The Sunday Intertitle: All the Fun of the Fair

Finally saw something I’d been longing for — the surviving fragment of Josef Von Sternberg’s THE CASE OF LENA SMITH.

I love fragments, me. I love fragments maybe even more than I love complete films. And I can think of all kinds of modern movies that would be better as fragments. You could probably find a three-minute clip from AUSTRALIA that would make people think “My, what was that? I wonder if that was ever any good?” The intact movie doesn’t make anybody think that.

Critic Dwight MacDonald called THE CASE OF LENA SMITH as “the most completely satisfying American film I have seen,” which you couldn’t, alas, say about the clip. But I can and do say “Isn’t that an uncredited Sig Rumann as the magician?” If so, even Alexander Horwath and Michael Omasta’s exhaustive volume on the lost film, Josef Von Sternberg: The Case of Lena Smith (Filmmuseum Synema Publikationen) doesn’t mention it. A Shadowplay first!

The sequence, set at Vienna’s famous Prater, scene of memorable events in LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN and THE THIRD MAN, is also fascinating as it recreates the setting of Sternberg’s own childhood, suggesting a more than usually personal production from this idiosyncratic and often autobiographical filmmaker. Here’s the relevant extract from his memoir, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, a sentence of John Collier-like length and ebullience.

“Hundreds of shooting galleries, Punch and Judy and the inevitable Satan puppet, chalk-faced clowns in their dominoes, boats sliding from a high point down into water with a great splash, leather-faced dummies that groaned when slapped, pirouetting fleas, sword swallowers, tumbling midgets and men with skirts flaring from them, proving that not all females had lost their undergarments, a forest of balloons, tattooed athletes, muscle-bulging weightlifters, women who were sawed in half and apparently spent the rest of their lives truncated, trained dogs and elephants, tightropes that provided footing for a gourmet who feasted on a basketful of the local sausages with horse-radish that made my mouth water, graceful ballerinas, grunting knife-throwers with screaming targets whose hair flowed down to the hems of their nightgowns, hatchet-throwing Indians and phlegmatic squaws, double-headed calves, members of the fair sex, fat and bearded, with thighs that could pillow an army, magicians who poured jugs of flaming liquid down their throats, drum-thumping cannibals and their wiggling harems, a glass maze from which the delighted customers stumbled with black eyes and gashed heads, hypnotists who practiced levitation and passed hoops around the dormant females swaying five feet from where they ought to have been, and the central figure of a huge Chinese mandarin with drooping mustaches longer than the tail of a horse revolving on a merry-go-round to the tune of Ivanovici’s Donauwellen — what more could I have asked?”

Alas I’ve been forbidden from uploading the clip, which Waseda University seem to be anxious to keep as their own personal stuff (Bastards! Bastards!) and some of the nicest bits are distorting reflections of crowds, a la CABARET, which can’t really be reproduced here as still images since they just kind of melt into blurry inkwash smudges. They’re gorgeous in motion, take my word for it. Or better still, ram-raid Waseda University and steal the clip and put it up on the internet.*

The female Johnny Eck! The heroine’s naughty blonde friend whispers a remark about her into the heroine’s ear — she looks scandalized at the suggestion. Of course — dramatic irony — it’s the virtuous heroine (goody-goody Esther Ralston) who will be seduced by the handsome soldier…

*It wouldn’t actually be cool to do the first part of this.

Three Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg (Underworld / Last Command / Docks of New York) (The Criterion Collection)

The Chimp of the Perverse

Revisiting the works of the late Richard Franklin, which I remembered as being pretty good. They are! But alas he perhaps never quite achieved a totally satisfying film… still, agreeable oddity, a likable spirit, and some camera panache counts for plenty.

Franklin was an Australian Hitchcock fan who studied film in America alongside John Carpenter. He was certainly the right guy to make PSYCHO II, from a smart Tom Holland script. If you’re going to do such a criminal thing, at least do it with respect and humour.

After a couple of softcore exploiters he didn’t much like to talk about, Franklin made PATRICK, a comatose telekinetic kid thriller, then the enjoyable ROAD GAMES, which we also watched. After PSYCHO II and CLOAK AND DAGGER (haven’t seen it) came LINK, his psycho chimp thriller with Terence Stamp, made for the late unlamented Cannon Films –

What most of the best Franklin films, and most of the best weird Australian films, have in common, is a script by Everett De Roche. Check his credits — besides the Franklin films, he wrote HARLEQUIN (Robert Powell as a modern Rasputin) and LONG WEEKEND (when everything attacks!) and RAZORBACK (JAWS in the outback with a wild boar!). Apart from the Peter Weir and Rolf de Heer Festivals of Strangeness, he seems omnipresent.

