The Quick Change Artist

Where can you see Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd in the same movie? And throw in Roscoe Arbuckle, Jackie Coogan and Rudolph Valentino as well.

CHARACTER STUDIES is basically a home movie by Carter de Haven, rich bloke and future John Huston producer. Aa lot of care has gone into it, and it has a very nice central conceit, which unfortunately means that none of the actors interact or even share screen time. If he’d just filmed everybody hitting each other with sausages he’d have had a terrible pointless film, instead of this witty and elegant one, but we’d have gotten to see Fatty Arbuckle smacking Valentino with a salami. Sometimes you can overthink things.

A thousand thanks to Steven McNicoll for alerting me to this one.

Erotic Intertitle of the Week: Bottoms Up

Surprising intertitle from THE NAUGHTY FLIRT, one of those early-thirties talkies that still uses title cards between scenes. And yes, we’re talking pre-code. The director is Eddie Cline, a former colleague of Buster Keaton — yet he shows no particular flair for slapstick, or even inclination towards trying it, in this standard-issue rom-com enlivened by Alice White’s exaggerated comic playing and cuteness, and Myrna Loy’s slinkiness. Cline would rediscover his mojo in films for WC Fields a little later.

Pert spankee Alice White.

As for the spanking theme, it’s really one of those punitive beatings that are more common in fifties films with John Wayne. All about putting a woman “in her place.” Here’s a movie I know I will never watch:

He may well be “McNificent,” but he has an arm jutting from his ribcage like some ghastly SILENT HILL mutant. A harrowing gurn distending his puffy mug. The gaping maw yawning hellishly from amidst an inflamed countenance like a skelped arse. Which is ironic, if you think about it.

While the makers of THE NAUGHTY FLIRT are clearly aware of the appeal of spanking as erotic play, the narrative use of it isn’t particularly playful. It compares unfavourably with thos dialogue in TROUBLE IN PARADISE:

“Your accounts are a disgrace! If I were your father I would spank you.”

“And if you were my secretary?”

“I’d do just the same.”

“You’re hired.”

Lubitsch, as always, is in a class by himself for naughtiness.

Intertitle of the Week: Genuinely Nuts

“The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.”

It can now be confirmed: Robert Wiene’s GEUINE is completely insane. Although, in the truncated form available at present, at least some of its apeshit incoherence may be down to the unwitting juxtapositions wrought by wanton pruning. So much footage has been stripped out that it’s often hard to figure out which intertitle belongs to which character.

Given the violence meted out to Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS, which was not only shortened, with entire plot-lines cast to the winds, but moronically rewritten (to make Rotwang’s robot a “worker of the future” rather than a replacement for his dead wife, for instance), there’s simply no knowing what GENUINE must be like in its genuine form — until I see a longer edit, that is. It may prove to be slow, rational and pedantic. If so, the butchers who hacked it about may have done it a favour, because the expressionist design certainly compliments the narrative frenzy.

Genuine is some kind of high priestess of a barbaric tribe somewhere or other who gets sold into slavery and brought to somewhere or other by an old Mr Burns type gentleman wearing high heels who keeps her in a glass pyramid in his house —

Then hairdressing comes into it. Hairdressing seems to be quite important in this picture. And everybody has mad, expressionist hair, which makes sense. Oh, except the old gent, who’s bald. He’s the one who has a hairdresser visit him every week. Makes sense.

Genuine escapes from her greenhouse and molests the young relative of the hairdresser. Some other stuff happens. Oh, and it’s all a dream that Peter the Painter is having. Or is it?

The script is by Carl Mayer, maybe the most interesting of all the writers in Germany at this time (CALIGARI, THE LAST LAUGH, SUNRISE). I love the extracts from German silent scripts that Lotte Eisner reproduces in her books. They’re all like,

The staircase. Dusk.

Now a shadow falls.

He!

Terrific stuff. Check out his IMDb bio for a sad story. I blame the British.

The mutilation of GENUINE is presumably the work of Raymond Rohauer, from whose collection the copy comes. And this week’s Hitchcock, JAMAICA INN, has also passed through RR’s sweaty hands, acquiring some bogus titles at the start — it was Rohauer’s habit to alter films in order to obtain copyright control over them. A slightly dubious character (he also collected images of bloody auto wrecks, for masturbatory purposes, I fear), he nevertheless can be credited with preserving many films that might otherwise have been lost altogether, including the entire directorial output of Buster Keaton.

Supertitle of the Week

From THE RING. During the climactic battle-of-the-last-century between Carl “the melodic Dane” Brisson and Ian “punchbag-face” Hunter, Hitch boldly experiments, for one shot only, with the supertitle.

I’m not sure why.

“Don’t hold, Corby.”

But the idea is a promising one — if the silent period had continued uninterrupted by Vitaphonic honkings, I bet more directors would have opted to superimpose dialogue over the image, rather than breaking the flow of action with inserted text-frames. On the one hand, this would have made the preparation of foreign versions much more complicated — no longer could you simply snip out the English intertitles and paste in Dutch or Swahili ones. A lot more lab work would be called for. But on the other hand, it still wouldn’t have been half as complicated as dubbing or subtitling a talkie, or even making three versions in three different languages, my favourite solution to the talking picture crisis, because it’s so mad. And you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Laurel & Hardy doing their thing in schoolboy Spanish or French. I’ve never seen Keaton’s foreign-language versions, but I bet they’re superior to his regular MGM talkies.

Precode Bathtime

A revealing moment of Claudette Colbert in DeMille’s SIGN OF THE CROSS. Costume and production designer (and later director) Mitchell Leisen measured C.C. from toe to nipple so that the sunken bath could be filled with milk to exactly the level dictated by decency. But who knew she’d bounce around so much?

Tom Sutpen has kindly gone to the work of finding the EXACT FRAME of revelation.

The milk soon became unpleasant under the studio lights, and had to be regularly replaced. On time some studio execs visited, and one of them stepped right onto the surface of the milk, which had set into a cheese-like formation and resembled a smooth marble floor. He sank up to his nipples in it at once, of course. Something about the expensive executive buisiness suit coated with soft, malodorous cheese makes a for a pleasing image.

But not as pleasing perhaps as Myrna Loy in THE BARBARIAN, a 30s knock-off of THE SHEIK starring Ramon Novarro.

Anita Loos scripted this kinky fantasy, which offends some people on the IMDb by indulging in the movie equivalent of s&m roleplay. Myrna is abducted by Novarro and learns to like it. I’m sure Anita Loos didn’t take this seriously as a political statement about male-female relations. It’s all meant as good clean dirty fun. It may not be a great film, but Myrna’s frontal nudity, which is even more revealing when you add the movement of the water, is impressively both explicit and yet not quite clear. Is she wearing some kind of modesty garment? It’s hard to be sure.

Hopefully someone will also mention Sybil Seely in Buster Keaton’s ONE WEEK.