It’s only 20 seconds long, but the contrast it provides in
thinking about on-screen presence is a valuable one.
Something Good —
Negro Kiss
Dir: Unknown
Prod: William Selig
Scr: N/A
Phot: Unknown
Premiere: 1898
20 seconds
This “Negro kiss” film came as a direct result of the 1896
John C. Rice/May Irwin “The Kiss,” a huge nickelodeon hit from 1896 which wewrote about here. Evidently William Selig, an Edison competitor who based his
Selig Polyscope Company in Chicago, thought a similar product, enacted by black
people for black audiences, would make money. This is the earliest preserved
Selig-produced film.
It probably failed, as it languished unknown, until it was
rediscovered by USC archivist Dino Everett decades later, and properly
identified with the help of Dr. Allyson Nadia Field of the University of
Chicago. It depicts two vaudeville performers, Gertie Brown and Saint Suttle,
embracing.
In sharp contrast to the stagey and stiff Rice/Irwin kiss, Brown
and Suttle sway in gentle harmony together, locking lips then parting, then returning
to kiss again. In between kisses they smile, they laugh, they josh with each
other. For the first time, we see two normal, unaffected people close up, a
refreshing blast from the past that belies all the staid and awkward filmmaking
of that period, and eloquently contradicts all the white-promulgated
stereotypes about African American behavior common at the time. It’s a breath
of fresh air.
The National Film Rregistry
Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National
Film Registry in chronological order.
In recent years, China has stepped up as the world’s largest
consumer of entertainment. The gravitational pull of its enormous audience
means that, for years, Western films have been rewritten and recut to appeal to
Chinese audiences (and Chinese censors). Now the Chinese film industry is cutting
out the middleman and producing its own blockbusters, films completely off the
West’s radar such as the romantic comedy The
Mermaid, adventure films such as Wolf
Warrior 2, and fantasies like Journey
to the West: The Demons Strike Back.
The Wandering Earth
(Liu lang di qiu)
Dir: Frant Gwo
Prod: Gong Geer, Yang
Hongtao, Hong Wang
Scr: Gong Geer, Junce
Ye, Yan Dongxu, Frant Gwo, Yang Zhixue
Phot: Michael Liu
Premiere: February 5,
2019
125 min.
The new science-fiction epic The Wandering Earth is garnering attention due to its unpromoted
posting onto Netflix this week. Why the streaming service would choose not to
trumpet such a profitable film smacks of cultural prejudice. Why not promote
the hell out of it? Can China produce a viable blockbuster, and is it worth
seeing?
Yes on both counts. The
Wandering Earth breaks no new ground, but it is entrtaining, kinetic and
visually rich, mounted firmly on the template of the by-turns wisecracking and tear-jerking
action flick.
Like many another science-fiction film, the premise is
ridiculous. The sun is unexpectedly expanding, and Earth is threatened with
destruction. Scientists discover another viable star to orbit, “only” 4.2 light
years away. Outfitting the planet with 10,000 “Earth engines” to push it
through space on a 2,500-year journey to its new home is a practically
unworkable idea — but if you let go of that, the movie flows along nicely. (There's already a good story by Emily Rome via Inverse about the scientific plausibility of the film.)
The conflict of the film stems from the Earth’s flyby of
Jupiter, intended to give it a gravity assist to propel it out of the Solar
System. Unfortunately, Jupiter’s gravity knocks out many Earth engines and
threatens the Earth with capture and destruction by the giant planet. It will
take the efforts of astronaut Liu Peiqiang (played by film star Wu Jing), his
estranged son Liu Qi, and assorted misfits to come up with a strategy to save
the planet. (Comic relief is provided by the half-Chinese, half-Australian
goofy ne’er-do-well Tim; is this a slam of Western slackerism?)
The defining feature of The
Wandering Earth is its relentless pace, it nervous giantism. It mounts set piece after set piece, each one bigger than the last. Director Frant Gwo has obviously
studied the work of directors George Miller and Luc Besson; unfortunately, he’s
also studied Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer. The movie strains to prove its technical chops, and it succeeds; it looks great. But narratively, the result is like an overpacked closet — you open
the film, and everything comes tumbling out, overwhelming you.
Something is ALWAYS on the verge of not working out in the
film; it’s one last-second escape to the next. Imagine a film made out of
nothing but climaxes, and you have The
Wandering Earth. The breakneck pace is halted only when an emotional speech
needs to be made, during which everything comes to a shuddering halt. The
production design is Standard Gritty Futuristic, with inventive art direction
by Ang Gao; Roc Chen’s score is a horn-heavy imitation of the swelling
orchestral accompaniments we’ve come to expect with this brand of fare.
So, our heroes struggle again and again to overcome
impossible odds. Given the relentless stimulation the move feels compelled to
provide, it’s hard to maintain the emotional through-line the movie is trying
hard to lay down as well. The film premiered in Chinese New Year — a time when
families gather together from across the country (and go see movies together).
At bottom, The Wandering Earth is
about family connecting — a father with his children, a brother with his
sister. This gives the film just enough heart to keep it from floating away on
a cloud of technological frenzy.
