Quote of the Day: Stolen Face

 

Billy Wilder on his friend, Otto Preminger:

“Tantalised by his mystique, I have devoted the last decade to unravel it. After the most laborious detective work, after scanning literally thousands of documents and photographs, after analysing and comparing samples of handwriting as well as of fingerprints, I have come to the irrefutable, if maybe not too surprising conclusion that Otto Ludwig Preminger is in fact none other than the elusive and dreaded Martin Bormann.

“He has been capable of perpetrating this brazen deception by using his modicum of talent for acting, by shaving his head three times daily, by wearing elevated shoes and having his face re-shaped by a plastic surgeon in Luxemburg. A xeroxed document in my voluminous files on Preminger attests that the operation was performed by a Dr Thomas Frick-Hutzmann in the Luxemburg Landesspital on 11 August 1945. Looking at his new face, there is no doubt that a sloppy and rather unflattering job has been done. However, one better remember that the delicate operation had to be performed by the usually quite competent surgeon while blindfolded.”

~ From Behind the Scenes of Otto Preminger, by Willi Frischauer.

Phone Crawford

Dana Andrews calls. Joan Crawford hangs up on him.

He calls again, this time using a MASSIVE TELEPHONE.

It’s so huge that when Joan flees the house and gets in her car and drives off through the snowy landscape, she can still hear the phone ringing in her ears.

This telephone is as big as the whisky bottle that attacks David Farrar in THE SMALL BACK ROOM, or the phone in DIAL M FOR MURDER that’s so huge you need giant plastic digits to operate it. And it’s as persistent as the phantom phone that haunts Robert DeNiro through several scenes of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA.

That’s some phone!

Kenyon passages

 

Otto Preminger’s 1947 masterpiece DAISY KENYON has just been released to DVD in the US in a package of films noir, but in fact one of the striking things about it (and there are several) is how outside of genreit is. While Otto shoots it in a somewhat more “cutty” variation of the style he deployed successfully in LAURA and FALLEN ANGEL (a Shadowplay favourite, most specially for Linda Darnell’s fabulous footsore entrance), there are no criminal activities front and centre (although one trial scene intrudes, reminding us that although Preminger trained as a lawyer, he’s quite willing to play fast and loose with courtroom etiquette) and we’re not dealing with a tale of corruption or madness or any of those noir subjects.

FALLEN ANGEL.

The natural pigeonhole of DK might be the women’s picture, given the title and the casting of Joan Crawford at the apex of the film’s love triangle. But (1) David Hertz’ adaptation of Elizabeth Janeway’s novel isn’t interested in conventional melodramatics, (2) Preminger tends to stifle big showstopping scenes in the interests of preserving a certain smoothness of pace, and (3) Joan Crawford is on remarkably restrained form. What the typical JC perf offers its audience is spectacle — the costumes, the grandstanding theatrics, the camp — which is one of the two main pleasures of the women’s picture genre. Here she seems like a person — a Crawford first. Otto doesn’t encourage intimate identification with the characters either, which would be the second pleasure of the WP: the pleasurably masochistic involvement with a suffering female lead. Here, everybody is equally tormented, but our engagement is with the characters as fellow humans, not as glamorous extensions of ourselves. For this to work, the people have to seem real and complex and surprising, and apart from some slightly overwritten dialogue, they really do.

It’s a truly uncommonly adult movie. Apart from distancing itself quietly from genre concerns, it opens up new terrain by presenting a group of characters with more or less likeable and dislikeable traits, and allowing us to form our own judgements — which are sometimes upset by the revelations of the advancing narrative. In this, it feels maybe more like a ’70s New Hollywood work, or our idealised idea of one. And such is the individual, and private nature of the film’s moral compass, that you can’t use the Production Code to figure out how it’s going to end. I can’t recall a ’40s Hollywood film that left me so uncertain as to how it would turn out. So many emotional issues are raised that, inevitably, a few are left hanging at the end, which also seems appropriate and rather ’70s.

