It’s damn near impossible nowadays to understand how big a
star Tom Mix was. He made hundreds of Westerns during his career and was dubbed
“The King of the Cowboys.” On film, he could beat up a bad hombre, wrassle a
critter, recover the gold, win the heart of a lady, and engage in wild stunts,
all with a winning grin. He rode Tony the Wonder Horse. He was cowboy as
superhero.
Mix wasn’t an actor who took on the Western genre. Mix was a
product of the West, a real cowboy who wandered in front of a movie camera and
became a star. He really could ride and rope and shoot.
Mix grew up wanting to join the circus. He rattled around the
country for a few years, working at everything from cowboying and rodeo
competition to Wild West shows to bartending to serving as a lawman. Eventually
he went with an outfit that supplied horses and extras to Hollywood
moviemakers. In 1909, Mix began a film career that lasted until 1935.
He knew that they key
to success was, for him, action and plenty of it. Before Mix, the premier film
cowboy was the melancholy loner plated by the hulking, poker-faced William S.
Hart. His moody works elevated Westerns to tragic status, often melodramas
about bad men who turn good.
But Mix was a good guy from the start, an upstanding hero
who could always be counted upon to save the day. He was cheerful and had a
sense of humor. He wore gaudy, overstylized garments. His adventures were
family-friendly, something kids and adults could both enjoy. His appeal was
universal.
So he spun out film after film, charging through the ins and
outs of the action film, Western-style. His approach recast the conventions of
the movie Western. Feats of derring-do and last-minute rescues were carried
over into the Mix films, just as the dime novels, stage acts, and Wild West
shows had outlined before film.
Sky High features
Mix as Grant Newberry, Deputy Inspector of Immigration. The movie opens with a
scene of him thwarting illegal immigrants – in this case, Chinese men whom he
treats none too respectfully, in keeping with the casual racism of the era. Then
there’s bright young thing Estelle, whose guardian is the secret head of the
smuggling ring. Did I mention the Chinese are being smuggled in through the
Grand Canyon? Well, they are.
This turns the location into a grandiose movie backdrop. The
novelty of shooting the Canyon is exploited to its fullest, with action
sequences taking place within and above it (Mix dropping from an airplane into
the Colorado River is an elegantly faked bit). The hero does almost all his own
stunts.
The cowboy films of the era usually leaned on the tropes of
the melodrama – hero, villain, damsel in distress. This formula served the
Western well, and thrives in Mix’s work. In the nearly 300 films he made, Tom
wears the white hat, gets the bad guy, wins the girl. In simpler times, that
was more than enough.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: Kodachrome Two-Color Test Shots Number
III.
Nanook
of the North Dir: Robert J. Flaherty Phot: Robert J. Flaherty Ed: Herbert Edwards, Robert J. Flaherty, Charles Gelb Premiere: June 11, 1922 78 min.
Nanook of the
North is the first commercially successful feature-length documentary
film. But is it a documentary?
Robert J. Flaherty was an explorer and photographer who decided he
wanted to make a film about the Eskimo (Inuit) he had encountered. He shot film
for two years, built up a rough cut that was praised – and dropped a lit
cigarette onto his original camera negative, sending it up in flames and
destroying it. He promptly returned to the Arctic region, spending a year
remaking his film, this time centering it on the story of one Inuit family.
Except it wasn’t really a family.
Nanook was actually named Allakariallak, and he did not live in a
primitive manner. His wives were actually Flaherty’s women. Flaherty got Allakariallak
and a cast of other natives to enact traditional hunting and crafting
techniques. The natives hunt walrus, fox, and seal; Nanook captures a
kayak-load of fish to feed his “family.” The group treks across the icy wastes
in their dogsled, kept constantly in motion by the search for food. In the
wild, they build an igloo to shelter themselves.
So, is the film invalidated by this approach? Does it accurately
record these people’s behavior? The controversy over Flaherty’s manufacturing
of a narrative on film continues in serious ethnographic circles. In a
contemporary culture in which “reality shows” are rigorously scripted, it
doesn’t seem to be such a big deal today.
His work has been classified as “salvage ethnography” – the
recording of cultures threatened by modern civilization. He did it without
condescension, in fact romanticizing the Inuit struggle for existence. No one
can deny its power as a film. It is still beautiful and compelling. Flaherty is
deeply in love with the landscape and his subjects, and it shows. We can’t help
but emphasize with the film’s subjects; as strange as their existence is, they
are recognizably human.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: Tom Mix in ‘Sky High’.
