Correspondence

‘interesting fact: if you google “david cairns”, shadowplay comes out at the bottom of the page; if you google “christina alepi”, shadowplay is the first result. (!) Typing my own name is the quickest way to get to your blog (after bookmarking, but it can’t beat googling my OWN NAME!)’

~ Christina Alepi, via Facebook.

A few things happening with the old email and Facebook, which I just joined in a spirit of “Why not?” Maybe once I year I do something daft like that: about a year ago I started a blog. Yep, Shadowplay celebrates her birthday on December 1st. Will have to think of some special way to mark it. Suggestions welcome.

Some time back I got one of the few bits of negative commentary I’ve had here, after reviewing a depressing British horror “comedy” called THE COTTAGE. I’ve tended to avoid trashing stuff most of the time, since it’s nice to be nice and it seems more interesting to find the exciting or strange bits of films and pare away the dull stuff, but when it comes to modern British cinema I sometimes get a bit upset. Anyhow, the piece attracted an irked comment from someone pretty obviously connected with the movie, but I never knew who. But when I joined Facebook, it swept through my emails looking for contacts, and suddenly identified the commenter as actor Reece Shearsmith, one of the stars of the film. Mystery solved!

Not sure how I feel about this, since I’m a fan of the first two series of The League of Gentlemen, and would have said at least some nice things about THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN’S APOCALYPSE, which seemed an honorable attempt to do something interesting in British cinema. So it’s not like Shearsmith was ever on my shitlist. (Do I have a shitlist? Note to self: compile shitlist.) I may have said something about his performance in THE COTTAGE not quite working, but that’s kind of the same as calling him a flawless genius, since the rest of the film doesn’t work the way a dead horse doesn’t work as an air freshener.

More pleasant correspondence: after the excellent Charles Drazin suggested I contact David Thomson and let him in on The Great Duvivier Giveaway, my scheme to reshape the movie canon, in hopes of getting him to change his mind about Julien Duvivier and maybe rewrite his rather critical piece in The Biographical Dictionary of Film, I wrote to Thomson with a disc of LA FIN DU JOUR, and received this very charming reply:

Dear Mr Cairns,

I was touched to receive your letter and the DVD of La Fin du Jour.  On the spot, I proposed you to the House of Edinburgh Saints (your only fellow there is Mark Cousins – maybe you know each other).

[We do.]

As it happens, yours is not the first plea on behalf of Duvivier. The other one came from no less than Stephen Sondheim (at the Telluride Film Festival). So I am re-examining the matter, and I am very grateful to you for the prompting.

More to come, I’m sure.

All good wishes

David Thomson

So I seem to be in good company. I wonder, if you’re David Thomson, if you’re constantly getting grabbed by bloggers and composers and bums off the street who want to convert you to the cause of John Ford or Tony Richardson or William Wyler?

Makes me think I’m lucky I only have the cast of THE COTTAGE to contend with.

In other news: I was vaguely thinking of starting Borzage Week in a week’s time, but since I have a number of pieces all ready and nothing else to post of any substance, I’m bringing it forward to Monday 17th. That’ll still give us time to invent something suitably exciting for December 1st.

Duvivierism

Gareth McFeely responds to the Great Duvivier Giveaway with a thoughtful and original analysis of LA FIN DU JOUR in the political context of 1939.

Check it!

Finally du Jour

At last, the day after Duvivier’s birthday, I get around to writing something substantial, or at least what passes for “substantial” around here, about LA FIN DU JOUR, the film I’ve been promoting to the best of my ability. In fact, the film has also been promoting me, since various mentions of the GREAT DUVIVIER GIVEAWAY around the blog-O-sphere have bolstered my stats and got Shadowplay some favourable mention. What goes around does actually seem to come around.

I think I mentioned in an intervening post that, having borrowed the film from the Lindsay Anderson Archive, a non-lending VHS repository in Glasgow, I ran it for my late friend Lawrie, who was always enthusiastic about French film, especially that of the ’30s and ’40s. It was a field that was mostly a blank to me when I first met Lawrie, but he had lived through it and seen Rene Clair and Duvivier and Carné films when they were new. As I was able to get a few of the films, we ran them together, and agreed in the end that while much Clair had dated a bit, Carné’s classics stood up brilliantly (and some of his non-classics seem to deserve reappraisal) and Duvivier was in serious need of rediscovery. Lawrie wasn’t so keen on Renoir, it seemed, and so my appreciation of him had to wait a little while (and I’m still in the process of catching up with him as a result).

