Moonrising
The titles of Borzage’s sublime (no other word will do) MOONRISE play out over strange, rippling pools of liquid fog.
This eventually resolves, post-titles, into the shadows of liquid fog, pooling eerily in an inexplicable fashion, as we enter a peculiarly abstract landscape of rain, where an execution is about to take place. I will say no more.
But that same year, 1948, Orson Welles was making MACBETH, at the same studio as Borzage, Republic. And when Welles’ weird women peer into their cauldron in Act 1, Scene 1, amid the murk and mist and bubble bubble, we get this liquid fog again:
Welles has double-exposed it with a shot of fas-motion billowing clouds, oddly enough. All playing the contents of an enchanted cauldron. You maybe have to see it moving in good definition to see that it’s exactly the same effect as Borzage’s liquid fog. So, either both men made use of a piece of kit in stock at Republic, which I’m going to call Professor Strickfaden’s Liquid Fog Vortex Projector, or, more likely in my opinion, Welles simply borrowed a few seconds of Borzage’s movie to enhance his own. It’s the sort of thing he’d do more wholeheartedly in F FOR FAKE, and which he’d already done in CITIZEN KANE, which uses footage, and animated bats, from SON OF KONG. (See here for the debunking.)
As John Huston says in Welles’ THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, “It’s quite alright to steal from each other. What we must never do is steal from ourselves.”
November 18, 2008 at 10:33 pm
What a title card, and sounds like a great film too.
Re the recycling, it all evens up in the end. The grand staircase from Welles’ “Magnificent Ambersons” was reused in “Cat People” and several other RKO films.
November 18, 2008 at 10:59 pm
I keep meaning to look through all the Lewton films to see which sets are reused. I think most of the sets from Cat People get an airing in The Seventh Victim, including the Ambersons staircase. “I’m always amazed by what you can find hiding behind thefront of a New York brown stone.”
Moonrise is a masterpiece, and a highly individual work too. More on it tomorrow.
November 18, 2008 at 11:59 pm
There’s something truly uncanny about the “liquid fog” that opens Moonrise. It’s a visual effect that I can’t recall ever seeing in another film. I’ve yet to see Welles’ Macbeth, but I’ll take your word as to its mutual usage. What’s striking about it is what it does to the space within the film itself, there’s a vagueness, an uncertainty to the pictorial environment, this fog and the real world overlap, blend, coincide… and it’s used a a backdrop, or perhaps a complement, to the somber events that open the film. It makes the tragedy of circumstances surrounding Danny’s birth, his entrance into a harsh and insensitive world, seem more acute. I pulled it out and watched it last night, finished it this morning. Looking forward to the next entry.
November 19, 2008 at 12:05 am
Yes, it’s like it’s rain reflected somehow across the walls and ground of the prison yard. Impossible to make sense of how it’s happening, and I’m not even convinced that the shadows of the characters are actually the shadows of the characters, or if they’re being cast from somewhere else in the set using stand-ins. It’s the most peculiar, abstract part of the film.
I’m pretty sure Welles has just mixed in a bit of the footage from Moonrise into his montage of goop.
The closest thing to that liquid fog is the patterns of rain on Robert Blake’s face near the end of In Cold Blood, as he stands by the window. Very similar patterns, but Borzage’s are projected across a whole set.
November 19, 2008 at 12:34 am
In Cold Blood: Two familiar faces from noir’s classic period have roles in this film, Paul Stewart (always a welcome presence in most everything he’s in) and Charles McGraw, who portrays Perry Smith’s father in flashback. What struck me in this film when last I watched it was the reference made to The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Blake’s Perry Smith talking about a film in which Blake himself starred in (he was the boy who sold the lottery ticket to Bogart at the onset of the film). A black and white film made at a time when they were becoming fewer and fewer, but perfectly apropos.
November 19, 2008 at 1:05 am
I never knew that was Blake in TreasureOTSM! That makes it a pretty extraordinary movie reference. And it may well come from the book, and maybe even from reality. Of course Capote had worked with John Huston and Humphrey Bogart too…
McGraw is an astonishing man-monster, “undeniably beautiful, with a face like a knife” as John Patterson put it. Incredibly scary, even when playing heroes.
November 19, 2008 at 1:38 am
McGraw died too soon, I heard he fell through the glass of a shower door, bled to death on the cuts from the shards. Prompted the manufacturers to produce a stronger, more shatter-proof replacement. His first screen appearance was in Brahm’s The Undying Monster, Fox’s answer to The Wolf Man. McGraw with a British accent! Included in the box set with Brahm’s two Cregar showcases, The Lodger and Hangover Square, The Undying Monster is the weakest of the three. We all start somewhere.
November 19, 2008 at 1:54 am
Well the real Blake Bonanza is Second-Hand Hearts — Hal Ashby’s wild road movie, scripted by Charles Eastman and co-starring the great and grealty neurotic Barbara Harris.
My dear late friend Anthony Holland (I’ve linked in his classic scene from All That Jazz) was a close friend of Barbara’s from their Chicago Second City (the original company) days. During the shoot the a.d. used to call Tony up every day so he could talk Barbara out of the trailer and onto the set.
She was convinced her leading man was trying to kill her. . .
November 19, 2008 at 11:05 am
Blake is pretty scary, as Lost Highway shows. I’d love to work with him, but I’d be terrified too.
Yeah, Undying Monster has a ropey script and a reluctance to fully BE a monster movie, and Brahm’s usual high style is rather muted somehow. Didn’t recognise McGraw though, so I may have to rewatch!
I had fun with Brahm’s Guest in the House, which is beautifully shot.
March 6, 2009 at 3:51 am
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