The output of early Hollywood was primarily escapist fare. But
there was also room for “serious” films, many of which were taken from honored
books and plays. Such is the case with Miss
Lulu Bett.
It’s the adaptation of a 1920 Zona Gale novel, which she adapted
into a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. The story is a cross between Cinderella and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The heroine of the title
is a young drudge trapped in a small town, one who works all day cooking and
cleaning for her sister’s family in exchange for room and board. When she’s not
being taken for granted, she’s browbeaten and belittled by her petty family.
Change comes in form of her brother-in-law’s brother, who comes
for a visit and jokingly offers to marry her. She takes him up on it as a means
of escape from her circumstances. After a week, though, he reveals that he may
be a bigamist. She returns home, scolded into not revealing the truth in order
to keep the town gossips’ tongues from waggling. Of course, despite this wag
they do anyway, speculating on Lulu Bett’s unfitness for marriage. Fed up with
her reprised role as the family servant, she declares her independence and
leaves the house. Only after doing so, she gets together with the town’s
schoolteacher, who has loved her all along.
Director William C. DeMille was the brother of the famous Cecil B.
DeMille, and he was known for his unflashy, naturalistic films. Here he creates
a work of quiet realism, keeping his camerawork unobtrusive and focused on “the
toils of the commonplace.” The result is a clear-eyed examination of the
constraints placed on the women of the day. Becoming someone’s, anyone’s wife
was seemingly the only ticket out of the family home.
But Lulu makes a way. First, she saves her niece from a foolish attempt
at elopement, then frees herself from mental slavery in a gripping scene.
Smashing dishes, spitting dialogue, Lulu renounces her family and packs up and
leaves for good. This proto-feminist liberation was in keeping with the times –
women were given the right to vote only two years earlier, and the idea of the
independent, self-assured woman was just beginning to take hold in popular culture.
Though hardly remembered today, Miss Lulu
Bett is a hallmark of America’s changing attitudes.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: ‘Nanook of the North’.
Scr: Erich von Stroheim, Marian Ainslee, Walter Anthony
Phot: William H. Daniels, Ben F. Reynolds
Ed: Arthur Ripley
Premiere: January 11, 1922
140 min.
The stereotype of the early American film director is that of a
harsh egomaniac equipped with a monocle, riding crop, and megaphone. Erich von
Stroheim invented it.
Von Stroheim started off simply as Erich Stroheim, born in Vienna
in 1885. He added the “von” and a fabricated noble background when he immigrated
to America in 1909. By 1914, he was in Hollywood, working as one of D.W.
Griffith’s many assistant directors on the epic Intolerance. During World War I, he began taking up the many villainous
roles that cemented him in the public consciousness as “the Hun you love to
hate.”
Finally established as a writer/director, Stroheim produced turgid
and costly melodramas such as Blind
Husbands and The Devil’s Passkey.
He hit the jackpot with Universal, getting them to fork over more than a
million dollars to make his Foolish Wives.
Stroheim as a filmmaker was doubly frustrating for producers that
tried to rein in in. He wanted to create on an epic scale, but he was also
obsessed with detail, spending recklessly to recreate the gilded pleasure spot of
Monte Carlo in the studio confines of California. Fighting with the studio, the
director managed to record hours of footage from which to make his final edit —
which ran for six hours. The studio cut ruthlessly to get it down to normal
feature length.
In Foolish Wives,
Stroheim stars himself as the bogus Count Karamzin, a spendthrift grifter who seduces
wealthy women and extorts money from them. His portrayal is perfectly
despicable. The film illustrates his attempts to claim another victim, the wife
of a U.S. ambassador. He is ultimately unsuccessful and brings on his own
comeuppance.
It is difficult to see now where the money went, as we are used to
films sporting large casts of extras and elaborate sets. At the time, however,
such extravagant and detailed settings were unheard of. Stroheim would continue
in the same vein until the studios finally got wise to his shenanigans and removed
him from directorial duties. Meanwhile, Foolish
Wives stood as a monument to what unlimited resources could create in Tinseltown.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: ‘Miss Lulu Bett’.
Cops is a perfect
little film, taking the premise of the comic chase and blowing it up to epic
proportions. It’s the 12th of 19 shorts that Keaton starred in and
directed between 1920 and 1923. I already wrote about his first significant
short, One Week, here.
