“Ah, Jean!”

 

That’s what my late friend Lawrie would say whenever the subject of Jean Simmons came up. I mention it because I happened to notice it’s her 79th birthday.

Lawrie’s first movie as assistant was CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA, produced by an irascible and untalented Hungarian mogul/confidence man called Gabby Pascal. Pascal had managed to persuade the notoriously intractable George Bernard Shaw to grant him the film rights to his entire oeuvre. Turning up for the meeting in a pair of new yellow socks (”always wear something new to an important meeting”) Gabby convinced George of his genius, which GBS remained convinced off throughout their partnership, despite numberless proofs to the contrary. ‘What is your company called?’ asked Shaw, agreeing to the deal. ‘It can be called whatever you like, once you advance me the money to set it up,’ replied the Mittel-European with a beastly twinkle.

CAESAR was a massive super-production, with all the traditional wastage. ‘We exported sand to Egypt for the desert scenes,’ remembered Lawrie with wonderment, ‘– during wartime!’ A thousand sandals were made for Egyptian extras, who promptly ate them. ‘The soft leather was apparently quite a delicacy.’ Ancient Egyptian-sounding music was produced by the Ondes Martenot, one of the first electronic instruments. Huge murals were painted, then ignored by the camera because the director preferred blank walls.

On location, Lawrie sat in a tent and manned a radio, co-ordinating troops for Caesar’s battles. ‘Oh, the battles were a scream! We killed so many people,” he recalled fondly. “Twenty years later I was walking in London with my fiancee, when a grubby old man accosted us. “Remember me?” he said. I didn’t. He raised his hat. One ear was missing. Cut off by a sword in one of those battle scenes. The man said, “I got paid a fortune for that. I do hope we’re going to do another film soon. I’ve still got one ear!”‘

In C&C, Jean Simmons doubled for Vivian Leigh, being thrown into a water tank at Rank Denham Studios — in January. They hurled her in, she couldn’t swim, the man delegated to save her couldn’t swim either, she was eventually hauled out, shivering and bedraggled, to face a delighted Pascal, who was doubling as director. “That was vunderful, perfect, perfect! We do it one more time.”

(Remind me to tell you the one about Pascal and the camel sometime.)

On BLACK NARCISSUS, Lawrie got to know Jean better. ‘I used to help her wash the brown body make-up off in the bath,’ he said, dreamily. Sabu was very interested in her too, but Mrs. Simmons didn’t approve of him, so he went off with Jean’s stand-in instead and got her pregnant.’

(Sabu is a pretty well unique figure in British cinema — my students are usually surprised that we had an Indian star in British films in the 40s. We don’t have one now!)

As Lawrie reminisced, I remember thinking: ‘Jean Simmons. In the bath. Aged seventeen. Wow. I’m in the wrong line of work.’ And then, ‘Waitaminute! I’m in the same line of work.’

“Beware the beat of the cloth-wrapped feet!”

 

My stairwell is dimly lit by a big skylight, its surface encrusted with aeons of birdshit and whatever garbage the people in the tower block opposite have chucked onto our roof. Seagulls alight on this opaque screen and walk about on it, visible from below only as disembodied sets of webbed feet.

It’s rather like a Disney version of Hitchcock’s THE LODGER.

The Life and Death of Colonel Chimp

 

I am indebted to Shadowplay informant Danny Carr for the information that former TARZAN compadre Cheeta (A.K.A. Jiggs), the world’s oldest recorded chimpanzee, is going to rock the world of showbiz with a tell-all autobiography. The watchful primate will pull no punches as he recounts his turbulent life story to a rapt reading public. Original “Jane” Maureen O’Sullivan is expected to bear the special brunt of the ape of wrath’s score-settling.

But has Cheeta himself led a blameless existence? According to TARZAN ESCAPES’ uncredited co-director, William “the Onion” Wellman, Cheeta would masturbate on command, at a secret signal from his trainer, whenever studio suits visited the set, thus driving them away. Not the sort of behaviour we expect from a movie star, except maybe Jason Statham.

