Here’s an odd one. I’ve been reading a film book, Hollywood: The Haunted Houseby Paul Mayersberg (later screenwriter of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, CROUPIER, and director of 1986 film maudit CAPTIVE, with Ollie Reed), which is smartly written and a fascinating snapshot of a moment during the slow decline and fall of Hollywood.
Mayersburg writes approvingly of creepy troilist Darryl F Zanuck’s return to 20th Century Fox, where he scored a hit with THE LONGEST DAY and attempted to help the ailing studio over the crisis caused by the failure of mega-budget flop-a-roo CLEOPATRA. Of course, this being Hollywood in the early ’70s, disaster lurked around the corner and Zanuck’s second reign would prove short, painful and financially unprofitable.
But what intrigued me is the statement that Zanuck put his son, shark-eyed go-getter Richard Zanuck, in charge of production since he himself was unable to enter the state of California for legal reasons.
I figure there has to be an interesting story behind THAT.
Unless it’s a tax thing, but then why wouldn’t Mayersberg say so?
‘Of all the bosses with whom I collaborated, Selznick and Zanuck and Goldwyn were the brightest. David, in the days he loved movie-making, was a brilliant plotter. He could think of twenty different permutations of any given scene without stopping to catch his breath. Darryl was also quick and sharp and plotted at the top of his voice, like a man hollering for help. Goldwyn as a collaborator was inarticulate but stimulating. He filled the room with wonderful panic and beat at your mind like a man in front of a slot-machine shaking it for change.’
~ Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century.
Gotta get this book. A kind-hearted student once photocopied an entire chapter of it, in which Hecht talks about movie censorship. He says that since movies always faded out just as characters were about to have sex, it’s natural to imagine that EVERY fade-out is a prelude to unbridled coupling. Next time you’re watching a 30s or 40s film and it’s proving a disappointment (maybe one of those BOSTON BLACKIE things, they’re dull as all hell), this might be a nice way to enliven it — imaginary intersticial pornography.
This little moment, from Billy Wilder’s late-period movie, THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, has entered into legend amongst a few friends of mine.
When I showed the film to screenwriter Colin McLaren (ROUNDING UP DONKEYS) some years ago, he was transfixed by this moment and insisted I wind the tape back, so he could enjoy it again, his face illuminated with infantile glee.
A year or so after, I ran the movie again in the company of special effects makeup artist Stephen Murphy (SLEUTH), the EXACT SAME THING HAPPENED, and at the same moment.
The mesmerising and unique feature of this scene is the strange, mannered performance of the “actor” playing the policeman. The gag is nothing much, and acts as a slightly unwelcome hiccup in the narrative progression, but the copper’s stylised movements lift it into a new stratosphere of crumminess. It’s a “comedic” performance rather than a funny one – every step the man takes seems to be in quotation marks.
It turns out there’s a story behind this scene, and I found it in Knight Errant, the autobiography of Wilder’s Holmes, Sir Robert Stephens. Comedy actor Bob Todd was supposed to play the part. As part of Benny Hill’s troupe of clowns, and Richard Lester’s informal stock company of bit-part comedians, Todd was a logical choice. Not a terribly strong actor, he was nevertheless inherently amusing.
But due to Wilder’s exacting methods, filming overran on the previous scene of the day, so that by the time cinematographer Christopher Challis was ready to turn his camera on the Scotland Yard bobby, Bob had to leave to appear in a play he was performing in the West End. Robert Stephens volunteered his chauffeur for the part, and drilled him in the appropriate comedy movements. That accounts for the cop’s exaggerated mannerisms, which, however, lack the precision of the true clown.
Visual comedy is a very delicate thing! My own brief adventures in the field have only served to show me how much I still need to learn. Wilder himself, an extremely clever visual storyteller in the Hitchcock mode when he felt like it, only dabbled in slapstick, but admired those, like Chaplin and Keaton, who excelled at it. In the ’80s, he would say that the only contemporary film-makers who could do visual gags were Richard Lester and Blake Edwards.