Buster Keaton was the greatest pure filmmaker of all the silent
comedians. In Cops, he uses geometry
and perspective to make his gags work, and to play tricks on the viewer. Here’s
he’s the oblivious young fool who creates havoc wherever he goes. In the
opening shot, he’s behind bars – but he’s not in prison, he’s stuck outside the
gates of his beloved’s grand home (she’s the mayor’s daughter). She won’t
respond to the plighting of his troth unless he becomes "a big business
man.”
In short order, he steals money from a cop, and is in turn defrauded
by a sharpster who sells him furniture that’s not his to sell. He loads the
goods into a wagon (the furniture’s real owner thinks Buster’s a moving man,
and helps him load up, to Buster’s quiet amazement). He has some fun with the slow,
old horse that pulls the wagon – he stops and gives the horse an injection from
goat glands (the Viagra of its day). Rejuvenated, the frisky animal pulls
Buster into the midst of a police parade.
While stopped in front of the parade grandstand, Buster reaches
for a cigarette but can’t find a match. Improvidentially, an anarchist tosses a
bomb that lands right next to Buster (it’s the stereotypical round shape with a
long, sputtering fuse). He calmly lights his cigarette from it, then tosses it
away. The subsequent explosion, comically tattering the uniforms of the
marching men, sparks the chase.
What’s funnier than one cop chasing a hero? Hundreds. As Buster
dashes to and fro, he finds swarms of cops on his tail. He nimbly avoids being
collared time and time again, and eventually traps all his pursuers in their
precinct house. However, his girl spurns him again, and he sadly unlocks the
doors and allows himself to be swallowed up by a sea of clutching hands. The grim final “The End” title card is shown on a gravestone topped by Buster’s porkpie
hat.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: ‘Foolish Wives’.
Henry King’s Tol’able
David (1921) is a parable on film. It’s positively folkloric, the tale of a
youngest child’s unexpected success and maturation, like an all-American
Grimm’s tale. This easily relatable story was a great success, furthering a
string of hits for its star, Richard Barthelmess.
Barthelmess was already popular and acclaimed for his work
in movies such as D.W. Griffith’s Broken
Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East (1920).
This was the first film that Barthelmess produced, for his new production
company Inspiration Pictures. He was a star, and Tol’able David made him even more of one. He had the power to choose
his material, and until he stopped playing leads in the early 1930s, he often
played in controversial and challenging films such as The Cabin in the Cotton (1932) and Heroes for Sale (1933).
In the film he plays the merely “tol’able” teen of the title.
He lives in rustic peace in rural Greenstream, a kind of sanitized and
sentimental sanctification of the common country American experience. Viewers
included many still on the farm, as well as those who sprang from and could
remember the same.
David is first seen dreaming over an illustrated Bible
containing the story of David and Goliath. He is the youngest in the family,
living with his father and mother, and older brother and his wife and their
newborn. The older brother drives the horse-drawn hack that delivers travelers
and goods from the railroad to the general store in the middle of town. The
most important duty of the driver is to carry the mail, seen almost as a sacred
duty. David dreams of driving the hack himself, but is routinely put down on
account of his age.
He is foolishly fond of the girl next door, Esther, but
their story is interrupted when three bad men come to town. They are cousins of
Esther’s father, three crooks on the lam from the law. Crude and bullying, they
take over Esther’s house. The worst of them is played in a hulking fit of sheer
menace by Ernest Torrence, who would later show off his comic talents playing
Buster Keaton’s father in Steamboat Bill,
Jr. (1928).
One could not ask for more of a melodrama. Torrence’s character
wantonly kills David’s dog, and cripples his brother. David’s father dies as a
result. David longs for revenge, but must abandon it when pled to by his
mother. He takes care of the family by working at the general store.
The day comes when David must drive the hack, and he loses
the mail on his way home. Torrence’s character grabs it, and David must
confront all three bullies in order to meet his responsibility. The justifiable-vengeance trope, long a theme in Westerns, is played hard here.
Director King keeps things simple. The villains are subhuman,
the hero is pure, the setting idyllic. This brand of Americana, as it came to
me known, would make up a considerable part of studio output as the years
passed. King would capture little moments perfectly -- a leering look from Torrence, or David shyly dancing with himself as we see the couples whirl inside the hall. King builds characters out of many small observations, providing a much richer feeling for the material.
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 ‘Cops’.
