Sauce

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 26, 2024 by dcairns

Max Miller was a legendarily popular music hall “cheeky chappie” whose appeal now seems irretrievable, alien, and who was never suited to film: his routines depend on jokes, patter and his evident rapport with the audience — smutty jokes aimed knowingly at working class mums in a style of harmless flirtation. Since film comedy isn’t about telling jokes and you can’t achieve exactly the same rapport with a movie camera (though some stars seem to manage a version of that). Nevertheless, Miller made a shit-ton of films, and shit seems to be the operative word here.

Roy William Neill, born at sea off the coast of Ireland started his career in the US and had a brief UK stint — he was at one point promised THE LADY VANISHES before Hitch got it, but hey Roy, you can have two Claude Hulberts and four Max Millers in consolation. Don’t take it to heart.

A lot of ABC films seem to be about going to Scotland — Will Hay and Old Mother Riley do it in order to be haunted. Max does it here in order to die a death on stage. Scottish music hall audiences were notoriously tough, with one known case of a comedian killing himself in Glasgow after a particularly bruising gig. Our hero comes on extremely obnoxious, constantly belittling his assistant, Chips, and feuding with a Scots comedienne, played by English Florence Desmond who was George Formby’s best leading lady (in NO LIMIT) with one of the ghastliest fake accents I ever heard. Still, you take her part against Max.

“Max Miller is the worst comedian I’ve even seen,” remarked Fiona. Yet he’s clearly skilled, the speed of his chatter is breathtaking, hard to keep up with. But he’s of another world. The references are obscure, the smut abstracted, the whole way of being alien to us. And there’s an undeniable nails-down-a-blackboard to the rapid-fire barrage of insinuating smarm. Who wears a suit made out of curtains? I think it’s also a mistake to portray Max as an egomaniacal bully offstage, since a lot of his appeal onstage seems to be his naughty-but-nice Jewish boy image.

Desmond’s act is almost as abstruse, with impersonations of Cicely Courtnidge (Mrs Jack Hulbert) and Elizabeth Bergner (!)

Neill’s strong, atmospheric visual style, as showcased in his later Sherlock Homes movies with Rathbone and Bruce, is nowhere to be seen, though it would hardly have fitted this material. But he doesn’t come up with an alternative — though surely a better copy would reveal vastly more visual quality. I wonder if any of the other Neill-Miller collaborations are haunted house films? It seems like every ABC worth his salt ‘n’ sauce had to wind up in a spookshow at some point. Askey and Hay did it every other film.

Unforgivably, neither Alastair Sim nor John Laurie appears during the Scottish scenes, but there’s a talented kid in a major role, authentically Scottish and working-class. Uncredited, of course. Otherwise, it seems to be a point of honour to employ no actual Scots.

As unsuited as Max is to film stardom, this film is a far worse vehicle than even he deserves. I seem to recall FRIDAY THE 13TH being better — not a movie in which Awful British Comedians are slaughtered by a maniac with a hunting knife, alas, but an ensemble piece where Max shares the limelight with Jessie Matthews, Ralph Richardson (!) etc.

VERDICT — Max Miller is awful, but to appreciate his gifts you probably had to see him on the stage, and be born in the south of England before 1900.

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Malicious Roomers

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 25, 2024 by dcairns

My exploration of the works of Herbert Mason continues. Lots of his films are unavailable so far as can see. BACK-ROOM BOY was a rare example of real cinematic flair being applied to the British slapstick film, and A WINDOW ON LONDON was a slick and graceful combination of slice-of-life realism and noir melodrama.

STRANGE BOARDERS is also very stylish in a Hitchcockian way. It’s the kind of spy romp he might have enjoyed, although making the hero a professional espionage investigator is something he’d probably have balked at.

Scene one: a little old lady is hit by a bus. Well, it gets your attention. When she’s discovered to have been carrying top secret blueprints of Britain’s newest MacGuffin, and investigation of her lodging house is clearly indicated, so ace spy Tommy Blythe (Tom Walls) is dragged from his honeymoon to go undercover. His wife, who doesn’t know about his covert work, is naturally outraged and suspicious, so she follows him — into the lions’ den!

I became fascinated by the plot’s close resemblance to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film L’ASSASSIN HABITE…AU 21. In both stories, an investigator goes undercover in a boarding house to find out which of the tenants is involved in an ongoing crime, and is joined by his wife, who shows up unexpectedly and without his agreement, determined to investigate on her own. In both stories there’s a blind man among the lodgers, and the denouement is strikingly similar in ways it wouldn’t do to go into without spoilering both films and their respective source novels.

For here’s the thing — STRANGE BOARDERS is based on a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Strange Boarders of Palace Crescent, while Clouzot’s film is based on L’assassin habite au 21 by Franco-Belgian crime writer S.A. Steeman. I call shenanigans!

Mason’s film scripted by the great Sidney Gilliat and A.R. Rawlinson, who worked on the first MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and was a genuine military intelligence officer in both the Great War and the one that was about to break out. They rejigged the plot quite a bit — in the very prolific Oppenheim’s book the hero is single, and is not an intelligence man, he’s more like the Hitchcockian amateur/innocent.

