The Prussians are Coming!

MADEMOISELLE FIFI, with Simone Simon.

Guy de Maupassant is a fave of mine, although I’ve only read his short stories, not his novels. Among these morally complex, twisted works, are a few atypically simplistic propaganda-type pieces dealing with the Franco-Prussian war, one of which, Mademoiselle Fifi, became half of a fine Val Lewton/Robert Wise drama at RKO. The other half of that movie was based on the considerably more complex Boule de Suif, in which the Prussians may be brutes and tyrants but the French are self-centred snobs and hypocrites. Lewton skillfully uses the simple story to counteract some of the anti-propagandistic aspects of the complex one, so as to wind up with a film that could be released in wartime without drawing accusations of giving succour to the enemy.

This week’s edition of the Forgotten, over at the Daily Notebook, looks at PYSHKA, the last silent movie made in the USSR, and a much more faithful, hard-line version of Boule de Suif. I suspect you’ll find the images there most bracing.

PYSHKA.

Three facts about Guy de Maupassant which I carry in my mind:

One day while swimming he saved the poet Swinburne from drowning. As a reward, Swinburne gave him an ashtray made from a human hand, and this formed the inspiration for Maupassant’s first published story, The Hand, a creepy and hilarious thunderstorming mystery.

Maupassant liked to paint fake syphilis sores on his erection and chase his mistress round the room with it. What a card!

Contracting the disease for real, GdM wound up dying, blind and insane in the asylum. Towards the end, he was convinced there were diamonds in his urine.

Asides from the films cited above, the movie most alive to the spirit of Maupassant is perhaps Ophuls’ LE PLAISIR. Interesting how the marvelous overcast skies of PYSKHA (that amazing combo of heavy clouds and bright sunshine blasting in from the horizon line) followed Ophuls around and crept into his last shot.

LE PLAISIR, with Simone Simon again.

If the weather had been different that day, all cinema would be changed. For me, anyway.

UK: Le Plaisir [DVD]

US: Le Plaisir

Max Ophuls Collection: Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948), Earrings Of Madame De.. (1953) + Le Plaisir (1952)

Crime of an Anatomy

Last week I wrote a celebration of the physical grotesquerie of the great Clarence Wilson, now visible at The Chiseler. One of the less-famed of the pre-code rep company servicing Hollywood in the early 30s, Wilson deserves to be sung of more often, and louder.

A furtive spell-check amended the piece, making it a hair less Rabelaisian than intended: I had compared everybody’s favourite fat man, Eugene Pallette, not to an inflamed bullock, but to an inflamed bollock. But it’s equally true either way.

During the course of the article, I compare Wilson himself to a zombie, a horse, and a crustacean, although the closest equivalent in nature might be some kind of beetle or roach. The movie THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER, however, an entertaining romp with Edna May Oliver as a crime-solving schoolteacher, comes up with its own comparison — some kind of horrible fish.

Seconds earlier, though some minutes before Ms Oliver’s appearance, the film also seems to offer a pretty good piscine analog for her long-faced fizzog –

And here’s an unrelated limerick, co-written with Hilary Barta.

I Feel Good!

This just in — the new Artistic Director of Edinburgh International Film Festival has been named as Chris Fujiwara. This strikes me as EXCELLENT news. An excellent critic and author of works on Jerry Lewis (pictured), Jacques Tourneur and Otto Preminger. That’s the retrospectives back on the table then.

This welcome bombshell is accompanied by the news that Gavin Miller is stepping down as CEO of the Centre for the Moving Image, the Festival’s governing body.

I’m going to pour myself a beaker of blue stuff and celebrate.