Just pictures. Pictures of buildings, bridges, trains,
boats, and the people leaking out of and into them. That’s the premise of this
10-minute ribbon of reality, captured and preserved forever as a monument to
the look and feel of a big city in the last century. Its largely static shots
turn the urban landscape into a triumph of abstract line and form.
It’ been tagged as the first avant-garde film made in
America. It’s also the parent of later, similar films such as Alberto
Cavalcanti’s 1926 Rien que les Heures (‘Nothing
but Time’), Robert Flaherty’s 1927 Twenty-Four-Dollar
Island, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin:
Symphony of a City (also 1927); and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
Sheeler was an artist who turned to photography early on in
his career, who was consumed by a love of documenting technology, industry, and
large-scale change. Strand, solely a photographer, weighed interests and themes
markedly similar to Sheeler’s, making the natural collaborators.
The grand accomplishment of painter Sheeler and photographer
Strand is to exit the need for narrative entirely. The film is what it is, a
seemingly simple recording of everyday reality. But it is grander than that. It
is an echo of the early cinema’s reliance on recording and screening
travelogues, actual visits to far-off places such as the Holy Land.
This film focuses on New York City, treating it as an unknown
quantity to be examined and considered almost from an archaeological
perspective. Steam shovels gape, wrecking balls cavort. The city tears itself
down, rebuilds itself, climbs higher and higher. The interpolated, laudatory
quotes from Walt Whitman’s poetry reinforces the sense of wonder Manhatta is trying to convey. It’s the
city as a poem in steel and brick.
In the end, the film shows us abstract mass against mass, a
nearly alien, strictly geometric portrait. The only real creatures at large are
large mechanical ones — trains, boats. People are ants, at best scrabbling
along the edges of a graveyard (Trinity Church’s). New York City personified.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: ‘Tol’able David’.
Chaplin was eager to make his first feature film, and he
planned a parent/child theme, half slapstick and half sentiment — what became The Kid.
At this point in his career, Chaplin was moving on past
short subjects, as well as contracts with companies that pressed him for fresh
material, ready or not. In January 1919 he formed United Artists with Douglas
Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith. This move gave him and the others
creative freedom and autonomy. He took his time making The Kid — nearly an entire year was spent shooting footage that
boiled down to a little over an hour’s run time. (Chaplin recut the film later
for posterity, whittling it down to 53 minutes.)
The best of the early child actors was Jackie Coogan (best
known later as the original Uncle Fester, in TV’s The Addams Family). At the ripe young age of 5, he was chosen by
Charlie Chaplin to co-star in Chaplin’s most successful film, and his first
feature-length.
Now, I hate children in film. There is something
fundamentally off-putting for me about the presence of the squeaky-voiced
little ones on the big screen. Their cuteness is annoying as hell. They are
usually included in a film as convenient plot points or for the manipulation of
sentiment. Honest film work that depicts the complex, kaleidoscopic nature of
childhood is rare. However, Coogan is spontaneous and engaging, and makes the
movie work.
Chaplin nakedly depicts the catch-as-catch-can experience of
the poor. Undoubtedly, he drew on his own memories of growing up poverty-stricken,
practically homeless, without a stable parent or sufficient resources. He keeps
the framing functional and on a human scale, maximizing the warmth the
protagonists exude.
The story is simple, right out of Victorian-era melodrama.
An abandoned mother of a newborn leaves her baby in a rich man’s car, which is
stolen. The baby is left in an alley, where it is found by none other than
Chaplin’s Tramp character. After a short spurt of trying to get rid of it, the
Tramp relents and takes the child home to his squalid attic room.
Time passes, and now we see the Tramp and the Kid scraping a
happy living together. The Kid breaks windows, and the Tramp comes along and
repairs them. Only when the child becomes ill does the heedless claw of
bureaucracy stretch into their lives. The authorities invade their garret and
takes little Jackie away to the orphanage, spawning an epic pursuit and battle across
and through the city. The Tramp may be laughable, but his fierce love for his
adopted child is laudable. In the end, the child is reunited with the mother,
and the Tramp is put together with both.
Ironically, Coogan would find himself let down by his real
parents, who blew all his savings from his child-acting career, prompting the
creation of the Coogan Act, which mandated the protection of child performers’
earnings.
In this film Chaplin successfully unites comedy and drama,
laughter and pathos. His confident and mature craftsmanship would only get
better.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: ‘Manhatta’.
