The Sunday Intertitle: Total Victory

Bull Montana does what Bull Montana does best.

It was Hogmanay, in Edinburgh, the most Hogmaniacal city on this particular hemisphere of the planet, and we were all set to go round to friend Nicola’s to celebrate in comfort and warmth and alcoholic haze but (1) Nicola got a stinking cold and (2) I got a stinking cold, which meant Fiona and I celebrated in front of the TV with a good film, which is my answer to any crisis anyway (my late friend Lawrie, octogenarian, frequently housebound, paralysed down one side, after watching any decent film: “Ah, life is good“).

The film chosen was VICTORY, about which you can read a bit here (am I David Bordwell’s publicist? Or just a long-distance stalker?) — apart from its many dramatic and aesthetic merits, the film may contain cinema’s earliest over-the-shoulder shot, we learn. One of the great things about the o-t-s shot is that, used sparingly, it can still seem as fresh as when Maurice Tourneur tried it out in 1919. In THE KNACK, Richard Lester avoids the standard shot-reverse-shot formula so consistently that when he does do it, near the start and near the end, it seems almost like some crazy sixties gimmick he’s come up with, along with jump-cutting the actors around a park or winding the film backwards.

VICTORY is a 9-10ths faithful 1-crucial-10th travesty of Joseph Conrad’s novel, which incidentally Lester once planned to make with a screenplay by Pinter. The Great Harold’s script perhaps short-changes us on the romantic aspect of the story, which Tourneur and his scenarist Jules Furthman (later of Sternberg-Hawks affiliation) allows more expression, as you’d expect, but they cop out on the tragic ending. The result is a slightly weird moral to the story which equates true love with homicide — both are things you apparently have to be prepared to do if you want to live a full life. Hmm.

Mmm, that Rembrandt lighting, by René Guissart, about whom I need to learn more. He shot the 20s BEN-HUR, is all I know.

BUT — the film is visually a treat, with many many striking images. Conrad’s dastardly villains are one part of his novels that the movies can really get down with — see James Mason in LORD JIM as a frinstance — and here we can exult in Wallace Beery, Lon Chaney, LOST WORLD man-myth Bull Montana and a terrifying fellow called Ben Deeley as the psycho-albino Mr Jones, who becomes somewhat less terrifying as the film progresses but starts off as the most terrifying specter I’ve ever seen in a silent movie. Scarier than Chaney!

Some primo villainous musing from Deeley and Chaney.

Nevertheless, Chaney is impressive, with an unpleasant makeup and some impressive athletic work, and that powerful presence and ability to distort his body in expressive, expressionistic ways. What a performer he was. This shouldn’t really be considered as “a Lon Chaney movie” — it’s early in his career and he has only a supporting part, but in many ways, it utterly IS — the grotesquerie and violence, faithfully transferred from Conrad (a moment where a character falls face-first into a bonfire is an unconvincing special effect but memorably wince-making all the same) seem to exact prefigure Chaney’s later stick-in-trade.

Maurice Tourneur, whose work is nearly all hard to see via legit channels, is somebody who really should be honoured with a fat box set sometime. Here’s what’s available just now in the USA — I highly recommend it all. Nothing whatever is available in the UK.

The Blue Bird

The Poor Little Rich Girl

The Last of the Mohicans (1920 – Silent)

Before Hollywood, There Was Fort Lee, N.J. – Early Moviemaking in New Jersey

NB — if you follow the links and buy anything from Amazon, I get a percentage!

The Sunday Intertitle: Black Christmas

WEST OF ZANZIBAR is a peculiarly sweaty, grubby, nasty MGM African adventure starring Lon Chaney and directed by Tod Browning — the remake, KONGO, is even more unpleasant, with Walter Huston taking the Chaney role and crawling leglessly away with it clamped in his dentures. While Huston’s performance as “Dead-Legs” is a tour-de-force of ham (“He sneered!”) and extraordinary physical acting (climbing down a rope and dragging himself to a wheelchair, legs limp as over-boiled broccoli), Chaney’s is, as you’d expect, even more powerful, with paralysis as the gimmick and blind hatred the guiding emotion.

Even for the period, the movie is shockingly racist (KONGO is at least as bad), some of which is inherent in the concept, with a white stage magician lording it over the natives with magic tricks they believe to be real. Chaney’s stage name, Phroso, was recycled for the clown in FREAKS a few years later — Browning was not a man to waste anything. And the brothel-keeper in this movie is played by Rose Dion, the same actress who was the sympathetic “Madame Tetrallini” in the later Browning.

The plot itself is one of those “I’ve made a terrible mistake” jobs, like THE SHANGHAI GESTURE. Chaney sets out to “ruin” his enemy’s daughter, only to discover she’s his own. All grand melodramatic stuff, although THE UNKNOWN, where Chaney learns he’s mistakenly amputated his own arms based on duff information, is perhaps the best of all the “IMATM” movies: Chaney assumes a series of expressions, none of which have ever passed across a living human countenance before in the history of physiognomy, but all of which are specific enough to all us to read specific sentences upon his fevered brow –

“Phantom limbs, come to my aid!”

“I am trying, as best I may, to defecate out my own soul.”

“Oh, I’ve made some colossal boo-boos in my time, but this one takes the Bournville Creme.”

More on THE UNKNOWN soon. And I may have to post something on the brothel featured in WOZ. A Tod Browning brothel is something you have to see.

The Sunday Intertitle / Question(s) of the Day

One of the many many things I love about my favourite movie of all time, Victor Sjostrom’s HE WHO GETS SLAPPED, is the way it has the nerve to ask some BIG QUESTIONS ~

~ and then answer them with a single image ~

Showed this to my students on Tuesday evening, a roaring success! (Hope this week’s pre-codes are equally successful.) Impressively, the movie got only one “bad laugh” as the audience acclimatized themselves to Chaney’s eye-bulging. In general, the film is so emotionally off-kilter that laughter is at times a valid response to the goings-on, which I characterize as tragedy seen through an ironic filter. The whole thing proceeds like a fairy-tale, with implausible plot-turns and coincidences, and dicey story concepts (Chaney as scientist working on unspecified “startling theories”; Chaney becoming a clown out of despair) which the film doesn’t waste effort trying to “sell” to us. We just accept them the way an audience of children would, with the question “And what happens next?”

The biggest contortion of credibility is when Chaney confesses his love to Norma Shearer and she thinks he’s joking which, given his performance and the lines we get via intertitle, is impossible to accept as believable in any literal way. Nobody could be that dumb.  A modern actor might say the scene is unplayable.  But it works, because we get what it’s about (this film is deep but it ain’t exactly subtle, so Chaney even TELLS us what it’s about: “I say serious things and people laugh!”)

Chaney’s expressions, which are BIG and open and unbearably raw, still move me, as does his physical work — he’s not required to run on his knees or wear a heavy plaster hump here, but his tortured postures convey the essence of emotional suffering. Although he has two makeups in this film (bearded scientist, painted clown) it’s really all about performance, exposure rather than disguise.