I’m slightly perplexed at the idea of a non-verbal, non-reading, non-writing primate authoring a book. If we go for that, there’s nothing to stop inanimate objects from getting their own bylines too. We could have The Rosebud Chronicles: A Sled’s Journey (I know Orson Welles said they burned that thing, but Spielberg still thinks he has a genuine CITIZEN KANE prop), Thus Spake Geoff: The Intimate Memoirs of a 2001 Monolith, and maybe Bridge on the River Kwai: His Own Story. Hell, there’s nothing to stop us having books authored by people, animals and objects that don’t even exist. How about the true-life struggles of the purely allegorical elephant that never appears in either version of ELEPHANT?

 

*

Another weird bit of Tarzania: in November of last year, a number of obituaries appeared commemorating the passing of Brenda Joyce, the second actress to play Jane opposite the incomparable Johnny Weissmuller (and Jiggs). It is pleasing to note that rumours…death…greatly exagg… and the former Betty Leabo seems to be Very Much Alive at 95. Wonder if she’ll be buying her co-star’s book.

Euphoria #33: Lip-flap a-go-go

High-powered producer/assistant director David Brown (pictured) is the most well-placed film industry bod I can claim as friend. Even I’m impressed I know him!

 

Here, David cameos in his first ever film (as unit runner), GREGORY’S GIRL. More on this little beauty in Euphoria #32.

At our recent outing to SWEENEY TODD, I twisted David’s arm and got him to think of some favourite film moments for this spot: scenes that create the kind of rosy glow and feeling of well-being that can be detected on Geiger counters.

To his great credit, the first title past David’s lips was Powell & Pressburger’s 1946 A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (or STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, for those of you afflicted with an oceanic handicap). He subsequently volunteered several OTHER great suggestions, but we’re keeping them for later. We veered back and forth between the rose and the table tennis scene, but I finally put my foot down and insisted on the rose, since I have more to say about it.

At this point I must hand over to my deceased friend Lawrie – a fellow assistant director of David’s, though of an earlier generation, present on the set as these sequences were shot.

‘David Niven, you know had odd hands, like a labourer, so whenever there was a close-up of hands to be done, they would say, “Get Lawrie.”‘

(So that’s Lawrie’s hands we see holding the flask.)

‘The line was written as, “One is so starved of colour up there,” but we’d done several takes, and Marius Goring, who was one of the cleverest actors I ever knew, was bored, so he said, “One is so starved of Technicolor up there,” and we all fell about laughing. He was just having fun, but Mickey [Powell] must have liked it.’

Sharp-eyed Shadowplayers will have spotted the fairly heavy lip-flap on that line: Goring’s mouth movement’s don’t quite synch with what he’s saying. My theory is that Powell must have decided he liked that improv later, but didn’t have a good take of it, so he used a “straight” take and dubbed the sound in from Goring’s ad-lib, or else got Goring in to post-synch the line.

Powell said that when he heard the audience laugh at that line, he knew there was no such thing as realism in the cinema. It’s true, too. All films bear a purely allegorical relation to reality — it may suit their purposes sometimes to strive for an illusion of “naturalism”, but it may not. British cinema seems to have arrived at something close to a “house style” which is either faux-naturalism (Loach) or FAILED faux-naturalism (almost everyone else) and which excludes nearly everything that can be enchanting or exciting about film art. One could pretty easily draw up a Dogme 95 list of commandments for British film and see that nearly all of them tow the line. (Note to self: try this and see if you’re talking crap.)

What else to say? Well, I purposely kept this clip long, because I just couldn’t stop it. It’s the same when I watch the film or show the opening to students. It takes a rare force of willpower to hit the STOP button. That’s cinema.

But the moment that primarily concerns us is the transition from b&w to colour on the rose, and the line afterwards. When Pressburger first suggested mixing media in this way, Powell assumed that the earthly scenes would be monochromatic, with fantasy otherworld in colour, as in THE WIZARD OF OZ. Pressburger set him straight: “Look around you: the world is in colour, therefore it’s Heaven that must be in black and white.”