It is interesting to note how cultural artifacts age. Some
stay front and center in the collective memory; a vastly greater number vanish
or hide in plain sight. The latter is the case with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an anti-war epic that
out-earned every other film at the 1921 box office. If it is remembered at all,
it is for the fact that it made a star of Rudolph Valentino.
The film is an adaptation of the popular 1916 novel by
Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibanez. It’s the story of two related families
who find themselves on opposite sides during World War I. The movie starts in
the pampas of Argentina, where a ruthless cattleman establishes an empire. He
has two daughters. One marries a Frenchman, the other a German. After the
paterfamilias dies, both families move to their husbands’ respective countries
of origin, setting up a situation in which their sons destroy each other on the
battlefield.
It was thought to be too difficult to turn into a film, but
screenwriter June Mathis pulled off an engaging adaptation, which led her to
spearhead the project. She selected both the director, Rex Ingram, and Valentino,
a handsome young Italian dancer who had only played bit parts to date.
In this film, he plays Julio Desnoyers, a pampered playboy
who thinks little beyond his own desires until he is shamed into serving in the
military. Why was Valentino such an icon? He was conventionally handsome, but
not extraordinary. The key to Valentino’s appeal was his vulnerability. In an
age when the ideal man was strong and emotionally unavailable, Valentino'
doe-eyed sensitivity appealed strongly to women and made him a screen idol.
Soon he was labeled as the Latin Lover, and was stereotyped as such for the
rest of his short career (he died at age 31).
Four Horsemen’s
powerful anti-war message resonated with filmgoers. America had been most
reluctant to get involved in the conflict, overcoming its isolationist
sentiments with the help of massive amounts of government and media propaganda.
The World War was cast as a messianic struggle for freedom and human decency —
a “war to end all wars.” (D.W. Griffith’s 1918 Hearts of the World was the first to depict German troops as
despoilers; Four Horsemen also demonizes
them.) Despite America’s decisive intervention, many still fought the idea of such
foreign entanglements, especially those that cost American lives.
The film’s 1993 restoration, complete with frame tinting and
a new musical score by Carl Davis, is a delight. The film’s production design
is lavish, and the action tends to overcome a plethora of long and complex
explanatory intertitles. The bravo set piece of the film is a nightmarish
fantasy of the unleashing of the Horsemen — Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death.
The reference crops up again and again, culminating in a final scene in which
the survivors mourn Julio at the bottom of a steep ravine crowded with the graves
of war dead. “Peace has come — but the Four Horsemen will still ravage humanity
— stirring unrest in the world — until all hatred is dead and only love reigns
in the heart of mankind.”
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: Chaplin’s ‘The Kid.’
The wonder is not only how good it is, but the fact that it
got made at all.
Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951) was an African-American. As such,
he was excluded from the mainstream culture, denied the means of production to
make cultural products. So, he made them on his own. Within Our Gates is his earliest surviving feature film, and its
intelligent boldness is worlds away from what Hollywood was cranking out at the
time.
Micheaux began his creative career as a novelist while in
his 30s. A producer’s interest in adapting his first book into a film led to
Micheaux doing it himself, in 1919. Over the next 30 years, he made at least 42
films, providing what came to be termed “race films” — that is, films for black
audiences.
Though only his second film, Within Our Gates demonstrates a maturity far greater than that of
mainstream films of the day. He tackles prejudice, racial violence, and the
dilemma of black people faced with innumerable obstacles to “uplifting”
themselves, to be taken seriously and given respect. Micheaux’s characters are
intelligent and complex, in sharp contrast to the usual depiction of
subservient, unintelligent “darkies” in mainstream film.
In the film, young teacher Sylvia tries to raise money for a
black school in the South — the key to empowerment is education. Her quest takes
her to the North, where prejudice still exists under the niceties of polite society.
In saving a young child from a speedy automobile, Sylvia is struck herself and taken
to the hospital. Providentially, the car that struck her was owned by a wealthy
philanthropist who give her ten times the money she needs.
Interspersed among Sylvia’s adventures are portraits of African-Americans
from many classes and types, not shying away from negative portrayals. In
particular, Micheaux gives us a black minister, Ned the preacher, who uses
religion cynically to control the gullible. He tells his congregation that
white affluence and political power condemns their souls, while the black folk,
simple and pure in heart, will humbly go to heaven. He literally lets his white
bosses kick him in the ass. Only when alone does he admit his complicity to himself.
This kind of examination and criticism of organized religion was unprecedented
in any film before or at the time, and in few films after.
