose undeclared but obvious homosexuality both amused and repelled England’s middle class. Coward had written his grand stage chronicles of English life, “Cavalcade” and “This Happy Breed”; his patriotism was showing. He volunteered for the war effort in numerous ways, and “In Which We Serve” was the grandest of these, earning Coward an honorary Oscar and an air of unassailable legitimacy.


 Based on the exploits of Coward’s friend Lord Mountbatten early in the war, the naval saga “In Which We Serve” is a perfectly pitched paean to the fighting spirit. In this case, it is delineated not by violence and victories, but by patience and fortitude in the face of what were at the time seemingly impossible odds. In this film, Britain’s classes are exemplified, and barriers between them are tacitly overcome as all bond together in unity, modesty, understated humor, and stiff-upper-lip stoicism.

Coward, in particular, was making a huge gamble. His insistence on making it “his” project included casting himself as the brave Captain Kinross, master of the destroyer Torrin. Coward’s portrayal of a noble, unaffected, and incredibly straight naval officer was probably his greatest performance. Coward’s Kinross is absolutely calm, repressed to the point of being wooden; an apt critique of the heterosexual male stereotype in performance. (Later, Coward would overhear criticism of his performance from a neighboring table at a restaurant. As he left, he flounced over the offenders, put his hands on his hips, and hissed, “Well, I thought I was VERY GOOD!”)

Coward knew he needed top help to realize his project. He selected talents such as future Oscar winners and nominees Lean, producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, cinematographer Ronald Neame, and camera operator Guy Green. Likewise, his casting initiated long-term relationships between Coward and Lean and actors such as Bernard Miles, John Mills, Kay Walsh, Joyce Carey, Celia Johnson, and Richard Attenborough.

Neame’s inky shadows and sharp highlights lend depth and dimension to the combat scenes, a nourish contrast to the traditionally lit domestic and flashback scenes. This high-contrast look will maintain itself in all succeeding black-and-white Lean films.

Lean, known already as the best film editor in England, now showed his organizational and leadership capabilities. Although he was a notoriously bad hand at drawing, he resolutely storyboarded the action -- and annotated his shooting script to within an inch of its life before hitting the soundstage. “All the important imaginative thinking, he (Lean) maintained, had to be done before the shooting commenced; there was no time for lengthy improvisations on the set when a director was working with numerous actors and technicians.” (1) This thoroughness and discipline served him well in future; his stone-faced seriousness on set would later lead to rifts with more easygoing colleagues such as Trevor Howard and Robert Mitchum.

Lean began production on “In Which We Serve” as a glorified assistant director; however, Coward wearied of the time-consuming, technical rigors of film direction and turned over the helm entirely to Lean after a few weeks. Even in his first effort, some of Lean’s trademarks -- confident pacing, deep-focus shots, and close attention to the human face -- are evident. “. . . .the fact that Lean was able to stamp his personal style upon a production overshadowed by Coward’s looming (and egotistical) presence says much for his ability.” (2)

Overcoming a initial lack of support and cooperation from the British military with an intervention from King George VI himself, Coward and Lean’s film wound up on release to be quite literally a rousing success, serving as a template for the stiff-upper-lip heroics of war films to come. The fruitful association continued.

“This Happy Breed” was a sentimental, historical stage epic in the style of Coward’s previous “Cavalcade” of 1931 (that show initiated the cliché in which a loving shipboard couple wanders away from in front of a life preserver . . . labeled “H.M.S. Titanic”!). Where “Cavalcade” profiled the upper crust, “Breed” looks warmly, if condescendingly, at the working class.

"This Happy Breed"
It’s another tribute to the spirit of embattled England, studded with heartaches and happiness, rendered in a deliberately dull Technicolor palette to more accurately reflect the dingy reality of plebian life. It’s an uneven if deeply felt panorama that fails to engage.

“ . . .he took every mundane event the cinema avoided – washing up, drying clothes, a great many meals – and worked the dialogue into them. For a British film to do this was unusual enough, but to show the kitchen sink, albeit in muted Technicolor, was revolutionary.” (3) This, along with a not-so-obscure moralizing about the comeuppance of those who don’t know how to “keep their place” oddly presages the conventions of British “kitchen-sink” social realism that were to flower 12 years later with John Osbourne’s “Look Back in Anger.”

