The Melancholy Dane

I’m slightly staggered that Von Trier has gotten himself banned from Cannes (What does that actually mean? Is it permanent? Will they ever show his filmsagain, or is it just the man himself that’s unwelcome?) for some comments that might certainly qualify as poor taste, but were pretty obviously not intended seriously. Maybe he’s been hoist by his own petard here, because maybe his success in arthouse circles has, all along, been down to the fact that critics and cineastes didn’t know when he was and wasn’t being serious. I’ve often suspected, or else been 100% certain, that Trier was not sincere at all times in his films. It’s been entirely clear that he’s been joking much of the time in his personal statements. But maybe the Cannes organisers think he means everything he says, all the time, completely literally. If not, it’s a bit worrying that they’ve banned him for facetiously calling himself a Nazi: where do you draw the line about what jokes are acceptable to make, and what is the appropriate punishment for making an unsuccessful joke?

Let’s be clear: this wasn’t a drunken Mel Gibson or John Galiano tirade, directed at and intended to hurt specific people. If anything, Trier was insulting himself. He did call Israel a pain in the ass, which is vague but doesn’t seem too severe for a nation whose military are not only routinely slaughtering Palestinian civilians but who may even be targeting children. This was a mildly bad-taste riff intended to provoke a few laughs — not that different from THE KINGDOM or ANTICHRIST, i’d have thought.

It’s political correctness and Lars Von Trier gone mad.

Your image fix for the day

Startling visuals from ALIAS THE DOCTOR, directed mainly by Michael Curtiz (I’d say he’s the father of the Warner style, along with Anton Grot), with some additional scenes by Lloyd Bacon. Curtiz’s high style subsumes Bacon’s more traditional approach.

Curtiz also gets a lot of visual beauty out of medical equipment insert shots — as he would in THE WALKING DEAD.

Richard Barthelmess plays a medical student who takes the rap for a drunken friend, and then is forced — forced! — by circumstance to masquerade as a qualified medico. Impressive and compact plot contrivance makes this all, not plausible exactly, but compelling, before the story does kind of choke on its own unlikeliness.

Marian Marsh is pretty and smiles a lot, Norman Foster is as unreliable as ever, and Barthelmess agonizes wetly. He’s the pre-code cinema’s number one drip, with David Manners as number two (see the great THE LAST FLIGHT, in part to see two starkly contrasting drips attempt to play world-weary together, a truly thrilling sight, and I’m not being facetious). Remarkable how much gravitas and genuine world-weariness Barthelmess has picked up by the time of ONLY ANGELS HEVE WINGS.

The sinister pathologist, hovering like an angel of death over the proceedings, is played, in a wordless bit of sepulchral moping, by the distinguished Nigel de Brulier, in movies since 1914 — regular bad guy support for Fairbanks, Chaney, Barrymore…

Gypsy Malady

Edinburgh Filmhouse and the BFI’s Screening the Archive series is a really nice initiative to project on the big screen neglected British items that don’t always get the attention they deserve — we saw Brian Desmond Hurst’s remarkable proto-noir ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIRE a few months ago. Two months back we were sorry to miss a double bill of rare early Boulting brothers thrillers. Last month, GYPSY MELODY, a long-lost musical comedy starring Lupe Velez was the star attraction.

The movie, a 1936 musical travesty, was considered lost for 75 years before being unearthed in the Cinematheque Francaise — the print was then passed on to the BFI for restoration. The film’s French director, Edmond T Greville (BEAT GIRL), a real maestro of the guilty pleasure (he’d just completed a lavish Josephine Baker atrocity, PRINCESS TAM TAM), is not particularly celebrated in his native France, perhaps because he had a tendency to denounce French cinema as a load of rubbish. Shuffling back and forth across the channel, he managed a bilingual career that also included THE HANDS OF ORLAC with Christopher Lee, and NOOSE, a fun 1948 crime pic with a great spiv turn from Nigel Patrick, swarthy villainy from Joseph Calleia, and perky news gal levity from Carole Landis.

NOOSE makes an interesting parallel with GYPSY MELODY — both feature US stars (Landis and Lupe Velez) whose careers were sliding, slumming it in the UK. Both stars made two Brit flicks back-to-back, and later committed suicide. NOOSE is by far the more accomplished film, but that’s not so much due to a fluctuation in Greville’s ability — he frames up some very attractive shots in GM — as to the inherent limitations of the material he’s struggling with here. A plotless Ruritanian romance, the movie nominally stars bandleader Alfred Rode (as Erik Danilo, the surname being a clue to the Lubitschian aspirations). Since Rode (who appears to have had little if any Romany blood) plays a mean fiddle but can’t act to save his life, the bulk of the dialogue is shifted to the annoying comedy relief characters, and poor Lupe’s romantic interest is given nothing to do but express wonder at indoor plumbing and stage a brief spitfire moment when Rode is flocked by female fans.

Despite his inexpressiveness and apparent discomfort in front of the camera, Rode had a substantial film career, but most of it was either in France, where perhaps he was more at home with the language, or in the form of musical guest spots.

It’s interesting to read, in the Filmhouse’s accompanying flier, a Monthly Film bulletin review from the period which refers to comedy support Jerry Verno as “the Jewish hatter” — it wasn’t crystal clear to me why we should interpret the character as being Jewish. A case of anti-semitic assumptions, or character coding that’s unreadable to modern eyes? Or just background knowledge about Mr. Verno?

Thankfully, racial profiling in film reviews is on the decline in Britain today.