Euphoria #23

 

Danny Carr, Shadowplay informant, offered a plethora of marvellous suggestions for our regular Euphoria section, all of them gold-plated cinematic pulse-pounders. He climaxes, metaphorically speaking, with this un-toppable offering:

“Or actually the infectiously brakes-off and anything goes first few minutes of Jules et Jim. has a movie ever been more fun?”

There’s quite a lot to be said about this sequence, but let’s start with Scorsese’s “I had never seen anything so exhilerating” and take it from there.

(No subtitles on this clip: go learn French)

 

Truffaut’s big innovation is to throw together what looks at times like a random selection of out-takes. Organising principles are provided by Georges Delerue’s ebullient bombast on the soundtrack, which the images cut to, and by an ilustrative approach, some of the time: we see the actors as their credits come up, some of the images seem to relate to some of the technical credits. What has been gloriously abandoned is narrative sense: that can come later. I don’t think anybody else had started doing this at the time, although maybe it was happening in T.V. The device certainly became a mainstay of television credits a little later:

Scorsese’s adulation is worth returning to because, though maybe it’s just my imagination, I’m posi-sure (as Dan Dare would say) that the J&J opening had some kind of effect on Scorsese’s approach to GOODFELLAS. Jeanne Moreau’s voice-over on black screen (stolen by me for my short CLARIMONDE), followed by that boisterous theme, seems to be distantly echoed in the Scorsese flick by Ray Liotta’s first V.O., “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” mopving into a freeze frame, with “From Rags to Riches” blasting in on the soundtrack a couple frames later.

 

Scorsese’s use of an unusually FAST V.O. also ties his work to Truffaut’s. Since Scorsese’s major influence on GOODFELLAS was the abrupt cutting seen in movie trailers, it’s natural that he’d have thought of Truffaut, since that’s kind of what this title sequence is: a trailer for the movie we’re about to see.

Another filmmaker who sometimes starts his films with a trailer is Richard Lester, much on my mind at present as I’m teaching a class about him on Friday (plus, he was nice enough to contribute some funds towards the aforementioned CLARIMONDE). Lester, A Truffaut fan, begins A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM with a piece-to-camera by Zero Mostel which climaxes in a fast-cut musical montage of scenes from the upcoming movie. And Harold Pinter’s unproduced screenplay for Lester’s proposed film of Joseph Conrad’s VICTORY, begins like so:

A boat becalmed, far out to sea. The mast slowly sways. Heat haze. Red sun. 

Gulls encircle the boat, screeching. 

Screeching violins. A ladies’ orchestra. Bare arms. White dresses. Crimson sashes. 

A wall of foliage. Bamboo spears pierce the foliage, quiver, stay pointed. 

Camera pans up to see, through leaves, impassive native faces. 

An island. Moonlight. Silence. 

Figures of men seen at a distance at the door of a low, thatched house. The door is kicked open. The sound reverberates in the night. Explosion of shrieking birds. 

Driving rain. Leashed, barking dogs leading men with rifles through jungle. 

One of the men suddenly turns in panic, raises gun to shoot. 

Champagne corks popping. Two men standing on a jetty. Champagne is poured into glasses. In background a freighter leaving. Natives waving, cheering. The freighter whistles. 

A cylinder gramophone playing in a room. Rosalia Chalier singing. 

Moonlight. 

A girl’s figure in a sarong passes, carrying a bowl of water. 

In background a mosquito net canopy over bed. A man’s body on the bed. 

The girl parts the netting, places the bowl on the bed, kneels on the bed, looks down at the man. 

The gramophone hissing. 

A creek. Night. Crackle of fire. Two figures seated in foreground. 

Fire burning. 

Beyond the fire two Venezuelan Indians poking long knives into fish. They eat. 

The two foreground figures remain still. 

One of these raises a hand and wipes it on a silken handkerchief. 

High up on a hillside two figures in the grass. Bright sunlight. 

A girl’s stifled scream.

*

I love how Pinter writes the opening montage, breaking every rule of screenwriting and format. The fragmented, snappy sentences are also quite close stylistically to Carl Mayer’s work for Murnau…

More on screenwriting soon!

Uncle Silas

Adapted from the novel by J. Sheridan LeFanu (CARMILLA), this maybe misses real greatness but has some great stuff in it. Produced by Two Cities, who also made Olivier’s Shakespeare films, Carol Reed’s ODD MAN OUT, and David Lean’s first Noel Coward films (before Lean branched out with cinematographer/producer Ronald Neame to make BRIEF ENCOUNTER), this emerges from the immediate post-war period when british cinema was enjoying a boost in confidence and ambition. Overall, UNC SILAS has elements of Lean’s evocatively textured Dickens films, and a little of Michael Powell’s hallucinatory surrealism.