And there’s a hint of subversiveness as well. The hero must
override a HAL-like computer system, and bureaucratic resistance from the
never-seen United Earth Government, to save the day. Considering how conformist
we’ve been taught Chinese society is, it’s refreshing to see a little
unilateral John Wayne-style action take place.
So, with The Wandering
Earth it’s obvious that China can replicate Western tent-pole cinema. Now:
can it do better?
Wallace Beery captures Lillian Hall in The Last of the Mohicans.
The Last of the Mohicans is another difficult “classic.” The 1826 novel by James Fenimore Cooper is enshrined as the first Great American Novel. It is almost more famous as the focus of Mark Twain’s immortal and incendiary 1895 critical thrashing, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”Mohicans has been dug up, re-examined, re-interpreted, lauded or hooted at, and returned to the grave several times in literary history. It is reviled today by the right-thinking due to its inherent racism, its endorsement of Manifest Destiny, its obsession with the perils of what was termed miscegenation. Wait a minute — maybe that’s what MAKES it the Great American Novel.
The Last of the Mohicans
Dir: Maurice Tourneur, Clarence Brown
Scr: Robert A. Dillon
Phot: Philip R. Du Bois, Charles Van Enger
Premiere: November 21, 1920
73 min.
Like it or not, we are stuck with it on our reading lists. As poorly written as it is, as wooden as the characters are, it is what we used to call a “rip-snorter.” It’s set during the French and Indian War, 1757, and has some basis in historical fact . . . making it, fittingly, the first notable “based on a true story” trope as well.
The basic plot is the effort to get two sisters, comely and of marriageable age, Alice and Cora, to their father, a British colonel who commands a frontier fort. The evil mainspring of the plot is Magua, a crafty and deceitful Huron who desires vengeance against Cora’s father for hooking him on that ol’ white lightning, and who develops a hankering for Cora. The ensuing complex of chases, rescues, captures, sieges, combat, torture, massacre, and whatnot crowd the pages.
This is a basically a battle over the ovaries of the young ladies involved. Cora and Alice are half-sisters. Alice is blond, and betrothed to dashing young Major Duncan Heyward, who is also a bit of a thickie. Cora has dark hair — due to her vaguely, miniscule yet significant amount of West Indies blood! — that drives Magua ka-ray-zay. It is this Cora-inspired lust that places all of them in peril, again and again, and eventually gets three people killed. Wombs are treacherous.
Working on the side of the angels, fortunately, are the prototypical calm, noble savages Chingachgook and Uncas (the latter our titular, doomed hero), and Natty Bumppo aka Hawkeye, a frontiersman with superhuman powers — he can hunt, shoot, fight, canoe, leap, stab, and presumably go to the bathroom with greater strength, agility, and speed than any man in fiction. The Last of the Mohicans may not be a Great American Novel, but it is the first Great American Action Movie.
This is the first of three Hollywood runs at the tome. Behind the camera was Maurice Tourneur, a prestige artist three of whose films — The Wishing Ring, The Poor Little Rich Girl, and The Blue Bird— precede this entry on the National Film Registry list. Tourneur got through about 40 percent of the filming when illness forced him off the project. Into his place stepped his editor and second-unit man Clarence Brown. This turned out to be Brown’s big break.
It’s interesting to guess at who shot what. Tourneur used a very stage-picture kind of look in his films, with plenty of visual cues placed to create a sense of depth. Brown’s shots are very flat and functional, two-shots that emphasize emotion and relation. (Brown would later become Garbo and Crawford’s go-to director.) This is the reverse of later Hollywood habit, when second units were sent to do the action sequences and links, and the name directors stayed in the studio with the lead performers.
Their joint creation works well, moving briskly from one picturesque sequence to another (much shooting was done at Big Bear Lake and in Yosemite). There are stunts, explosions, a bit of gore, even a little baby-tossing. The problem of miscegenation is stated boldly; unlike in the novel, there is an unconsummated passion displayed between Cora and Uncas that makes their movie-logic doom all the more certain. Sure, Magua (Wallace Beery!) gets it in the neck, but not before we are shown a dying Uncas crawling to the body of Cora, and twining his fingers with her, before expiring.
Of course, it is condescending (an intertitle describes Uncas’ “simple words of a savage – yet revealing depths of thought and imagination”) and white actors in “redface” play Native Americans (Boris Karloff is in there, somewhere). This it has in common with other films of period, ones we’ve covered previously: Traffic in Souls, Broken Blossoms, Birth of a Nation. It was symptomatic of the time, but still deserving of study.
And the text is not as irredeemable as it seems. Though the 1936 version, starring Randolph Scott as Hawkeye, reiterates the conceits of the original, take a look at Michael Mann’s 1992 adaptation. Mann is not a director we associate with pastoral settings (Thief, Manhunter, Heat, The Insider) but he makes something compelling, visceral, and questioning of the narrative. Daniel Day-Lewis trained for the role of Hawkeye by legendarily going off into the forest and living off it for a few months before filming, just to get into the right frame of mind. He goes for authenticity, employing nearly 1,000 Native American actors.
The result stands the fairly narrow ideas of Cooper and gets them to resonate. Tourneur and Brown’s version is beautiful, but rings hollow.
The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: ‘The Making of an American.’