Colin adds:
“It’s on the ninth second. If you watch his truncheon hand, there’s many an inforced WAGGLE to that wrist, as if cranking himself up to fully register the horror of the (some way off) comic soaking. It looks like he’s working the crowd, drawing out applause. It really is terrible. The wrongness is everywhere. The lack of extras and precision of shot make if feel indoors and airless, a bit like MARNIE. And the sombre music hardly aides us in our froth. If you want funny Victorian policemen (and who doesn’t) plump for The Phantom Raspberry Blower. If you want crap, it’s all in the wrist.”
…which brings us back to Fritz Lang. Yes, our Waltz of the Eye Patches concludes with the monocled maestro himself, who suffered an eye injury as a cavalry officer in the Great War, necessitating the monocle which became a symbol of his dictatorial, “Prussian” style of directing in Hollywood. But in later life he suffered from progressive deterioration in the other eye, bringing on the eye-patch years — his bad eye became his good eye, and he now wore both monocle and patch — the belt-and-braces approach to being a crazy film director.
I do cherish Lotte Eisner’s story about trying to introduce Lang and Bunuel, but failing because Lang was to short-sighted to recognise Bunuel and Bunuel was too deaf to hear Eisner. Human frailty is a great subject for art and anecdote.
I also admire, in a strange way, the contrasting approaches to cigarette smoking shown in the archival interview clips of Lang and Nick Ray in A PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN FILMS.
Lang, minus his usual long cigarette holder (possibly his lungs by now were too swampy to get the smoke up the tube) clutches his ciggie Alec Guinness-style between the second and third fingers of his flat hand, and sucks eagerly on it mid-phrase, as if unable to make it to the end of a clause without another wheezing puff of the life-giving cancer.
Ray lets his cigarette hang from his lip, paper grafted to dry skin, bobbing like a sprinter’s erection as he mumbles away, ignoring the clinging coffin nail and only managing to inhale what drifts his way through natural air circulation, passively smoking his own cigarette.
Ray, I forgot to mention earlier, is the only one of the five canonical patch-wearers to have suffered injury to the eyeball in the line of duty, apparently bursting a blood vessel due to the stress of making WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN, his final film.
My only other eye-patch-related story concerns another Edinburgh Film Festival, the year of VELVET GOLDMINE as opening film. A perfect film to theme a party around, which may have more to do with opening and closing film selections than anything else, but nobody much minded this choice, especially with Todd Haynes in attendance. (Actually, it’s one of his lesser films, with a half-hearted engagement with narrative but a great deal of visual and aural pleasure to compensate.) Festival director Lizzie Francke wore an eye-patch through the entire two weeks, as a result of a tragic glitter accident during her party preparations. Still, it was another injury in the line of duty, and an eye-patch does in fact make an excellent glam rock accessory.
“I got a great idea! Two movies in one — like an old double feature, get it? And make it in the old style, and even have trailers in between ‘em!”
No. It’s not the misbegotten GRINDHOUSE, it’s the misbegotten MOVIE MOVIE (1978), an earlier attempt to create a faux-double feature experience, directed by Stanley Donen from a script by the great Larry Gelbart and the less-renowned Sheldon Keller. The flick consists of two parody ’30s Warner Bros type stories, a crime/boxing melodrama and a backstage musical. Harvey Weinstein, if he’d remembered or even heard of this one, might have had second thoughts about commissioning a two-parter from his wunderkinds Tarantino and Rodriguez. Like it’s 21st century equiv, this film sank without trace.
I stumbled across a cheap copy of this on VHS and thought I’d give it a go. It represents Donen’s last stab at directing musical numbers in a feature film, numbers choreographed by Michael Kidd (who also appears) so it seemed it would be of some kind of interest.