The film ends with a flashback that shows us a double lynching,
as well as a sexual assault. These white crimes are portrayed matter-of-factly,
as though they would be familiar to the film’s viewers. Though the final
moments of the movie are given over to optimism, it’s the mayhem of white violence
that sticks in the memory. “And remember the white man makes the law in this
country!” says one intertitle.
Micheaux’s film pulls no punches. If white people of the
time thought about its subjects at all, they would have judged the film as
deeply subversive, as it was and still is.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’
I was first pulled effortlessly into the dream world of
cinema when my mother plonked me down in front of our dingy old black-and-white
television and tuned in to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film Beauty and the Beast.
Mom was intellectually precocious, culturally aware, and
lonely, moored in suburbia. I think she was trying to raise three little
friends rather than three children. She was a voracious reader, and we made
regular pit stops to the local library. Music, books, movies, all were
available in our home, with very little filtering — and no subject was off the
table.
She was a fan of the “great films” series that ran on public
television during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and as we only had the one set,
we kids all ended up watching Ivan the
Terrible, Part 1 and Grand Illusion
and Seven Samurai and stuff like
that. This had the effect of turning into de facto film critics, and scarred us
for life to boot. Gratis. Hey, if you’re 10 and you watch Fires on the Plain, something in you breaks way too early.
It’s tough for me to overstate how influential this film
was. It has an emotive power that drew me in, made me forget about anything
else. Even via that dinky set, I was sucked into the movie.
It’s a fairy tale of course, but it’s a fairy tale full of
fire and meaning, enacted so convincingly that even the most fantastic moments
seem natural, the logical outcome of what has gone before. Cocteau and his
creative team trapped magic inside the camera.
It is derived from the fairy tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince
de Beaumont (1711-1780). The story is the traditional one, containing two vain
and spiteful older sisters (the hilarious Mila Parely and Nane Germon) and
Belle (Josette Day), guileless and kind. When their father, an unfortunate
merchant (Marcel Andre), is forced to cross a forest dark with night, he
stumbles on an enchanted castle. In plucking a rose, he summons the wrath of
the Beast (Jean Marais), who demands that he forfeit his life or that of one of
his daughters.
Cocteau uses all the cinematic trickery at his disposal. A
double row of candelabras, held by disembodied arms, light themselves and point
the way. Decorative sculptures observe, blow smoke. A disembodied hand serves
wine. The rich scenic design of Christian Berard and Lucien Carre was modeled
on the engravings of Gustav Dore and the paintings of Jan Vermeer, and it
delineates the story with unerring accuracy.
Belle, of course, takes her father’s place. In the Beast’s
domain, he is a loving servant to her, though he’s compelled to stalk and kill
game in the night. (His fingers smoke with the blood of his victims.) Belle
pities him, but steadfastly refuses his nightly request to marry him.
The Beast is a classic romantic anti-hero – possessed of power,
but cursed and stricken with melancholy. He is by far better than Belle’s
wastrel brother Ludovic (Michel Auclair) and his pal and Belle’s would-be
lover, the “good-for-nothing” Avenant (Marais again, out of Beast mode and
staggeringly handsome). Gradually, Belle sees through the Beast’s appearance
and grows fond of him. When she is given leave to visit her family, the Beast
wastes away in unhappy isolation. Can she return in time to save him?
The second time I saw the film, I was at The Flick. This was
a tiny but delightful, ritzy two-screen art house at the corner of 15th and
Larimer in Denver. Besides a couple of other repertory houses, the Flick was
the only place where obscure, foreign, and avant-garde cinema was shown at the
time. (It seems like Rene Laloux’s Fantastic
Planet was always playing there.) It’s the only movie theater I can think
of that I dressed up to attend. Films there were events, to be mulled over and debated later at the nearby all-night coffee shop.
I made the mistake of taking a high-school date there to see
Beauty and the Beast. It was someone
I was interested in who did not reciprocate. (Then why did she go out with me?)
At this stage in my love life, I was needy and intense, the worst possible
combination. “Let’s just be friends,” she said as I tried to hold her hand
before the show. Ironically, it’s a statement Belle would later make as we
watched the film. I felt rejected and beastly myself.
You can tell whether a relationship is going somewhere by
how easy it is to talk movies after the show. The film failed to impress her,
and I took her home as fast as I could. There was nothing to discuss.
But the movie resounded in my mind. I was more convinced
than ever of its primacy. I was also certain that I would never ask out a
non-film buff to a movie ever again. And I didn’t.
