Great Directors Made Small #4

Hal Ashby and his big brother.

Nick Dawson’s recent bio, Hal Ashby, Life of a Hollywood Rebel seems pretty good — it tells the story of the troubled editor-turned-director in what seems a fairly even-handed way, sympathetic to Ashby but also admitting his weaknesses and moments of cruelty.

However, I was slightly alarmed by a passage dealing with Ashby’s work as a junior editor for William Wyler on THE BIG COUNTRY (I know, it’s a strange meeting of talents, but Wyler was actually a big personal influence on Ashby)…

“When the film previewed in San Francisco, he was one of the few not brought along by Wyler, but he nevertheless paid his own way to attend the screening. Wyler was so impressed that Ashby was there that he had his expenses reimbursed. Everybody settled down to watch the film, and all was going well until, about an hour or so into the film, one of the reels went out of sync. It took a group of nervous editors almost ten minutes to rethread the negative and sort out the problem, by which time, as Ashby recalled, “a lot of people had come out to the popcorn stand to get candy and popcorn and so forth. And when they started the picture back up again, there was Willy running around in the lobby saying to people, ‘The picture’s started again, the picture’s started again,’ forcing them back into the theater! There was no question about it: he wasn’t polite, he was just grabbing them and throwing them back in! It was hysterical.”

It’s a nice anecdote, but what strikes me about Dawson’s telling of it is the blithe technical ignorance he displays. What would the negative be doing in the projection room? Does he have any idea what you would see if you projected a negative? You would see a negative! And you really wouldn’t want to risk your negative under such conditions, even if for some crazy idea you fancied previewing the film with all the colours reversed.

This kind of thing in film bios rather irks me, and puts me off because how, if you don’t understand the difference between a neg and a print, are you going to be able to talk about Ashby’s actual work as an editor, or even as a director? It certainly seems like a moderate amount of grounding in film language would help.

Incidentally, I used to wonder how a film could go out of sync when the sound was printed right on the print, in that optical film stripe ~

The answer lies in the loop. First, it’s important to understand that the sound is already out of sync — due to the impossibility of reading sound from a frame of film passing in front of the projector beam (I assume there’s just no room, plus the heat of the lamp might be deleterious to a sound head), the sound is printed several frames off, so that one frame is passing over the sound head to have the soundtrack read, while the corresponding frame of picture is passing through the gate and being blasted with light.

Meanwhile, there is the loop, literally a loose loop of film between the sound drum and the gate, a little quantity of excess that’s designed to stop the film tearing if it momentarily snags anywhere along the way. The trouble is, if the film does snag, the loop can shrink or disappear, which has the effect of moving the sound out of sync. The frame being projected would now be up to half a second closer to the frame whose soundtrack is being read. That’s enough to be very noticeable whenever a a character onscreen talks or slams a car door. (Dawson is quite correct in his use of the world “rethreaded” for the solution to this problem.)

This stuff might or might not strike you as interesting, but none of it is inherently hard to grasp, and anybody writing a book about an editor’s life might want to make a point of understanding some of it…

Street With No Name

Was fortunate enough to pick a copy of the Criterion Collection’s DVD of JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES for cheap. I haven’t watched it yet, but not having seen the films never stopped Michael Parkinson reviewing CARAVAGGIO and FLESH AND BLOOD when he hosted FILM ’86, so I feel fully qualified to write about it.

Really my thoughts are more tangential to the film (well, they’d kind of have to be) — I was wondering what other films would benefit from including not only a character’s name, but their full postal address. It’s a pressing question.

You could have FRANKENSTEIN, THE SCARY WINDMILL LABORATORY, NR. INGOLSTADT. The Roger Ebert lookalike star of UP could have his street address as well as that Peruvian plateau he winds up on. And THE SEARCHERS, NO FIXED ABODE has a certain ring to it. Since Fassbinder made films which have people’s names (VERONIKA VOSS) and addresses (BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ), we could save a lot of time by grafting them together. ROSA LUXEMBURG has the advantage of being a name and an address.

Further suggestions?

Chantal Akerman herself, of course, lives in the splendour of her Chantal Akermansion.

Carry On Noir

Had a great time showing NIGHT AND THE CITY to my class a couple weeks ago, a movie I always enjoy, for all kinds of things, from the London noir atmosphere, Francis Sullivan’s eloquently tortured fat man bad guy, and Richard Widmark’s sweaty desperation (ALL the characters in the film are studies in desperation of one kind or another). Despite the seedy atmosphere, the film seems to have had an oddly healthy effect on its participants, with Widmark and director Jules Dassin surviving well into their nineties, and co-star Googie Withers still being with us today. But this time I was taken with a minor player who was not so lucky.

The thug in the car is an actor names Peter Butterworth. Not somebody one associates with thug parts, actually: Butterworth is chiefly known for his roles in the CARRY ON series, often as an incompetent underling to stars like Harry H Corbett (CARRY ON SCREAMING) or Kenneth Williams (DON’T LOSE YOUR HEAD). He’s also in three Richard Lester films, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, THE RITZ and ROBIN AND MARIAN, where he plays a barber-surgeon failing to extract an arrow from Richard Harris’s neck.

Melancholy and an end-of-the-pier seediness seem to coalesce around the private lives of the CARRY ON team, few of who reached particularly ripe ages (so it’s pleasing to have Barbara Windsor as an uncharacteristically perky Dormouse in Tim Burton’s mess of an ALICE IN WONDERLAND). Butterworth’s death, aged sixty, from a heart attack while waiting in the wings to go onstage at a pantomime show (I’d previously read “while entertaining at a children’s party” but I’ll go with the IMDb), has a sad sound to it, although you can configure a Hollywood Version easily enough: the sound of laughter/applause ringing in his ears. And it probably beats being bashed with a brick, which is what happens to his co-thug in NIGHT AND THE CITY.

Butterworth was a splendid comic, who could quietly hold his own amid the chaos of a CARRY ON farce — it was actually good from to upstage your fellow players in these things, since the only way to make the experience lively for the audience, with the inert staging, corny gags and clunking editing, was to have a few faces emoting at once, each trying to outdo the other in enthusiasm. Situate Butterworth in the background and he’d add a whole mini-drama just by being endearingly daft. He spends the whole climactic exposition of FORUM struggling to get his sword from its sheath, and faffs around behind Richard Harris in R&M, taking the curse off the script’s poetic musings with a welcome infusion of bumbling.

Here’s a bit of SCREAMING which illustrates a number of the painful pleasures of that series. Fenella Fielding is a great underused resource of British cinema, best known internationally for revoicing Anita Pallenberg in BARBARELLA. Kenneth Williams, always alarming, is especially so as the reanimated Dr. Watt, his voice a-quiver with vibrato suggestiveness. Then, about three minutes or so in, we get Butterworth, who hardly says a word but stands behind the other players and mugs genially. Jim Dale tries to match him twitch for twitch, and you get a sort of doubling of affect as they do a kind of facial dance-off behind Harry H Corbett (once praised as British theatre’s answer to Brando, now a magnificently resourceful farceur with TV’s Steptoe and Son as, essentially, his entire career) and Williams.

You can also appreciate Gerald Thomas’s bad filmmaking. He serves up passable angles in which we can enjoy the mugging, but they don’t cut together at all well — there’s no reason for the angle changes except to serve up a spurious variety to the coverage, and break the scene into manageable-sized segments. Kevin Smith must have been taking notes.

Oh, and the big guy at the start is Bernard Bresslaw, who nearly got the role of the Creature in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, just losing out to Christopher Lee. Imagine what a fun alternative universe that would be!