“Blithe Spirit,” a farce about ghosts and fidelity, initially hailed as a masterful work, has not stood the test of time. Its brittle drawing-room sauciness is a return to form for Coward, and it had a long and happy run on stage in London. However, in Lean’s hands, the jokes fall flat – male lead Rex Harrison waspishly declared years later that it’s useful to make a comedy with a director who knows what’s funny. It is known best watched for its Oscar-winning special effects and Margaret Rutherford’s definitive performance as the batty medium Madame Arcati.

"Blithe Spirit"
Lean and Coward’s final collaboration, “Brief Encounter,” equals “In Which We Serve” in quality and significance. A third adaptation of a Coward stage work, it tells the story of two married people who meet by chance in a railway station, fall in love, realize that an affair would destroy them both, and part.

It’s a fever-dream, stream-of-consciousness visual poem punctuated with the heavy thuds of “realities” to be faced up to bravely. Our narrator and protagonist, Laura (Celia Johnson is absolutely perfect as the clipped, overwrought, unconventionally ravishing heroine) feels so keenly the lost chance that Alec (Trevor Howard as a noble young doctor) represents that she contemplates throwing herself under a train a la Karenina in the penultimate scene.

"Brief Encounter"
As is the case in almost every subsequent Lean film, the willing spirit is chained by the weak flesh, the social imperative. Wild, nonconformist impulses threaten the blasé normality from which they sprung and are snuffed out ruthlessly. Tellingly, Lean is quoted as saying: “I am drawn to the person who refuses to face defeat even when they realize that their most cherished expectations may go unfulfilled.” (4)

Like Rosy Ryan in “Ryan’s Daughter,” Zhivago, Lawrence, and Nicholson in “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” Laura is swept out of and above mundane reality by her passionate obsession, but is flung to earth. In the end she does the right thing – and crushes out her soul like a cigarette butt.

Coward and Lean both moved on to reach iconic heights – Coward as a sort of aging roué, and Lean as the eminence grise of cinema, for better and worse. To watch these four films in chronological order is to see Lean grow from a contractor to a fully assured artist who is ready to do what he needs to make his vision come to life.

  1. “Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean,” Gene D. Phillips, pg. 55.
  2. “Noel Coward: A Biography,” Philip Hoare, pg. 328.
  3. “David Lean: A Biography,” Kevin Brownlow, pg. 181.
  4. Phillips, pg. 96.

DAVID LEAN DIRECTS NOEL COWARD
Including:
In Which We Serve (1942)
This Happy Breed (1944)
Blithe Spirit (1945)
Brief Encounter (1945)


In Which We Serve (1942)
Britain
Director Noel Coward, David Lean
Screenplay Noel Coward
Producer Noel Coward
Director of Photography Ronald Neame
Art Director David Rawnsley
With Noel Coward (Capt. E.V. Kinross, R.N.), Bernard Miles (Chief Petty Officer Hardy), John Mills (Ordinary Seaman ‘Shorty’ Blake), Celia Johnson (Mrs. Kinross), Joyce Carey (Mrs. Hardy), Kay Walsh (Freda Lewis), James Donald (Doc), Derek Elphinstone (Number 1), Michael Wilding (Flags), Robert Sansom (Guns), Philip Friend (Torps), Richard Attenborough (Young Powder Handler – uncredited)
Runtime 114 minutes

This Happy Breed (1944)
Britain
Director David Lean
Screenplay Noel Coward (uncredited), Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, Ronald Neame
Producer Noel Coward, Ronald Neame (Neame uncredited)
Director of Photography Ronald Neame
Art Director C.P. Norman
With Robert Newton (Frank Gibbons), Celia Johnson (Ethel Gibbons), Reg (John Blythe), Vi (Eileen Erskine), Kay Walsh (Queenie), Stanley Holloway (Bob Mitchell), John Mills (Billy Mitchell), Amy Veness (Mrs. Flint), Alison Leggatt (Aunt Sylvia)
Runtime 111 minutes

