N.Y.C. (New York Colossus)

“America! I am coming to conquer you!” ~ Charles Chaplin.

Yes! Thanks to the concerted efforts of sympathetic persons, I am off to New York to see a bit of the Duvivier retrospective at MOMA. I’ll be leaving on the 2nd of May. Blogging will continue from Metropolis. I’ll be writing about the Duviviers here and at the Auteurs’ Notebook, and anywhere else that’ll have me.

Thanks are due to ~

Paul Duane for the flight.

Noe Mendell for the time off work.

Daniel Kasman and MOMA for the movie tickets.

Comrade K for the proverbial Couch in New York. 

Hope to meet a few old friends and some new ones while I’m there, so if you’re a reader and you want to glut your soul upon my accursed ugliness, by all means declare yourself. “It’s going to be fun!”

Bluebottle Rocket

  

Ivor Montagu, who helped shape THE LODGER into Hitchcock’s first triumph, was reunited with the portly auteur when Hitch joined Michael Balcon at British Gaumont, and immediately became his collaborator on the scenario of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, which is a good enough excuse to link to Montagu’s stylish, Hitchcockian silent comedy, BLUEBOTTLES, which stars Elsa Lanchester and is an utter delight. Lanchester is a superb visual comedian, it turns out. There’s also Montagu’s intriguing and titillating decision to introduce her in ECU kissing her girlfriend goodbye in front of a cinema showing an Ivor Novello movie. 

Couldn’t embed this one, but I urge you to follow the link and watch it — maybe it’s a little overlong, but it has style, innocence and the electrifying Elsa, a truly unique talent — as great as she was as a character actor, I deeply regret that she didn’t play more leading roles, particularly in comedy.

With her stick figure body, twitching from place to place as if operated by a puppeteer bothered by wasps, her beautiful but oddly-assembled face (not easy to take being cast as the monster’s bride as a compliment, but she was entitled to) and her eccentric, childlike approach to any situation, Elsa was an unnatural natural, a machine for generating surprises, an instinctive oddball with a keen analytical mind, sneaking up on a script crab-fashion then pouncing like a thin baby from a wardrobe. Her way with line readings is equally doo-lally: remember BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN again, where she imbues the line, “It will be published — I (!) think (!)!” with an excess of invisible punctuation I can only hint at here. When she turns up as a mad medium in THE GHOST GOES WEST, I want to hurl the entire movie, charming though it is, over my shoulder and simply follow her character into a kind of alternative GHOSTBUSTERS world of supernatural intrigue, possibly featuring Alistair Sim as Alastair Crowley.

The other underrated genius here is Montagu, who shows serious chops, both as a Hitchcockian/Langian expressionist and as a comic filmmaker. Either of those courses would have seemed suitable for him, but he seems to have been content to settle as the studios’ resident intellectual, helping out on a range of films and then becoming a contributor to books on cinema in the ’50s. He was good at it, but there was more to him than that. He put in a lot of time to helping Eisenstein get a foothold in the west, which came to very little.

It’s also possible that Montagu’s arduous duties as a Russian spy kept him from advancing his filmmaking career as much as he should, but this has never been proved. If true, it puts an interesting new perspective on his contribution to Hitchcock’s espionage thrillers…

Quote of the Day: Good Manners Cost Nothing

THE CONSPIRATORS is a rather uninspired CASABLANCA imitation, seemingly inspired by the delusion that what we really wanted in that movie was more Paul Henreid, but it does have a sort of slow-burn gag as it goes on, relating to the casting. We all know that anybody foreign can play anybody foreign in classic Hollywood, but Jean Negulesco, perhaps irked at being the only Romanian director in town, takes things to extremes here –

Henreid, an Austro-Hungarian, plays a Dutchman, while his fellow-countrywoman Hedy Lamar plays French. Belgian Victor Francen plays a German. Sidney Greenstreet, a man of Kent, plays Portuguese, as do the Maltese Joseph Calleia, the Italian Eduardo Cianelli and the Russian Vladimir Sokoloff. Even the minor German stooges are played by Hungarian and Polish actors. Russian Gregory Gaye plays a Norwegian red herring. Absolutely NOBODY in this film is playing the correct nationality.

Peter Lorre (our MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH connection) plays Jan Bernazsky, which seems in keeping with everybody else, and he’s good value. Known in England as “the walking overcoat” due to his distinctive dress style, by now he has lost a ton of weight, had his teeth fixed, and looks a little drawn, a little more turtle-like. 

Lorre: “Oh, I am the least important of our trio, in fact I have nothing to recommend me except — always good manners.”

Greenstreet: “Always?”

Lorre: “Oh, up to a point: a man can lose his patience.”