The Sunday Intertitle: L’Herbier Goes Bananas

Thanks to La Faustin for recommending ELDORADO, a truly scrummy self-described melodrama from Marcel L’Herbier. The title refers to a house of dance/pleasure, where the glamorous Eve Francis is star attraction. Francis made several films in the twenties, a few in the thirties, and then retired from the screen for decades until cast by Patrice Chereau in 1975 in THE FLESH OF THE ORCHID, his twisted James Hadley Chase adaptation (kind of a sequel to NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH).

As so often with L’Herbier, decoration wins out over sense, and BECOMES sense. I couldn’t quite figure out why this brothel/tavern employed a clown, for instance. Doesn’t seem the best way to get the customers in the right mood. But there he is, looking very splendid, so how could I object? This makes the second L’Herbier production I’ve featured to include a scary kabuki clown.

Director of last week’s romp, LA GALERIE DE MONSTRES, Jacque Catelain, plays the young hero in this picture, and as La Faustin pointed out, costumes are by Alberto Cavalcanti, a man whose talents seem without limit — a child genius who studied law at 15, he switched to architecture, then interior design — I’d previously been wowed by his elaborate and fanciful sets for L’Herbier’s L’INHUMAINE (English translation THE INHUMAN WOMAN is unfortunately hampered by a clunky rhyme). Becoming a director he made a stupendous city symphony, RIEN QUE LES HEURES ~

~ and several more shorts, before LA CAPITAINE FRACASSE, a striking period feature film with a young Charles Boyer as villain. In England he designed the innovative sound montage for seminal postal documentary THE NIGHT MAIL ~

~and became a leading light at Ealing where he helmed the ventriloquist section of DEAD OF NIGHT, the staggering WENT THE DAY WELL? about an invasion of German fifth columnists in a sleepy English village, before returning to Brazil and helping launch the country’s film industry.

Also, he talked like the big cat in CREATURE COMFORTS ~

In ELDORADO, Cavalcanti’s stylings aren’t always flattering to Francis, but they’re beautiful creations in their own right. Likewise, her kiss-curls border on the grotesque, but help us take us into L’Herbier’s loopy hispanic daydream.

The film combines striking interiors — Catelain helped design the guest-house his character stays in — with impressive location photography (the Alhambra reflected in a pool, shot upside-down so the reflection becomes the building itself). As Catelain, an aspiring painter, stares at the ornate buildings, a foggy distortion warps the columns and arches, showing how he sees them with his painter’s eye. At the end of shots, patterned veils or stenciled cut-outs descend over the image…

As a sign of the film’s weird stylistic unity (despite having two cameramen, multiple designers, location and studio shooting), check out how Catelain’s jumble of tourist postcards echos the constructivist/futurist mash–up of the top intertitle ~

Mayhem and Probs

I enjoyed Joe Cornish’s ATTACK THE BLOCK. which I saw with friends Marvelous Mary, David and Ali, and young Louis. I don’t have a lot to add to the general impression of approval emanating from the print media — it’s great to see a film which takes representation of British experience seriously while still delivering an entertainment. I remember Mike Leigh expressing satisfaction that ALL OR NOTHING was getting a wider distribution than usual so that his film about life in sink estates could be seen by people IN sink estates, and thinking, “Yeah, but be honest, why would they go see it? They know what it’s like.” Cornish has actually given the real-life equivalents of the heroes of his film something to enjoy, something that they can’t get at home: alien invasion.

It’s the alien invasion I want to dwell on, because that’s in some ways the film’s weakest part. Although the movie has a few scattered pop-culture allusions (the setting is Wyndham Tower, a nod to the author of numerous British sci-fi classics, and repeated mentions of Ballard Street tip the hat in the direction of another master of apocalypse, but where is the H.G. Wells tribute?), it doesn’t seem to have bothered much with imaging a coherent alien race. An eleventh-hour plot twist involving pheremones is the only real idea offered, and otherwise we’re asked to believe in a race of interstellar travelers too dumb to figure out how to open a wheelie bin. One bit of narrative development is surely not enough — ALIEN gave us the egg, the face-hugger, the chest-burster and the full-grown man-sized Geiger biker dude, after all. If it’s not going to be transformations in size and appearance, it should be a transformation in our understanding of the creatures’ purpose and behaviour, which is only grudgingly offered here, and doesn’t ultimately make much sense (if this is a mating ritual, why are the pheremone-doused humans KILLED?). A promising idea, that the film’s nominal hero, Moses, may be responsible for all the carnage due to his thoughtless, vicious killing of the first visitor, is largely abandoned — Cornish’s strength as writer, his affection for his flawed characters, may also be his weakness, as he’s too easy on them.

In terms of the aliens’ design, there are issues… Cornish has decried the over-detailed look of most modern CGI monsters, and he’s right (how ironic that he’s involved ins cripting Spielberg’s forthcoming TINTIN, which looks from previews like a reckless plunge into the Uncanny Valley of hideously-over-textured motion capture ugliness…) and so the idea of “monsters you could actually draw” sounds refreshing. Blacker-than-black outline beasts with glow-in-the-dark fangs sounds fine, but I wish the beasties’ ability to blend with the shadows had been exploited more. And the thick, matted fur may be making things too easy for the prospective fan-artist: even I could draw these things, since the jagged-edge outline robs them of even a clear silhouette. Basically they’re a bit like the star of ROBOT MONSTER but with a dog’s head. In fact, basically they’re exactly like the dog Gnasher in Britain’s Dennis the Menace cartoon strip.

A fuzzy outline filled with menace — that encapsulates why the scifi side of the film, both visually and conceptually, feels underdeveloped compared to the compelling and compassionate view of life in Britain today, which is more switched-on than most of the supposed social-realism of the last several decades. Still, I’m quibbling — this movie is a hell of a lot of fun, confident without being brash, exciting, funny and likable. Since Cornish comes from a similar background to Chris Morris (FOUR LIONS) and Richard Ayoade (SUBMARINE) , we may be seeing something almost unprecedented in British cinema: a reinvigoration of commercial movie-making by TV comedy talent, spearheaded by ATTACK THE BLOCK exec Edgar Wright. There have been some notable failures too (MAGICIANS, BUNNY AND THE BULL), but nobody since Monty Python seems to have managed that transition, so it’s worthy of note.

Out of Mind

Keith Carradine’s hair is only one of many reason’s to enjoy TROUBLE IN MIND. Believe it or not, it’s not even one of the major reasons. The film is that good. I mean, there the hair is, hovering above his head like an angry deity, and yet in my review of the 1985 indie sleeper over at The Daily Notebook, this edition of the column known as The Forgotten, I barely even mention the hair. So that must be quite a film, right?