Blithe Spirit (1945)
Britain
Director David Lean
Screenplay David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Noel Coward (Coward uncredited)
Producer Noel Coward
Director of Photography Ronald Neame
Art Director C.P. Norman
Costumes Rahvis (dresses only)
With Rex Harrison (Charles Condomine), Constance Cummings (Ruth), Kay Hammond (Elvira), Margaret Rutherford (Madame Arcati), Jacqueline Clarke (Edith)
Runtime 96 minutes

Brief Encounter (1945)
Britain
Director David Lean
Screenplay Noel Coward, Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, Ronald Neame (latter three uncredited)
Producer Noel Coward, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Ronald Neame (latter two uncredited)
Director of Photography Robert Krasker
Art Director Lawrence P. Williams (as L.P. Williams)
With Celia Johnson (Laura Jesson), Trevor Howard (Dr. Alec Harvey), Cyril Raymond (Fred Jesson), Stanley Holloway (Albert Godby), Joyce Carey (Myrtle Bagot)
Runtime 86 minutes


DVD
USA, 2012
Produced and Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region 1)
Aspect Ratio 1:37:1
Sound Mix Mono

Extras New high-definition digital transfers of the BFI National Archives’ 2008 restorations. Audio commentary on Brief Encounter by film historian Bruce Eder. Interviews with Coward scholar Barry Day on all four films. Interview with Ronald Neame, short documentaries on the making of In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter, TV documentary David Lean: A Self Portrait (1971), 1992 episode of The Southbank Show on the life and career of Coward, 1969 audio recording of conversation between Coward and Attenborough, trailers, 46-page booklet with essays by Ian Christie, Terrence Rafferty, Farran Smith Nehme, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Kevin Brownlow.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Just for fun: 26 essential French films

Happy Bastille Day! I love French film, and have ever since I saw Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast" when I was 10 years old. Without the time to write summaries or analyses of each film (this can be rectified by purchasing this story from me), here's my quick list of essential French films.

Now, lists tend to tell us more about the list-maker than anything else, so any omissions or questionable inclusions are a reflection of my own idiosyncrasies. Also, I have questions about who is a "French" director. Maurice and Jacques Tourneur, whom I both love, made the bulk of their films in America. Is Max Ophuls a French director? I think not, but I deem his son as one. What about expatriate Joseph Losey? American, English, or French?

And where are Resnais, Rohmer, Tati, Demy, etc.? Well, dammit, I don't LIKE them, so  they're not on the list. And -- do you hate Luc Besson? I don't. I love Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and hate "Amelie." And so it goes.

As well, each significant director is represented with one film, as an entry point to that person's work. I can and have watched all of Renoir, Truffaut, Vigo, Cocteau, Melville, and Varda, multiple times, and am working on the others. Good stuff here! If you can't find the specific film listed, there are plenty of other choices in each director's list of films.

Plus, these will teach you life skills. I watched enough French gangster films to be conversant in French when I went to Paris -- although I was best able to say things like: "look out for the cops" and "roll me another cigarette."

Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927)
L’Age d’Or (Luis Bunuel, 1930)
A nous la liberte (Rene Clair, 1931)
Les Miserables (Raymond Bernard, 1934)
L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
Pepe le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937)
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne, 1945)
Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau/Rene Clement, 1946)
The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)
Touchez pas au grisbi (Jacques Becker, 1954)
Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1956)
A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)
The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959)
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969)
The Red Circle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)
The Butcher (Claude Chabrol, 1970)
Sunless (Chris Marker, 1983)
A Sunday in the Country (Bernard Tavernier, 1984)
Shoah (Claude Lantzmann, 1985)
Au revoir les enfants (Louis Malle, 1987)
City of Lost Children (Jean-Pierre Jeunet/Marc Caro, 1995)
Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990)


Wednesday, July 13, 2016

The NFR Project #32: 'Matrimony’s Speed Limit' (1913)

Matrimony’s Speed Limit
Dir: Alice Guy-Blache
Prod: Alice Guy-Blache
Scr: Unknown
Phot: Unknown
Premiere: 6/11/1913
14:17

 She had signs up around her studio that said, “Be natural.” Alice Guy (1873-1968), the pioneer film director, writer, and producer is lauded primarily because she was the first and one of the most prominent women filmmakers in history.

