Intertitle of the Week: Highland Reels

ANNIE LAURIE was the rattiest recording of anything I’ve looked at lately. The movie itself had a big timecode stuck on it, and the disc I was watching had evidently been produced by somebody with a video camera filming a TV screen playing the movie on VHS. At first I was irked, thinking the anonymous pirate ought to have at least used a tripod, even if he couldn’t simply connect the VCR to a DVD recorder. Then I surmised, from the timecode, that the movie was probably the property of some archive, and the intrepid crook had smuggled a handicam into a little screening room to filch the movie’s image. Of this, I heartily approved. Archives are great things, preserving the physical substance of cinema history, but too often it’s difficult for us mortals to access the goodies within, for geographical locations, and the archives make it difficult or impossible for us to get our hands on recordings, for copyright reasons. So larceny is the remaining option for cinephiles with hungry eyes.

Credit to the mysterious source: whenever his arm got tired, resulting in violent jostling of the image, he would rewind the tape in order to get a better version of the ruined sequence. I presume he intended to edit the faulty “takes” out, but never got around to it. A shame there was no soundtrack though — I can imagine a score making deft/cheesy use of not only the title song, but also “The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond” and “Auld Lang Syne”.

Anyhow, the movie posits Lillian Gish in the Scottish Highlands, as the titular Annie, she of the beautiful ballad heard in both Elia Kazan’s A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN and Takeshi Miike’s THE BIRD PEOPLE OF CHINA. So, I was of course thrilled at seeing La Gish impersonate one of my countrywomen. And then I was doubly, triply, quadruply thrilled that this studio Scotland was a dank, papier maché affair highly reminiscent of Orson Welles’ MACBETH. I doubt it was an actual influence — I prefer to think that both films accurately reflect the way denizens of Hollywood imagine my homeland — heaps of muddy canvas draped over boxes, molded pulp mountains, crooked castles of permanently wet clay. Come to think of it, that’s often how *I* think of the place, and I live here.

The story is set at the time of the Campbell-MacDonald feud, leading up to the infamous massacre of Glencoe, when the English-loving Campbells treacherously murdered a batch of sleeping MacDonalds. Lillian plays a Campbell who falls for a MacDonald, leading to kilted Romeo & Juliet antics.

Wouldn’t be surprising to see a trio of witches atop this outcrop.

Gish is more than usually pert and perky and pixieish here. One saucy scene has her serenaded by her effete Campbell beau, while she sits on the castle wall and smiles down at her rough, manly MacDonald suitor, who’s sitting on a rock amid a babbling brook. It’s surprising to see Lillian so fickle.

By the film’s climax, the Campbell’s have pretty much disgraced themselves via treachery, except for maybe Lillian’s Walter-Brennan-like grizzled protector, so she jumps ship and heroically lights a beacon to call rescuing clansmen. The climax is really thrilling, helped by the fact that both history and Gish’s rep as a tragedian really push us to fearing the worst possible outcome. In the end, this follows the MGM model and averts disaster, so we get a lovely two-strip idyll instead of heaps of corpses. Whatevs!

Colour hasn’t aged too well, alas. But by a happy coincidence, the MacDonald tartan uses the same hues as Two-Strip.

Praise to John S Robertson (a Canadian, probably with Scottish roots) for spectacular battle/chase action. We can see his film technique has grown more sophisticated since his (excellent) Barrymore DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE.

Leading men — Norman Kerry (Lon Chaney’s strongman rival in THE UNKNOWN) is a dignified MacDonald, triumphing over a deeply-scooped waistcoat which allows his nipples to peep shyly forth. Creighton Hale (THE CAT AND THE CANARY) is a suitably poncified Campbell. He may be best known today for Kenneth Anger’s completely unfounded allegation that he fucked a goat in a porno movie. All the more reason for joy at the liberation of this charming curio from its dusty canister.

The End of a Perfect Week

Thanks to everybody for their contributions!

Game Over

George Stevens’ THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN — had I even heard of this? I’m interested in testing the commonly-embraced supposition that Stevens went downhill after WWII, when he abandoned comedy for increasingly lumbering dramas. Those dramas include A PLACE IN THE SUN, the film which inspired John Cassavetes, so it’s a supposition that needs careful examination and doesn’t usually get it.

Widely decried as an $11,000,000 two-handed play, back when that was a lot of money, the film seems to have vanished utterly — my copy came from an almost impenetrably dark and fuzzy VHS, doing know favours to Henri Decae’s Vegas night scenes… and let’s stop and observe the striking fact that George Stevens, a former cinematographer himself for, among others, Laurel and Hardy, got Jean-Pierre Melville’s favourite cinematographer to shoot his final film.

The year is 1970, the self-adapted play is by Frank D. Gilroy, the stars are Warren Beatty, who passed up BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID to do this, and Liz Taylor. Who’s playing, in a fit of implausibility, a Vegas showgirl. Fiona got very excited, expecting CAMP. This is the 1970s Liz, dwarfish frame huddled beneath a vast Sontaran helmet of hair, hair flown all the way from Paris, we are told, just to make her wobble beneath its oppressive weight. Liz’s wigs are like Charles Laughton’s hump in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME — designed to make the wearer bend under them.

The younger, more elegant Beatty should be a mismatch, but there’s a rather perfect blendship at work — the movie, a pure filmed play with a few lame stretches of opening out/padding, would be sunk if the stars didn’t have chemistry. In fact, Beatty’s underplaying stays out of the soporific zone he’s latterly drifted towards, and Liz meets him halfway with a modest, likable portrayal, only getting the famous fishwife bray out when absolutely necessary (maybe once every ten minutes).

Strikingly, it’s NOT camp and it’s NOT embarrassing. It’s mildly touching. Sure, the rear projected car ride and fishing trip make you cringe (as they do in Melville’s last movies), and the whole thing is terribly overlong. But it has a certain charm. Being able to see the night scenes could only help it.

I always find myself watching out for signs of Stevens’ peculiar shooting style, often used as a stick to beat him with. “He shoots in a circle,” they say, covering the action repeatedly from all sides and all distances. Beatty, who notoriously takes twenty takes just to warm up, probably appreciated the exercise. In a few scenes, Stevens zip-pans dramatically across the little apartment set from one character to the other, in shots which seem unlike coverage, more like genuine direction. Occasionally, he does seem to have shot an amazing number of angles on simple scenes, and the editor has made the mistake of trying to represent a moment from each of them. But mostly, the shooting is elegant, effective, and if there are a gazillion feet of discarded material for every moment onscreen, that doesn’t affect the quality of what we’re seeing. Stevens always seems very skilled at shooting and cutting people moving from room to room while talking — this film is like a slowed-up, less comedic approach to his charming THE MORE THE MERRIER. It’s not as good, but it’s not bad. If this is as arthritic as Stevens became, there’s got to be gold lurking in his post-war back catalogue, and not just in the acknowledged classics.

What separates the movie from the incoming New Hollywood that Beatty was part of, is not so much the classical style (Coppola could do classical), as the romantic illusions. The title refers to marriage, and the solution to a gambling addiction in this film is to win big at roulette. Stevens dips a toe in the waters of modernity, but he still clings to the life preserver of conventional Hollywood narratives.

A nice moment — I’d never seen a character in a Hollywood movie sit down next to the fountains and have them SWITCH OFF, light and water wilting defeatedly.