Genre-wise, it’s straightahead gothic melodrama. Jean Simmons, a rising young star at the time, plays an innocent young thing foisted upon her sinister relative who lives at Scary Hall (not its real name). He plots to Do Her Into get her inheritance. There’s a simple Locked-Room Mystery thrown in for good measure (which is probably the best thing to do with L-RMs, since if made the basis for an entire story they tend to reduce the narrative to puzzle-solving). As stories go, it’s all pretty generic and linear.

Director Charles Frank (a Belgian with a fragmentary and puzzling non-career) compensates for a rather basic story by throwing style at the film. He’s like a matador decorating a cake. Even the heroine’s French lessons get treated to an expressionist dream sequence — and a damn good one.

 

The credits suggest the involvement of a storyboard artist (”Script Illustrator”), and the mise en scene slots together with pre-planned precision and nicely designed angles. Cinematographer Robert Krasker (THE THIRD MAN) lights the doomy sets beautifully, and has a particularly nice approach to fireplaces, blasting light through them from behind to make flickering shapes on the floor.

Based on his work here, it’s criminal that Frank didn’t make more films in Britain. I’ve never seen his scanty Belgian oevre, and it’s uncertain I’ll ever get to, but this movie has moments of incredible brio and gets so many things dead right that with slightly more complex material I can’t help but feel that Frank could have made a truly Great Film.

The cast is marvellous, with Simmons breathing vivacity into the dull protag, Derrick DeMarney crepuscular and oleaginous as the eponymous Unc, and John Laurie as a hilariously odd, lopsided butler, materialising in rooms without warning, like Mrs Danvers, or Jeeves. My friend Lawrie Knight’s abiding memory of his quasi-namesake and fellow Scot was J. Laurie’s tendency to start every acquaintanceship with an account of his success in the lead role of Hamlet. If you watch RETURN TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, you can see John Laurie actually do this.

A fellow called Manning Whiley does good work as Silas’ awful, horny son, making great use of a powerful voice, and the great Esmond Knight brings his customary strength to the role of Simmons’ sympathetic family doctor. All the more impressive when we recall that Knight was blinded in the war. He continued playing sighted parts in films like THE RED SHOES and BLACK NARCISSUS, using sheer dramatic skill and self-confidence to make the audience believe he can see. In the latter film, he had to ride a donkey through a forest. “Don’t you want a stand-in?” “No, no, the animal doesn’t want to bump into a tree any more than I do.”

(Casting a blind man as a film director seems a fairly sick joke, but it shouldn’t surprise us that this is just what happens in PEEPING TOM. Knight’s character, Arthur Baden, a frenzied bully, is a parodic self-portrait by director Michael Powell [the character name derives by way of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scout movement. Furthermore, studio boss Don Jarvis is a "spoonerism" of real Rank Studios president John Davis, who is viciously and accurately parodied throughout, and the name of Mark Lewis, the film's titular voyeur, is a reversal of screenwriter Leo Marks' name.])

The only film where I’ve ever seen Knight play a blind man (in Olivier’s T.V. King Lear he plays the old man who actually LEADS the blinded Gloucester) is Richard Lester’s witty and touching ROBIN AND MARIAN, where Knight actually popped his glass eye out in order to be even more convincingly disabled. But to return to UNCLE SILAS –

– Best of all, Katina Paxinou is the scary French mistress, Madame de la Rougierre. Alternately shrieking and muttering, she is terrifying in her malice, offensive familarity and sheer stupidity — you may not think of stupidity as naturally frightening, but it can be, just look at our world leaders. 

K.P. submits to being made truly grotesque by Frank and Krasker’s leering use of wide-angle lenses: she lurches into close-up and makes things happen with her corpse’s teeth, or else she stands swaying on the spot and lets the camera rocket drunkenly in on her. Either way, she was born to alarm.

The film’s only trouble is its inability to accomplish anything beyond suspense and slick visuals. It has a compelling baddie in the hypocrite and schemer Silas, but his bad qualities never amount to a coherent whole. The leading lady is trusting, then figures things out, then gets rescued, which robs her of the opportunity to fend for herself and grow as a character. It’s one of those films that can quickly fade to black after the villains are vanquished, because there’s nothing else to sort out.

One possible half-solution to this poverty of theme is to throw in some spuriously ambiguous final moment, tenuously connected to any old motif established earlier, and leave the audience with a faux-poetic puzzle. This is known (by me) as the Coen Coda, but I guess nobody was buying that one back in the ’40s.

I don’t mean to be down on this film AT ALL, because it’s a great directorial box of tricks — students of cinema (which I hope includes all of us) could probably learn more technique from this than from an acknowledged masterpiece like Lean’s OLIVER TWIST. But O.T. is the better film for narrative and thematic reasons, which lend it greater impact and make it satisfying in a way that UNCLE S. cannot aspire to be, for all its visual and aural dexterity.

Quote of the Day: One thing or two?

THE MATRIX

Larry Fishburn: “It is designed to do just one thing: Seek And Destroy.”

Me: “That’s TWO things!”