Does anybody know? #1

 

Does anybody know if Columbia Pictures ever made a good musical?

I was all set to enjoy YOU’LL NEVER GET RICH — I like Robert Benchley*, and I love Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. The film has an amusing credit sequence, there’s a little dance between Fred and Rita which is quite charming, and then it becomes a shapeless unfunny lumbering thing without appealing characters or interesting situations or even much good musical action. I haven’t seen all of it but I probably won’t watch more unless somebody tells me there’s a great dance at 1hr 22 mins or something.

I haven’t watched the other Rita and Fred show, YOU WERE NEVER LOVELIER, but am I wrong in assuming it’s identical in every way?

I got a deja vu feeling and remembered how much I’d disliked DOWN TO EARTH as well — forced and unfunny and kind of DUMB in a way that even really silly Hollywood movies weren’t, usually.

In a flash, I just remembered THE SKY’S THE LIMIT, which has Astaire’s great angry dance to “One for my baby”, but checking it, I find it’s an R.K.O. Radio Picture.

TONIGHT AND EVERY NIGHT kind of bored me too, and it had some really horrid colour schemes, like M.G.M. seen through a hangover, though there was one nice bit where a young artiste tap-dances to a Hitler broadcast: “No, leave it on, I often dance to this fellow.” You don’t see nearly enough of that sort of thing.

It might actually be that I just don’t like Columbia. Their idea of greatness was Capra, who I’m rather iffy about. My favourite Columbia films were made by visiting independents — ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI. I love GILDA, but the director of that one, Charles Vidor, ended up suing studio boss Harry Cohn for psychological injury. This could be one of those studios that I’m just temperamentally unsuited to.

(I love Paramount, especially 20s-30s. Love Warners, esp. 30s-40s. Love R.K.O. — almost everything. Love lots of different things from Universal. Love M.G.M. musicals but almost nothing else from that studio, and even with the musicals I have to leaven them with something drier or I tend to break out, and not in song.)

*I like Benchley for his dreamlike qualities. There’s an essay that starts something like this: “So, on top of all this other work I’ve got to do, they tell me I have to build the Hoover Dam. I said to them I was already very busy and couldn’t they get somebody else, but no, it had to be me.”

Quote of the day: Wonder Kid?

 

From Ezra Goodman’s marvellous The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood ~

‘Director King Vidor’s story, in his autobiography, A Tree is a Tree*, about how [M.G.M. executive Irving] Thalberg coolly conducted a story conference during a funeral, is a hair-raising tip-off to the man’s character. The funeral was Mabel Normand’s, and the screen story under discussion was that of  the homicidal Billy the Kid. The busy Thalberg did not have any time to waste. The conference between him and Vidor started in a limousine on the way to the funeral, continued intermittently through the services (”Too many murders,” Thalberg whispered of the movie plot at one point), and was concluded by the time the car reached the studio again. Thalberg bounded up the steps to his office, told Vidor “I’ll call you,” and, as Vidor noted, “the story conference was at an end.”‘

Goodman’s book is full of such insights, drawn from many other sources but also from his long experience as a Hollywood press-man. The lack of respect shown by Thalberg to Normand, a key figure of the silent era (she’s rumoured to have thrown the screen’s first custard pie) is horrifying. On the very next page, Goodman gives us:

‘Thalberg’s successors never enjoyed the esteem he did. It has been said that the imposing M.G.M. executive building, named after Thalberg, is air-conditioned and hermetically sealed “so that the ghost of Irving can’t get in to see what they are doing.”‘

Lovely. And he’s good at demolishing the myth of Thalberg’s genius: ‘For sheer bad taste and bad movie-making, it would not have been easy to beat some of the pictures Thalberg turned out,’ — I’m inclined to agree. Then as now, the pursuit of “quality” in Hollywood is usually an alibi for middlebrow tedium and/or vulgarity. The really interesting work is made by people who are aiming for something more, or less.