Steeman’s French novel appeared shortly after the British film, so he could certainly have seen it, if it were showing in France or if he saw it in England and could speak English. He couldn’t have been stealing from the book because the key elements common to both works are not in the Oppenheim original.

I can’t convict Steeman, who was a prolific and quite imaginative author (Clouzot’s magnificent QUAIS DES ORFEVRES is also based on a Steeman work, though apparently quite loosely as Clouzot couldn’t remember the exact plot and couldn’t find a copy of the paperback), but I thought I’d read synopses of his other works, since plagiarism is rarely a one-time crime unless the author is immediately caught. And indeed, Steeman’s Le Furet/The Ferret, filmed in 1949, does sound quite a bit like the film of Georges Simenon’s Picpus. Both involve anonymous letter-writers and a fortune teller, if memory serves. But stealing from Simenon, or from a recent adaptation of Simenon, would be far riskier than swiping from an obscure British thriller film. It looks like Steeman borrowed some plot elements but reworked them into his own pattern. He may have felt that’s what he was doing, legitimately, with L’Assassin…

Clouzot’s film doesn’t do much with its blinded prize-fighter, who is just a red herring, whereas STRANGE BOARDERS gets terrific mileage out of its sightless villain — in one scene, Tommy Blythe, standing stock-still to escape detection, is nearly given away by the soft ticking of his wristwatch, until he pokes his arm out the open window and it’s drowned out by traffic atmos. There’s also a fight in a darkroom — exciting stuff.

Kinky, too — Tommy playfully threatens his wife with a spanking, and when he captures one enemy agent, the ubiquitous Googie Withers, he has to enlist his wife’s aid to get her bound and gagged in the back of a car. Much is made of Renée Saint-Cyr stripping off Googie’s stoking to bind her ankles… Something Clouzot would have enjoyed, if he’d seen it, and would probably have insisted on swiping, but his film doesn’t have any equivalent of the Googie character.

Actually, the means by which Tommy gets this femme fatale out of a public night club, by insisting she’s his wife, also turns up in Edward Dmytryk’s Columbia B-movie THE BLONDE FROM SINGAPORE, made just a few years after STRANGE BOARDERS, but there may well be other movies that use that trope, which relies on the sinister assumption that the public will always believe a man over a woman.

I have been unaware of Tom Walls except for a vague idea about the Aldwych farces he produced on stage and directed on film. Now I’m starting to see them and he’s a fantastic comic actor, but perhaps a little long in the tooth for his role as a dashing bridegroom here. He’s an amazing and versatile character actor who wants to be a leading man.

Also featured: a nubile Irene Handl and Martita Hunt.

STRANGE BOARDERS stars Major Bone; Princess Isabelle; Helen Nosseros; Eldridge Harper; Lord Edgware; Mrs. Hudson; Tom Gradgrind; Sexton Blake; Alaric Chichester; Jellyband; Undetermined Role; Miss Havisham; and Joe Gargery.

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The Distance of Time

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , on April 24, 2024 by dcairns

Very much enjoyed Keisuke Kinoshita’s TWENTY-FOUR EYES, which resolves some unique dramatic issues inherited from a source novel in some very interesting ways.

It’s about a schoolteacher and her first class, twelve kids. That’s already too many characters to keep straight. Then there are the schoolteachers’ family, various parents, other school staff. And the story covers decades so all the initial kids get swapped out by new actors. The film is quite long, but that’s a crazy number of people to keep straight.

It’s also a film with a lot of tragedy in it. The story starts before the war and the boys are the right age to enlist when WWII starts. There’s also illness, financial problems, death in childbirth. So there is a lot of crying, no way to avoid it even if you invoked a bit of Hawksian staunchness. “Tragedy is when the audience cries, not when the actors cry,” but sometimes, quite a lot in this case, there is no way realistically to avoid tears.

Kinoshita likes distant framing, and this has a couple of very positive effects, quite apart from the scenic values it brings in. The kids are often seen as a group, and I never felt pressured to remember particularly who was who. I had more of a general sense, but they definitely all had personalities and developed in different ways through their distinctive subplots. As a teacher — an aging one — I often feel pressured to remember lots of names in reality, so I don’t want that in my movies. But here it was fine.

And the wide shots added a certain discretion to the treatment of emotion. No up-close blubbering, though I don’t mean to imply we’re in a Roy Andersson film without closeups. It’s just that Kinoshita often goes wide when you might expect the opposite. The considerable space around the actors enhances aspects of the emotion but stops it being overwhelming in a bad way. Space = Time in an odd way, so that there’s an “emotion recollected in tranquility” sense to it. Welles talked about how, though the old line about how “comedy is long shot, tragedy is closeup” is broadly accurate, the TRUE long shot, the small figure in the vast landscape, takes us right back to tragedy again.

Kinoshita uses a lot of Western tunes, often quite emotionally loaded ones like Ford’s favourite hymn “What a Friend we have in Jesus,” and one would bet that he’s a Ford fan (like Kurosawa) but his wide shots are subtly different in effect/affect, there’s a little more, hmm, neutrality?

But I watched it with friends and we all cried buckets.

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