It was, but mainly in a sad way. The first section of the film, a boxing yarn, has some moderate funniness, mostly in the form of strange verbal non sequiteurs meant to imitate the clunky writing of a weak ’30s melodrama. “I saw what I saw! It’s a wonder my eyes didn’t throw up!” cries a pretty young Harry Hamlin. His presence made me feel about 17% more gay than usual. This section is shot in luminous black-and-white, very flattering to HH, and helpful to the period feel. Unfortunately, Donen has no idea how to direct period pastiche, as becomes clear by the way he begins nearly every scene by ZOOMING OUT from a detail. I know he wasn’t directing in the ’30s, but he must have noticed that the zoom wasn’t a common piece of kit when he got going in the late ’40s, surely?
Anne Reinking is around to dance one number — not very ’30s but fun, and introduced by Donen himself, and act in a pleasingly plebeian Warner Bros dame kind of a way. Asides from that, miscasting reins.
George C Scott is the star of both movies. He’s very funny in STRANGELOVE but here he’s too heavy and too SLOW. It feels like a rehearsal for a Warners Film, before they got things up to speed. Art Carney drags his heels too. Rather oddly, Eli Wallach is more suited to this period, and actually makes underplaying work.
Part 2 begins, and is massively underwritten. Did Gelbart wrote the first half only? Of did the pair just run out of jokes? If the musical is supposed to be amusing through the sheer gusto of the players, its out of luck. Worse, Donen assassinates the supposedly Busby Berkeley-esque numbers by zooming in and out like he’s rehearsing for VAMPYROS LESBOS. Abandoning the silvery monochrome of part one, this has to make do with a vague attempt at period colour. The real work is done by Jack Fisk’s production design and, as we know from his turn as “the man in the planet” in David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD, Fisk can work wonders.
I presume the inspiring demon here is Mel Brooks, who’d recently shown that parody could be very successful, and that a black-and-white film could be very successful. MOVIE MOVIE proves the opposite by hiring the wrong people and giving them the wrong guidance. Only pride could have kept Donen from hiring the likes of Madeleine Kahn, so instead we get a Kahn-like broadway diva played by… Trish Van Devere.
This was the problem faced by anybody hoping to employ George C Scott in the ’70s. He would tend to bring his lovely wife along. Somebody (John Simon?) said she was “never more tha n a smiling hole in the air” and while that’s unkind, it hits on something inescapable. Far from being a terrible actress, TVD simply lacks the force of personality to make an impression next to someone like GCS. Where he has great presence, she has great absence. It’s unfair, but there it is.
I was curious (wary, but curious) about MOVIE MOVIE because of the great time I’d had recently with IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER, a Donen-Kelly movie from 1955 — 23 years, and a projillion centuries, before MOVIE MOVIE. Apart from the amazing song-and-dance numbers and the breathtaking vituperative bitterness of the narrative, what wowed me there was the long take style. The whole movie is master shots! No coverage, no protection, Donen and Kelly apply the same aesthetic to every scene that they apply to the rigorously planned dance routines. The editor would have had little to do but cut off the clapperboards.
This kind of filmmaking is rare in the commercial cinema because all it takes is one little flaw in one little shot and the scene is unusable without reshooting. But on an old-style studio film with a decent budget and schedule, the expense of reshooting is minimal, since everybody’s on contract anyway. Might as well make them work.
The only other film that springs to mind, apart from experiments like Hitchcock’s ROPE, to commit itself fully to master shots, is THE GENERAL by Buster Keaton. Keaton’s other work is very rigorous too, but in THE GENERAL you literally can’t remove a single shot without collapsing the scene it’s part of, and you certainly can’t remove a scene without damaging the beautiful symmetry of the story structure. It’s like a maginificent house of cards. And again, since everybody was on contract all year, reshoots were not too onerous. Of course, if you’re going to collapse a burning bridge with a steam train on it you might want to cover that with a spare camera or two, but apart from that, there’s an awesome economy to the filming of massive spectacle.
Which brings us back to MOVIE MOVIE, which is all coverage. No one shot feels like it had to end up in the final cut, every decision has been postponed until the edit. Which is what happens when a filmmaker loses their courage. What needs to be said in Donen’s favour is that when he lost that courage, he lost more of it than most filmmakers ever have.