LINK is set in the UK (locations on the Scottish borders) but de Roche’s script makes Terence Stamp’s nutty primatologist an honorary Ozzie, with his matey, classless, no-frills manner. It’s a great way to take the curse off the scenario’s more fantastical elements — have them explained by a casual (yet intense) ordinary (yet impossibly handsome) bloke. Stamp is blocked on his latest opus –

“I was gonna call it Out On A Limb but Shirley MacLaine beat me to it.”

It’s actually one of Stamp’s nicest performances, and nobody appreciated it because it was in a killer chimp film. If A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE had a homicidal ape in it, we’d never have heard of Marlon Brando.

Stamp is joined at his isolated clifftop manor by a young Elizabeth Shue, who’s better than the average girl-in-jeopardy, although the script doesn’t do her as many favours as it does Terry. There’s a blandness in the role, and a bit of 70′s bloke sexism — I’m surprised the actress didn’t mutiny when called upon to answer the question “Can you cook, clean?” with “Well, I’m a woman, so I guess I have some kind of genetic aptitude.” The role, and the film, ultimately devolves into a lot of running around, rather as HOLLOW MAN would years later.

But what we were really watching for was the APES, and here LINK satisfies fully, if bizarrely. At the time, there was a certain amount of critical incredulity about the idea of chimpanzees as horror movie menace. The world is a bit better informed now about the dangers of apes run wild — a chimp is pretty much the most dangerous escaped zoo animal you could hope to meet. Stamp tells a charming story over dinner about one ape who savagely dismembered his human owner to try and sell us on this idea. “What had he done to the chimp?” asks Shue. “Oh, nothing. The chimp was just glad to see him,” smiles Stamp.

This is one of the few primatology-based movies to show signs of real, intelligent research. All of which is nearly overshadowed by the bizarre casting of the titular ape, a chimp played by an orangutan in blackface. Presumably because no adult chimp of sufficient training was available, some poor orang has been given a close-cropped haircut and a dye-job, then dressed as a butler (his character is a former circus artiste). It’s the simian equivalent of Mickey Rooney in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, an embarrassment to modern sensibilities. We were also shocked that none of the apes (three appear) were accorded a screen credit. I mean, that’s just good manners and good showbiz.

Whoever the anonymous ape is, he acquits himself well, aided by a few bits of prosthetic trickery, most of them well concealed. Unfortunately, orangs are pretty sluggish compared to chimps, so he’s not as adept at moving in a threatening way, but he sells the moments of sexual tension well, eyeing Shue’s body double with the sly lechery of a primeval George Sanders. It might seem like the movie’s most B-picture exploitation angle, but Link’s attraction to Elizabeth Shue (this is the same year as arthouse monkey-love epic MAX, MON AMOUR) is perfectly accurate in terms of simian behaviour. Captive apes often have crushes on humans. Lucy, raised as a human child, liked to relax with a glass of gin, a copy of Playgirl and a Hoover attachment.

Orangs, even in the wild, are known to be sexually rapacious. The name may mean “old man of the forest,” but it ought to be “dirty old man of the forest.” as Julia Roberts nearly learned to her cost.

“Pretty human!”

LINK is good fun — lots of problems, but only the score seems truly wrongheaded — Jerry Goldsmith has been encouraged to rip off his own GREMLINS theme, and it doesn’t work — although it gets better when he adds the timpani from Marlene Dietrich’s Hot Voodoo number in BLONDE VENUS, which Franklin quotes at the film’s start, in a bit of sub-Joe Dante pop culture referencing.

D is for La Diosa Arrodillada (The Kneeling Goddess)

Guest Shadowplayer David Melville returns from sunny Spain to bring us another Mexican melodrama from the golden age –

CINE DORADO 

The Golden Age of Mexican Melodrama 

D is for La diosa arrodillada (The Kneeling Goddess) 

Let us close our eyes and live this dream.