*I haven’t got this book and I WANT IT! But I do have A Cast of Killers, by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, which details Vidor’s retirement project: investigating the 1922 murder of film director William Desmond Taylor, a case which involved numerous Hollywood greats — including Mabel Normand. Film directors don’t like unsolved murder cases, especially when the victim is a film director: it’s what you call a vested interest. Plus they tend not to like inconclusive endings in Hollywood. Anyhow, Vidor, being a storyteller, convinces himself of a massive conspiracy, which may well be true but is just the story you’d expect from him. Fiona and I love the idea of Vidor as detective. He could carry a badge with the M.G.M. lion on it and say things like “Freeze! King Vidor!”

Euphoria #32: small boys

Edinburgh Filmhouse habitué David Watson (ever notice how everybody is called David?) nominates this little slice of grin-making cinema from the bottom of his heart:

It’s from Billy Forsyth’s classic GREGORY’S GIRL, and may be the most perfect example of a Little Moment to Induce Happiness that we’ve yet had. Tiny and jewel-like in it’s simple beauty, it has brought pleasure to literally plomzillions of people.

More like this, please! (And more Scottish films like this, too.)

The actor playing the ivory-tinkling headmaster is Chic Murray, a music-hall comedian of long standing. (Sample material: ”I had a tragic childhood. My parents never understood me. They were Japanese.”) My late friend Lawrie once ran an organsiation called Films of Scotland, the first official body for the promotion of Scottish cinema, and the worst job he ever had. At once point he was brought a proposal for a short comedy starring Mr. Murray.

‘”He’s the Coming Man,” they told me. I said, “Chic Murray has been the Coming Man since I was in short trousers.”‘

Despite his great popularity in Scotland (and we’re a tough crowd: after a hostile reception at the Glasgow Empire in 1918, comedian Mark Sheridan walked to Kelvin Grove Park and shot himself), Murray remained largely an unknown quantity elsewhere until the end, save for THIS MOMENT — proof that immortality can strike randomly, when we least expect it, like a moonlit rapist. All we can do is keep busy and await the moment.

Will I be saying more about this film? Yes, starting TOMORROW.

 

“It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.” ~ Chic Murray.

Quote of the Day: Scotsman, Beware!

 

LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS:

GARANCE (dreamily): Do you remember, my dear friend, that young Scotsman you provoked to a duel in Edinburgh?

COUNT: Yes, I remember very well — why?

GARANCE: That young man was not nearly as good a shot as you, was he?

COUNT: Of course not! And everybody knew it.

GARANCE: But you killed him all the same.

COUNT: An affair of honour, Garance!

GARANCE: All that, because I smiled at him.

COUNT: Yes, in public, several times.

GARANCE: But I told you that when I was smiling at him I was thinking of someone else.

Screenplay by Jacques Prevert. Directed by Marcel Carné.

I remembered an almost exact repeat of this exchange in Ophüls’ LOLA MONTES, but when I went to look, it WASN’T THERE!

Anybody else have any vanishing movie scenes?

*

Somebody could make a little movie about the Young Scotsman, and then it could be slotted in between the two halves of LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS and played as a sort of entr’acte. It’s the kind of thing David Thomson could write if he wasn’t so TIRED.

Euphoria #31: “STRRRRIKE!”

 

Film student Stuart Condy hails from the same sleepy hamlet that birthed Great Scots Michael Caton-Jones and Nicol Williamson — say its name with a flinty pride: BROXBURN. For our ongoing series of happy-making moments, he has recommended this sequence from Roman Polanski’s 1967 curate’s egg THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS.

Last night I revisited THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS and was presented with the perfect nomination. It’s not the dance scene, although that also gives a glow, but the scene where Professor Abronsius and the ever faithful Alfred evade the crypt keeper, scale the rooftops and climb in the small window at the back, with the intention of taking out Count Von Krolock and his son. … The great moment is the way Abronsius says “STRRRRIKE” when Alfred has eventually got the lids of the coffins and the stake in his hand………. Love it to bits.