LA FIN DU JOUR was a big hit with Lawrie. I don’t think he’d seen it before. While the fact that it was about elderly characters may have resonated with him, the pleasure probably had more to do with seeing favourite stars Michel Simon and Louis Jouvet in meaty roles, and finding Victor Francen a revelation. Rather than reviewing the film in detail, I just want to talk about those characters a bit.

Victor Francen as Marny. Francen is, I suppose, the nearest thing to a leading character in the story, which is more or less an ensemble piece. Unlike Michel Simon’s Cabrissade, Francen isn’t a clown, and unlike Jouvet, he isn’t mad. But Duvivier and co-scenarist Charles Spaak deliberately divide our attentions and sympathies, so that Francen doesn’t quite assume the status of hero.

For one thing, he’s a bit of an old stick. He stands on his dignity too much, and thus makes an irresistible target for Cabrissade’s practical jokes. One can’t entirely blame Cabrissade for picking on the stuffed shirt Marny. It seems likely that Marny’s “dignity, always dignity” approach to life has hampered his career as an actor. He describes himself as an actor without a public, and his overall stiffness is perhaps responsible for this. It may also be to blame for the failure of his marriage: one can imagine a young wife preferring the dash and vigour of the irresponsible Saint Clair.

Louis Jouvet as Raphaël Saint Clair. Isn’t that a great name for a classical actor? Jouvet is introduced in scene one almost as if he’s the protagonist, but this is really just a narrative device to take us from the familiar circumstances of a touring theatre troupe to the less familiar setting of a retirement home for actors (a brilliant location to set any kind of drama, it seems to me — I tried on one occasion to interest the producer of BBC3′s wretched Twisted Tales series in a supernatural comedy with such a setting).

Saint Clair is a complete egomaniac, introduced as such, whose character development consists of a slide into madness which is really just an exaggeration of his normal personality. “We ought to hate him!” observed Fiona when I ran the film for her. Miraculously, we don’t. Other people just don’t exist for Saint Clair, except as an audience for his greatness. So there’s no possible malice in him. But he’s blithely unaware of the emotional destruction he leaves in his wake. If somebody kills themselves over him, that’s just fuel to his ego. He’s perhaps the most stupendously selfish character ever written, and it seems he got this way just by basking in the audience’s affection. This is a movie with some fairly tough things to say about the acting profession — yet it’s full of love and admiration for actors.

Michel Simon as Cabrissade. Only 44 when he made the film, but with the face of a compressed buffalo, Simon represents, on one level, the failure of the popular front. Duvivier, who apparently was fairly conservative in his politics, lays this old radical to rest, dismissing him as a mediocre player and a case of arrested development, but celebrating his love and devotion to his craft. But Cabrissade is closer to Duvivier than politics would suggest: the spark of the film came from J.D.’s experiences as an actor, and in particular the nightmarish moment when, like Cabrissade, he “dried” on stage, forgetting all his lines and standing paralysed and sweating before a derisive audience.

ken

The late Ken Campbell — still can’t believe he’s gone – described his own experience of this phenomenon in colourful terms. He was performing in Ben Jonson’s “comedie” The Alchemist and was frustrated with the lack of actual belly laughs in it, so he had just decided to attempt a fart, to get the audience going a bit, when an angel descending and informing him that he was going to have his acting ability, or license, or something, taken away, and then the angel extracted his fart, bubble by bubble, and departed, leaving Campbell unable to access his memory of the lines except as if through a thick fog. He never played a leading role again… although the angel did visit him again about a week later to say, “Small roles in film and TV: still OK.”

The fact that Cabrissade’s drying, followed so soon by his dying, may be poetic evidence for the existence of this theatrical angel…

So: not a film review, but I think THIS IS THE PLACE for anyone who has received and watched LA FIN to chime in with their responses, questions, demands for emotional reimbursement or whatever. Let’s talk!