- Arturo de Córdova to María Félix

In Hollywood after World War II, a new genre called film noir brought the look of German Expressionism and Gothic horror to a contemporary urban world of morally compromised heroes and ruthless, sexually voracious femmes fatales. It did not take long for film noir to travel to Mexico, and the man who made it happen was Roberto Gavaldón. One of two great auteurs to emerge in Mexico in the 40s, Gavaldón is barely remembered today – unlike his arch-rival Emilio (Bugambilia) Fernandez.

The two directors and their films could not have been more different. Fernandez was the naïf rural poet of Mexican cinema – evoking a world of flyblown pueblos, a landscape of cactuses and clouds, and Dolores del Río looking beautiful and stalwart in a native shawl. Gavaldón, in contrast, was an urban sophisticate with a flair for high-style decadence. His films – which emulated, and often transcended, Hollywood and European models – showed impossibly glamorous people behaving disgracefully in ineffably chic interiors. Made in 1947, La diosa arrodillada (The Kneeling Goddess) remains the ne plus ultra.

Both hero and heroine in this film are utterly gorgeous and wholly depraved. Indeed, their occasional twinges of conscience invariably make things worse and not better. The dashing matinee idol Arturo de Córdova (back in Mexico after an abortive Hollywood career, whose highlight was Frenchman’s Creek with Joan Fontaine) plays a wealthy industrial chemist with a devoted but ailing wife. The implication is that she’s too ill to have sex, which means the poor guy is perpetually horny. That is the only possible explanation for much of what follows.

As the film opens, we learn that he hides a guilty passion for none other than Mexico’s premiere sex symbol, María Félix – who here sports an eye-popping wardrobe of Surrealist-inspired gowns, in the manner of Elsa Schiaparelli. (One skin-tight black silk sheath, with its skirt billowing around the ankles, makes her look like a beached mermaid.) She’s a part-time whore and also – gasp! – a nude model who inspires a faux Greek mythological statue called ‘The Kneeling Goddess’. No sooner has Arturo split with María, to devote himself to caring for his wife, than he buys this life-size replica of her to decorate their garden at home!

The entire film, as this particular plot twist suggests, is an essay in fetishised and narcissistic passion. Never, outside of a Jean Cocteau movie, have I seen a director so obsessed with mirrors and reflections. When María crashes the couple’s anniversary party – egging her lover on, silently, to poison his sick wife – a vast looking glass reflects the entire scene. Once the poor woman dies, María luxuriates in front of her mirror, reflecting that Arturo has committed murder for her sake, so this must be true love at last! Later, when it all goes sour, a mirror reflects the lavishly set table where María now dines alone.

Signs, also, play a big part in Gavaldón’s visual world. Arturo languishes in his office, lusting helplessly after María. His window looks out on a giant perfume ad – which spells out the word DESEO in huge capital letters. That’s Spanish for ‘desire’ as in The Law of… which this film could just as easily be called. When María runs away, Arturo tracks her down in Panama – singing in what looks suspiciously like a gay nightclub. The male clients are in couples. In each, a well-dressed businessman squires a hunky young sailor out of a Jean-Paul Gaultier ad. María croons (slightly off-key) a torch song composed by her real-life husband at the time, Agustín Lara. Another sign looms over her, in blazing neon: Welcome to Panama’s Paradise.

This whole nightclub episode builds to a fetishist frenzy that’s worthy of Josef von Sternberg. María’s sleazy manager and co-star (Fortunio Bonanova) scrawls a message in lipstick on her dressing room mirror (Morocco). It’s New Year’s Eve, and the air shimmers with balloons and paper streamers (Dishonored). He wears a white tuxedo (Blonde Venus) and she sports a white silk gown decorated with fringe (The Devil Is a Woman). María Félix, to be fair, is far more Maria Montez than Marlene Dietrich – but she throws herself into the melodramatic absurdities with a gusto that many a more gifted actress might envy.

The guilty lovers return to Mexico City, marry and settle down to a life of blackmail and mutual torment. It doesn’t help that Arturo promptly becomes obsessed with his dead wife, whose portrait on the wall dominates the latter half of the film, much as María’s statue did the former. At this point, La diosa arrodillada becomes a sort of weird Rebecca-in-reverse – as if Laurence Olivier had murdered the mousy Joan Fontaine character, so he could marry the glamorously evil Rebecca instead! There are a few twists still to come…but it ends with María Félix in a narcissistic tableau, contemplating her own sublime marble image.

Frankly, if you look like her, why look at anyone else? 

David Melville