Boy, Ford sure had the sloppiest eyepatch. Even I could tell you it’d look better UNDER the spectacles. Better yet, get a Fritz Lang monocle. Walsh’s eyepatch, covering a big sticking plaster, is kind of gross, but then, Walsh didn’t have an eye.
Walsh was injured when a jackrabbit came through the windscreen of his car. The doctors told him the eye had best come out: “They said it was a mush eye.”
Ford once grumbled to Walsh that his eye was bothering him.
“At least you’ve got an eye.”
Walsh then offered to remove the offending Ford eye with a nearby piece of cutlery if that would help, and Ford got in a huff about the whole thing.
De Toth, among many other things, was second unit director on LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (and Nicholas Roeg was his cameraman), during the later part of his career when he also produced BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN for Ken Russell and generally did things other than directing his own films. On LAWRENCE, most of his ideas were rejected (”Revolting!” Lean would say) but he was still very useful to the production.
When Sam Spiegel decided that Lean was never going to finish the film in Arabia and arranged to have the unit shifted to Almeria, Spain, it was decided that the production would have to buy some camels and import them. I think the figure was fifty camels, including ten silver racing camels.
(Stop me if you’ve heard this before.)
De Toth is presented with a problem. Several production personnel have visited the sheik, and arranged to buy these camels, but the deal never seems to go through — the camels don’t come. André is the muggins who must go and investigate.
The deal is agreed once again, over a banquet. Then, the sheep’s eyeballs are brought in. A rare delicacy. De Toth shrewdly realises the problem. All the previous production emissaries have refused to partake of this treat — a fatal insult to the sheik. To make sure the deal goes through, De Toth must chow down on ovine orb.
For a brief moment he imagines that the consumed eye will replace his own missing left eye. He pops the thing in his mouth. Not so bad. Yes it is. Worse! Unendurably repugnant. He swallows, the sheik is appeased, and De Toth will awaken gagging for many nights to come, re-experiencing the traumatic sweetmeat.
De Toth and the camels and their herders go to Spain.
One morning, he is awakened in his hotel suite by the smell of camel dung. The camel herders are standing round his bed. They have bad news. The camels have escaped. All of them. How has this happened? Nobody knows.
Imagining haveing to return to Arabia and eat another sheep eye, De Toth pulls out all the stops. Soon he has the Guardia Civil sifting the dunes for his fugitive ruminants. Partial success! All ten of the silver racing camels are recaptured, but only 37 of the regular ones.
Defeated, De Toth reports the camel shortfall to Lean’s trusted assistant, an indefatigable and resourceful woman. “Mr. Lean specifically asked for 50 camels and I only have 47.” She thinks. “We won’t tell him,” she decides.
Lean goes into battle with 47 camels and never notices the difference. Nobody thinks to count them.
As for the missing camels, De Toth reports that they were still living in the Spanish desert when he shot PLAY DIRTY there some years later, adding enormously to the conviction of his North African setting. “We could never have afforded them otherwise.”
Almeria in those days was such a popular location that film shoots would actually collide — De Toth’s armoured vehicles would break into the background of Edward Dmytryk’s western SHALAKO, while Dmytryk’s cowboys and Indians rampaged across De Toth’s WWII campaign.
Today’s story is a believe-it-if-you-like story, as Mr. Lindores, my old headmaster, used to say in morning assembly at Parsons Green Primary School.
Raoul Walsh.
‘D.W. Griffith had a stock company — 4 or 5 of us, 3 or 4 girls — and one day he asked me if I would like to go to Mexico and film some battle scenes. I said I would, and he said, “Well, you’re going to go and meet a very notorious bandit. You’re going to meet Pancho Villa. And I may as well tell you this: we’ve had a very sad experience. We had Villa under contract through Mutual, and they signed Pancho Villa up for $500 a week. So I must tell you that Mutual sent a Mr. Doaks or somebody down to meet Pancho Villa with a check for $500 and we never heard anything more from him.”
‘So I said to Mr. Griffith, “What am I going there for — to find Mr. Doaks?” And he said, “No, no, no. You’re going to meet a Mr. So-and-so at the Del Norte Hotel in El Paso and they will have $500 in gold for you to give to this bandit…”
D.W. Griffith.