There’s Jack MacGowran and Little Roman’s cartoon-expressionist performances, and the humour of thin men in tight trousers tiptoeing over battlements (something it should be compulsory to include in ALL FILMS), and an overall sense of the picturesque and folkloric that has nothing to do with comedy but is rather stunning and mysterious.

I have a history with this one. When I saw it as a kid, in a curious way it made me more aware of the film director, because Polanski was IN it. I’d seen lots and lots of Chaplin at this point, but Polanski was more famous as a director than as an actor, plus the Radio Times made special mention of him (he’s the film’s only major sales point). So I may have come for the vampires but I stayed for Polanski, whom I knew I’d heard of SOMEHOW.

A bit of research afterwards gave me the whole shocking story. But in the meantime I’d really enjoyed the film. I’ve liked it less and less since that first screening (even though it was a pan-and-scan, with the alternative title, DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES, carelessly stitched into the beautiful opening credits). The plot seriously lacks any sense of progress (Professor Abronsius is ALWAYS getting stuck, or trapped, or frozen stiff) and Polanski the director is possessed of some kind of anti-comic-timing. It’s rather sweet that he’s continued to try and make comedies, out of sheer enthusiasm for the form… I bet that’s the first time the word “sweet” has been used to describe any atribute of Polanski in print. But he’s clearly a fan — check out the references to Chaplin’s THE GOLD RUSH in both REPULSION and PIRATES (where the “eating a shoe” moment is recreated with a dead rat — very Polanski).

But Roman did succeed one time, I think. BITTER MOON may not have been a critical or box-office hit, and it may look like an ugly failure as a sexual melodrama, but viewed as an evil comedy it suddenly takes on vigour and imagination. It’s extremely funny. Surely, it HAS to be deliberate. He just didn’t let anybody know what he was doing, which kind of solves the whole timing thing, since the movie just uses dramatic timing. Polanski utterly demolishes the erotic thriller before BASIC INSTINCT was even released.

Returning to 1967 – FEARLESS VAMP was photographed by the towering Douglas Slocombe, who remarked on Polanski’s very Eastern European love of folklore and fairy tales, seen strongly in this film and almost nowhere else in his oevre.

Tragically, the last I heard, Mr. Slocombe was blind, having suffered a detached retina when a jeep went over a bump shooting an INDIANA JONES movie, and a second some years later. But Robin Vidgeon, formerly Slocombe’s camera operator, said the old chap was still chipper in spite of everything.

“Mirrors are the doorways through which death enters the world.”

 

Reflections on reflections: 

Welles loves his multiple images.

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI.

TOUCH OF EVIL. I like the way Welles mixes from the above shot to the below: for a brief moment we get two shots with four images, all at once.

In spite of this enthusiasm for reflections, and those long lap dissolves in KANE, and various other devices for fragmenting the frame, Welles never got interested in split screen, unlike his fellow Wisconsan Nick Ray. I suspect split screen, like wide-screen, was seen by Welles an aspect of the modernity he so disliked. (On ‘Scope: “I don’t believe the public deserves anything bigger than they’ve been getting.”) That’s why I suspect TOUCH OF EVIl was actually composed for the old 4:3 ratio, despite being cropped to something like 1:1.85 in the restoration.

But Welles did shoot ‘Scope once, when he took over direction on THE SOUTHERN STAR, a rather trashy African adventure story, when director Sidney Hayers got sick. The opening sequence, shot by Welles, is full of dynamism and wit in its zippy reframings, resembling Sergio Leone as much as Welles, and it’s photographed by Raoul Coutard so the colour is really pretty – see it if you get the chance.*

*Apart from scene one, and Welles’ amusing gay villain, the film has little that’s memorable except an amazing line mis-reading by Ursula Andress. As she splashes around an African river, no doubt contracting bilharzia and cholera, during her obligatory nude scene, she shouts at George Segal, “I am trrrrying to whush away a memnory!”