It’s bad enough to begin with. I’m a film historian. I
always seem to be in the middle of watching a movie. Usually it’s something in
black and white, in a foreign language, and strange. This makes it tough on
people who live with me. Too often they have to wrassle the remote away and put
on something comprehensible.
I have a contrarian sense of quality. I like the bizarre, the
obscure, the overlooked. If it’s popular, I will often reflexively and stupidly
line up against it. Some part of me I am sure is always spoiling for a fight
with the larger culture (too many years as a critic).
You can see where this is headed. We’ve all been there — you
see a movie you love, you praise it to the skies. You lobby for it. You get
people to sit down and watch it with you. And there is silence.
And they start looking at you like you’re something the cat
coughed up.
This has happened to me so many times that I started keeping
track of these guilty pleasures. I just checked the list, and there are more
than 300 of these bad boys on it. I can guarantee, if you stay away from these,
you will be a happier person.
I’m not claiming that these are neglected masterpieces. I
know they are problematic, to say the least. Now, once in a while the critical
consensus will change about a film, so that a stinker I like becomes generally acceptable.
However, to date this has only happened to me in regard to the original The In-Laws (1979).
A lot of them are films in a series. I was raised on old
movies, and have a sneaking affection for Flash Gordon, Ma and Pa Kettle, and
Francis the Talking Mule. I followed the adventures of Basil Rathbone’s
Sherlock Holmes, Karloff’s Mr. Wong and Peter Lorre’s Mr. Moto, and all the
incarnations of Charlie Chan.
The “oriental” detective is just one of the many politically
incorrect figures of that period. Many more classic films are ruined by
sequences of blatant racism. In Babes in
Arms (1939), Holiday Inn (1942), and
James Whale’s Show Boat (1936),
blackface numbers stand out, deeply disturbing to watch now. Hauling them into
the light does good, but films like this do not constitute fodder for a fun
watch party.
Some of the films on the list of the forbidden are
so-bad-it’s-good — It Conquered the World
(1954), The Tingler (1959), Attack from Space (1964), and some are cheesy
Technicolor fantasies — Atlantis, the
Lost Continent (1961), Crack in the
World (1965), and Fantastic Voyage (1966),
in which Donald Pleasence is eaten by a white corpuscle.
New entries swell the list on a regular basis. John Carter (2012) is there, as is Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017).
It’s a sickness.
So here are 13 of the most traumatic film experiences you
should avoid. If by chance you like any of these selections, then know that you
are a weirdo, and my very dear friend.
Where Eagles Dare (dir. Brian G. Hutton, 1968)
Do you like Nazi kill counts? Then you are gonna love this
one. Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood (a match not made in heaven) and company
go on a secret WWII mission deep behind enemy lines to rescue an American
general. That’s it. They do that and a bunch of other stuff, to at a level not
seen until the casual bloodshed that permeates The Matrix. They just kill and kill and kill. This film is adapted
from the work of formulaic adventure novelist Alistair MacLean (The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, etc.), for whom I
have a weakness as well. It’s chaff, but it’s GOOD chaff.
Vampire Circus (dir. Robert Young, 1972)
It’s the only horror movie I know of that starts with what
is a softcore porn scene. Oh, do I have your attention now? Yeah, it’s a
hippy-drippy-trippy kind of horror film, in which a village suffers the
vengeance of — a vampire, in the form of — a circus. There is a chuckling
dwarf, a naked panther-lady, YOU know.
It will make you stop taking drugs.
Day of the Dolphin (dir. Mike Nichols, 1973)
“Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of
the United States.” ‘Nuff said. It’s what I consider to be a neat little sci-fi
thriller. There’s one problem. The dolphins have learned to speak through their
blowholes. In tiny little squeaky voices. This is evidently a barrier to the
suspension of disbelief, as any normal person watching will start laughing at
this point and won’t stop until all the credits have rolled. And who will
address you in said “dolphin voice” for weeks afterward. Even though this
project was helmed by the great Mike Nichols and starring George C. Scott, it
has is disappointed many. I still watch it.
Murder by Death (dir. Robert Moore, 1976)
First, you have to know who Truman Capote was. And to find
that amusing. Now we’ve lost 95 percent of the potential audience. Then you
have to understand a gallery of movie-detective stereotypes and their
mannerisms. I’m thinking this whodunit was made because Neil Simon wrote it; oh
yes you also need to know who Neil Simon was. If none of these cues spark your
interest . . . oh well. This was a prestige project; many honored actors appear
in the film including, bizarrely, Alec Guinness as a blind butler. Biggest
laugh: “I want my Dickie!”