She was resurrected, appropriately, on the strength of her own words. She wrote her autobiography in the 1940s, but it was not published until 1976, eight years after her death. Her daughter worked to get it translated into English a decade later. “The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blach” inspired many to corral and examine her work.

Alice Guy-Blache
She has 433 directing credits in IMDb, but film scholar Margaret Hennefeld pegs the total at more than 700; one tally asserts that she made more than 1,000, including 22 feature films. Approximately 350 survive.

After a money-making decade as writer, producer, director, and chief of production at fledgling studio Gaumont in France, she moved to New York and, three years later, did the same at Solax Studios. From October 1910 to June 1914, first in Flushing, Queens, and later at Fort Lee, New Jersey, where a surprising 14 film studios were located during the period. She supervised approximately 325 film there, directing between 35 and 50 herself.

This representative short shows off a style utterly unlike that associated with earl film comedy – the grimacing and mugging, jerky pantomime, and frantic slapstick that Mack Sennett was just now concocting on the West Coast. Guy seems to be the first director to understand how film accommodated a completely new, subdued, more reactive style of acting.

Hennefeld terms this a “marital chase” film, citing a few precedents films using the plot device, and noting its resemblance to its more famous descendant, Buster Keaton’s 1925 feature “Seven Chances.” The story here is traced explicitly through tile cards that set up each sequence.

In this, the young stockbroker hero (we can see the steeple of Trinity Church in the background through his office window, telling us in elegant shorthand that he works in the lower Manhattan financial district of the day) loses all his money in the market. He visits his girl, tells her the bad news. She offers him her funds; he refuses, she cries, he leaves. It’s absolutely naturalistic, compared to silent fare to this point.


Guy invested thought and time in creative camera setups that others would have shot head-on, knees-up in the style later called derisively “the American shot.” She positioned the camera in efficient, non-standard ways that emphasized characters working in depth, moving on multiple planes, and making the front-to-back angled crosses that John Ford would be noted for later, movements that give the screen more dimension.

The girl concocts a scheme to force the hero to marry her, sending him a telegram informing him that he will gain a fortune if he marries before noon that day. For the first in this list of films, here is a female character who is active, a catalyst. In fact, she’s smarter and more practical than her beloved, a modern-day Rosalind.

He receives the wire at 12 minutes to noon, and begins frantically proposing to any woman he runs across. He tries a scrubwoman, a plain lady (who faints), a married woman, and a black woman. Thankfully, the last is portrayed by an actual African-American woman who does not act in stereotype, but the message is still clear – not appropriate. (This concept of “miscegenation,” the relationship of two people with different racial backgrounds, is still entertained by many in private.)

These bits are intercut rhythmically with the girl, who meanwhile hijacks a minister and speeds via auto to her boyfriend’s side. (Lovely traveling shots give a great kinetic, careening sense of urgency to the film’s second half.) Boy and girl miss each other. The boy lays down in the road in front of a speeding car at a minute to 12, tempting death. Fortunately, it’s the girl’s car, which halts in time. They wed, as a steamroller blocked behind them hoots and whistles --

She drives up, they wed, and all is well, save for the steamroller behind them, the raucous whistles of which serve as an impromptu, discordant trumpet to herald the occasion. She gets him home and confesses the deception. He tries to leave, and she grabs his hat

She confesses the deception, he tries to leave, and she grabs his hat (read into that the symbolism you will). After a mild tussle, he relents, they embrace. It’s a playful, warm ending to a quirky, cute little comedy. Alice Guy set an example of how to make touching, humorous portraits of relationships that the mainstream wouldn’t catch up on until Ernst Lubitsch made “The Marriage Circle” 11 years later.

The NFR Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological order. Next time: ‘Preservation of the Sign Language.’