The copy I watched was an off-air recording from a few years ago, ripped from VHS, so I still have the pleasure of a proper DVD copy to look forward to, the better to enjoy Leon Shamroy’s glowing visuals. Shamroy was the king of Technicolor Gorgeous Lifelike Color by Deluxe at 20th Century Fox, but his monochrome work here, though less showy than the eye-searing hues of THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT or LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, already looks very fine.

Incidentally, I was curious as to how Preminger and Crawford got on together. Though Otto would sometimes claim to have entirely forgotten the movie, in his autobiography he recalls J.C. as professional and generous: “When the film was finished she gave me gold cuff links. I later discovered that she always gave her director cuff links at the conclusion of shooting. Once at a party there were four of us wearing identical sets.” La Crawford had fond memories of Otto too, crediting him with whatever success the picture had, though hinting that the success might be limited. They’re both wrong — like LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, this is a Hollywood picture that transcends genre in such a way that nobody working on it seems to have recognised how special it was. 

Biting the hand

One of the few things Sergio Leone didn’t pinch from Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO when he unofficially remade it as A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, was this cheeky moment:

As man-with-no-name wandering ronin Toshiro Mifune slouches up the main street of the film’s no-horse town, an intent dog hurries past, jaws clamped jealously down on a tasty morsel salvaged from some recent street-fight.

I guess cowboy films weren’t using imagery like this in the early sixties, plus in a genre dominated by gunplay rather than swordplay, the lopped limb would raise unanswerable questions. Too bad.

But Italy hadn’t finished with the right-handed dog. He makes another appearance in scene one of Lucio Fulci’s nauseatingly effective NEW YORK RIPPER, emerging from a bush to startle his walker with a tidbit retrieved from the bushes.

NYR is indeed an extremely offensive film, with the typical giallo misanthropy and misogyny turned up to eleven. When it was submitted to the British Board of Film Classification (not Censorship, no no!), director James Ferman not only banned it outright, he personally escorted the print back to the airport to make sure it left the country without corrupting and depraving anybody en route.

While director Lucio Fulci’s previous employment as a DOCTOR may explain his extremely high tolerance for scenes of gore and suffering, it does make me worry slightly for his patients. They’d be better off with seeing nice Dr. Miller down the corridor.

The dog wasn’t through yet. He pads his way out of a bank in David Lynch’s WILD AT HEART, another gory forelimb clenched triumphantly in his canines, pay-off to a gruesome and somewhat dislikeable joke that kind of mars the film, arguably Lynch’s most cynical and unpleasant. (Lynch, as always, finds real sympathy for his protagonists, but it’s offset by a callous treatment of the film’s little people, of which the dog incident is a strong example.) It IS, however, proof that Lynch does watch movies and draw inspiration from them. It’s easy to see the director as a complete original, or somebody more influenced by the other arts than by film history, which may be somewhat true, but he also picks up moments from a wide range of movies and recycles them in an interesting way. I was struck by a moment in Michael Tolkin’s THE NEW AGE where Peter Weller meets a strange monk-like man in black at a party. The basics of the scene undeniably form the basis for Robert Blake’s terrifying entrance into LOST HIGHWAY.

Taking the mutt full circle, Philip Kaufman quotes the Kurosawa scene directly as part of a karaoke scene in RISING SUN, based on Michael Crichton’s anti-Japanese crime thriller. The fact that karaoke machines don’t usually screen extracts from classic Japanese cinema tells you everything you need to know about the accuracy of this strident warning about the dangers of Japanese cultural influence. My friend Kiyo expressed an interest in the film at the time saying that he wondered if Sean Connery’s character would speak Japanese with an Osaka accent, “Because people in Osaka shpeak like thish.” But when he saw it, his only reaction was, “Sean Connery’s Japanese fucking crap!”

It’s tempting to come up with more roles for man’s right-hand dog. At the start of Polanski’s MACBETH, the three witches bury a severed arm on a beach. I’d like to think our doggy pal (I’m going to name him MURDO) is lurking just outside the frame of Gilbert Taylor’s Panavision lens, waiting to trot over and dig up his evening’s meal.