‘By the way, before I went down, Griffith told me, “You know, we have no story to do of Villa’s life, so while you are on the train you will probably think up some story. Either that or get shot.” So I kept thinking about stories on the way down. I had nothing else to do. I kept about 8 possible stories in mind until I could see this bum and see how he would react. They led me in to Villa, and he was sitting there with his goddamn bug hat on and he was loaded with bullets and guns and he had a big black moustache.
Pancho Villa.
‘The interpreter started palavering. “Why did you come?” he said. “With the $500,” I said, and I opened the bag and showed it to him. Ah, they were tickled to death. And they came over and looked down and saw the money. Ah yes, gold!
‘So then this fellow says, “What do you want to do with my general?” I said, “I want to make a story of the general’s life,” and he told that to the general and then he said, “The general is interested. Tell me the general’s life. He wants to hear it too.”
‘Well, a couple of guards are at the door and a guard is at the window, and I thought, “Hell, I’m never going to get out of here. Why did I come? So I told him the general’s life [. . .]
Then this handsome young boy, with this terrible calamity that hit him just in the prime of life — I said he stood there before his mother and vowed to kill Federal after Federal until the whole army was wiped out. And I said that from then on the general had hatred, just nothing but hatred, for the Federals. And he decided to collect an army, and he went from town to town to tell them what these Federals did to his family, what they did to the poor, what they did to this, what they did to that, and I said that finally he got a great following of people. And I said that they’re here in Juarez right now, and here is the general who accomplished all this. And he got up and shook hands with me.
‘We actually made the picture. It was called THE LIFE OF VILLA, and I played the young Villa myself.’
~ Raoul Walsh, talking to the Yale Alumni Magazine, June 72. Quoted in Film Makers Speak, edited by Jan Leyda.
…or does Mike Leigh’s new film, HAPPY GO LUCKY, look incredibly awful and annoying? If you’ve seen the trailer you surely agree.
As usual, you can tell the lead actress is actually really good and charismatic, only she’s smothering her appeal in a patina of affected “theatrical” Mike-Leighism. Horrible horrible horrible.
In an attempt to be “cinematic” Leigh has decorated this one with brightly coloured turquoise and magenta bunting. It makes me want to inject codeine into my eyeballs.
People keep telling me I would really like TOPSY TURVY and maybe I would, and I haven’t purposely avoided seeing it, but I refuse to give any money to the man who made all those other appalling flicks, so I’m dependant on it turning up on TV. Suspiciously, none of the people who tell me I’d really like it actually own copies they can lend me.
I hate Mike Leigh’s stuff! Rather than giving him money to make films, the Film Council or Film4 or whoever should actually send him one of Timothy Spall’s fingers whenever he releases anything. He should be allowed to do theatre, where posh people can come and see Leigh’s quaint ideas of what working class people are like, for their amusement and edification. Or else he should just run a zoo, with Jim Broadbent and Brenda Blethyn in the cages.
Do Not Feed The Spall.
I’m being mean. I don’t like to be mean. But nothing I say can harm Leigh. He will go on making films, and on, and on. Some of them will be quite successful. He will complain they don’t get good enough distribution, so people in housing estates can come and see his quaint portrayals of what life is like on a housing estate.
In case he runs out of titles, here are a few that he can apply randomly to his next projects: MUSTN’T GRUMBLE; STONE THE CROWS; DEAR ME; WHOOPS A DAISY; YOU’VE GOT TO LAUGH; A NICE CUP OF TEA.
Whew. Sorry. Just had to vent.
(Since I could not bring myself to use any images from his films, this post has been lavishly illustrated with images of actual cinema.)
5 Comments | 
FILM | Tagged: 20th Century Fox, Captive, Cleopatra, Croupier, Darryl Zanuck, Hollywood The Haunted House, Paul Mayersberg, Richard Zanuck, The Longest Day, The Man Who Fell to Earth | 
Permalink
Posted by dcairns