Movie Movie (dir. Stanley Donen, 1978)
The great director Stanley Donen got together with the great
comedy writer Larry Gelbart and crafted this gem. It’s a parody of Golden Age
Hollywood — a double feature! “Dynamite Hands” is a gritty black-and-white boxing
drama and “Baxter’s Beauties of 1933” is a gaudy Technicolor backstage musical.
The ensemble, which includes George C. Scott, Eli Wallach, Art Carney, and many
other old hands, are drop-dead funny. If you get the references. “That’s the
second time you’ve made me drop my panties today!” This is the level of humor
at which I dwell.
The Stunt Man (dir. Richard Rush, 1980)
I love movies about the making of movies, such as The Bad and the Beautiful and Day for Night. I love this movie ever
since I saw it as a rough cut. From my perspective it’s funny, wry, and
profound. To those who’ve endured it, it’s pointless, meandering, and pompous. Take
your pick. With Peter O’Toole as director as Prospero.
Red Dawn (dir. John Milius, 1984)
“WOLVERINES!” If there ever was a conglomeration of teens
from Pueblo that could kick the Russian army’s ass, this is it. There’s Patrick
Swayze again! Charlie Sheen! C. THOMAS HOWELL! Jennifer Grey! And they even
throw in Harry Dean Stanton, and Ben Johnson, and Powers Boothe. All are called
on to fight the Commies who invade our homeland, and everybody gets a character
beat. Many industrial barrels of whoop-ass are opened.
Dune (dir. David Lynch, 1984)
It’s wasn’t his fault! He did the best with what he had, and
later extended cuts demonstrate to me at least that Lynch had a grasp on the
material, however bizarrely that played out from a design standpoint. It’s a
space epic that’s tough to pull off — we’ll have to see if a new adaptation
does any better with this “cursed” material. “Mua’dib! The Spice is life!”
Road House (dir. Rowdy Herrington, 1986)
First of all, the director has the best name in film
history. I want to make a film with him just so I could say I did. Then: it’s
terminally earnest Patrick Swayze as the mythical Dalton, the Ultimate Bouncer.
(Yes, those people who maintain order in nightclubs.) He slides into a rural
town in Missouri, a specialist hired to reform a bar with a bad reputation. In
doing so, he piques the ire of Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), a picayune Capone
whose mob-boss ways are a sharp contrast to the backwoods atmosphere in which
we find ourselves.
Dalton is a peaceful warrior with a degree in philosophy
from NYU. As such, he is called to knock the snot out of ruffians on a regular
basis. He’s like a Zen monk with feathered hair. He romances the only
professional woman in the county, a doctor he meets in the E.R. when he comes
in for some stitchery. He famously remarks, in a display of good old mind over
matter, “Pain don’t hurt.” The ridiculously over-the-top fight scenes are alone
worth the price of admission, but tarry to revel in what passes for dialogue and
characterization.
Joe Versus the Volcano (dir. John Patrick Shanley, 1990)
This comic fable is one of my favorite films of all time.
They let John Patrick Shanley make it just like he wanted, and it’s wonderful.
I swear to you it is. I watch it and I get all goopy and break down and cry and
think about what a precious wonderful thing life is. In stark contrast to those
around me.
Hudson Hawk (dir. Michael Lehmann, 1991)
What can I say.
Cannibal! The Musical (dir. Trey Parker, 1993)
OK, to supplement my non-existent comedy income I was
waiting tables in Boulder. There, one of my fellow waitrons, who could score
the best acid, mentioned that he was shooting a movie on the weekends with
people from CU. It was a musical about Colorado cannibal Alfred Packer. I will
ever regret not jumping at the chance to get involved. It was the first big
project of Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park” fame. And it is
hilarious. Those of this film’s cult and I can recite it verbatim. “Weep-wah,
weep-wah, suro no hapo.”
Timecop (dir. Peter Hyams, 1994)
It’s Jean Claude Van Damme! He’s a cop! Wait — not just a
cop but a TIME cop. A cop that travels though time. To catch bad guys to want
to abuse time travel for fun and profit. So the statute of limitations goes out
the window. Time-travel movies usually fall apart in terms of internal logic
and this is no different. But it does give it a game try. Just turn off your
mind, relax and float downstream . . .
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.
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
