The Sunday Intertitle: Big head of Pola

I’ve been on a Lubitsch kick lately — I did a lecture about him on Friday, so it was quite useful, as well as pleasurable. It finally got me motivated to watch DIE BERGKATZE (THE WILD CAT), which I own in a terrific Masters of Cinema box set, to which I actually contributed essays (on SUMURUN and ANNA BOLEYN), but which I somehow had never gotten around to. Now that the thing’s out of print, I should start appreciating it.

Like THE OYSTER PRINCESS, my favourite German Lubitsch, this is billed as “a grotesque,” and more than lives up to the billing. It might have been called ROMEO AND JULIET IN THE SNOW, except that Lubitsch had already used that title, and also that might give an impression of tragic romance rather than knockabout foolishness. But the plot deals with star-crossed lovers, a womanizing soldier (much like Chevalier in THE MERRY WIDOW) and a wild bandit girl (Pola Negri), and the whole thing is set around the bandit camp and the ridiculously ornate army fort, both situated in the snow-capped mountains. The film somehow unites baroque sets with real locations, partly by framing everything through fancy vignettes. The arched, or circular, or leaf-shaped frames are so relentless that when an occasional rectangular shot shows up, that looks peculiar.

Lubitsch had a gift for inspiring comic performances from actors not noted for being comedians (he told David Niven: “Nobody can play comedy who does not have a circus in his head.”) Pola can incline to the grotesque in her mannerisms anyway, so she might seem easy to divert into self-parody, but the lady had a mind of her own. In fact, her performance suits the film’s rambunctious tone, but she still manages to be the main character you care about, to the extent that you care at all.

The “Lubitsch touch” may be present in spots, but really the comedy here is broad and big and cartoony: a distraught lover weeps in his tent until a river flows from the flaps, snaking through the snow in a miniature canyon. When the very drunk commander of the fort tries to open a closet that Pola is hiding in, she snaps ~

“It’s occupied!”

“In my wardrobe? Shame on you!” the befuddled lush mutters, before staggering off.

So when I ask the trivia question “Which Lubitsch film has a joke about Pola Negri shitting in a cupboard?” you’ll know, won’t you?

Title of blog post explanation: according to Micheal MacLiammoir, Orson Welles was fond of a story about an émigré director in Hollywood who asked for a closeup of his star by demanding a “big head of Pola.” The phrase became code for a closeup on the set of Welles’ OTHELLO. Maybe it’s a German tradition — Hitchcock used the expression “big head” for a facial close-up throughout his career. It’s quite useful, since a close-up can be of a foot, a hand, a chair or anything. When one asks for a “close-up of Pola,” one’s cinematographer might well ask, “What part?”

Big Head of Pola

In the fascinating and highly amusing Put Money in Thy Purse, Michael Mac Liammoir’s memoir* of the making of Orson Welles’ OTHELLO, we hear of some silent-era European émigré director whose English wasn’t too hot, shooting a Pola Negri romance, saying he wanted a “big head of Pola,” meaning a close-up. Welles’ cast and crew liked the expression so much they adopted it, so all through the book, Mac Liammoir writes of each day’s filming, “Big head of Pola of me today,” etc.

HOWEVER! The big head of Pola above is not Pola Negri but Pola Illéry, a Romanian actress in France best known (until now!) for her leading role in Rene Clair’s UNDER THE ROOFTOPS OF PARIS (available from the good people at Criterion) but currently under discussion over at the Auteurs’ Notebook, in my regular Thursday piece, where you can find out what Charles Boyer was doing here on Sunday.

*I can’t get over the fact I just typed “Mac Liammoir’s memoir.”

Waltz and All

‘When I mentioned to Hitchcock that I’d never seen WALTZES FROM VIENNA, he said, “That’s a good girl. Don’t.”‘

~ Charlotte Chandler, It’s Only a Movie, Alfred Hitchcock, A Personal Biography.

It’s tempting to regard WALTZES FROM VIENNA, directed by Hitchcock after his relationship with producer John Maxwell at British International Pictures had gone into a decline. According to John Russell Taylor’s authorised bio, Hitch, Maxwell had passed on a screenplay called Bulldog Drummond’s Baby, which Hitchcock had developed with BLACKMAIL’s original author Charles Bennett, with the words, “It’s a masterpiece of cinematics, dear boy, but I’d rather have the £10,000.” The screenplay would be revamped, losing the familiar character of Drummond, and become THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, the film which sparked Hitch’s renaissance.

Meanwhile, the only offer on the table was a musical-comedy life of Strauss the younger, produced by an independent but umbrellaed by the sizable Gaumont-British. Hitch would always dismiss the film in later years, and was heard to vocally denounce it even while it was in production: “I hate this sort of stuff. Melodrama is the only thing I can do,” a remark overheard and recorded by the film’s star, Esmond Knight.

Yet as Charles Barr points out, melodrama is exactly what WFV is, in the literal sense of being a musical drama. It introduces the idea of a musical leitmotif woven into the story (in this case, the writing of The Blue Danube) which became a favourite Hitchcock device, deployed in both versions of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, as well as THE LADY VANISHES and REAR WINDOW, a film which can be viewed as the story of the composition of its own theme song.

In addition to the composition story, there’s romance, with Knight’s Strauss torn between romance with baker’s daughter Jessie Matthews, who wants him to get a straight job, and an affair with countess Fay Compton, who wishes to nurture his talent and also to cheat on her husband. A further layer of complication is added by Strauss’s fraught relationship with his father, Edmund Gwenn, who feels threatened by his son’s talent.

Cries and Vosper.

Does any of the film work? Yes, any of it does. But certainly not all of it. The early parts of the film attempt Lubitschian comedy, and despite Hitch’s well-known puckish sense of humour, much of this falls flat. Frank Vosper as the cuckolded husband gets the only laughs, with some beautifully timed physical playing. There’s a heaviness to the story and characterisation that tends to crush the attempts at gaiety. Esmond Knight would be blinded in the war and make a heroic come-back as a character player (riding a donkey through a forest in BLACK NARCISSUS, he declined the use of a stunt double: “The donkey doesn’t want to run into a tree any more than I do!”) but he’s not quite a light comedian yet. Jessie Matthews certainly could be, but her contemporary musicals kept her informal, to counterbalance her highly coached vocal delivery. Here, the costumes and pomp seem to stiffen her, and she gets little comedy to play and surprisingly little to sing. Fay Compton, so moving and natural in Welles’s OTHELLO, years later, is somewhat floaty and somnambular as the Countess, who ought to be a bit flightier, one would have thought.

The pleasure of the film is in little flourishes concocted by Hitchcock, like the naive but fun scene where Strauss conceives his waltz by watching the work in a bakery, and a couple of bold jump-cuts:

In this one, Hitch achieves an impossible rack-focus into a close-up on the fleeing Jessie Matthews, by the expedient of cutting sharply from blurred to focused.

In another scene change, Hitch tracks in on a rolled-up score clutched by one character, then cuts directly to an identically composed shot of a matching score held in the same way by someone else — then he tracks back, mirroring the earlier track in.

Hitchcock was without his usual cinematographer, John Cox, on this movie, which may have added to his sense of alienation from the project. Cox wouldn’t return to the fold until THE LADY VANISHES, but Hitch would soon forge a productive collaboration with cameraman Bernard Knowles.

My favourite moment was the ending, which is not intended as a glib dig: I genuinely like the ending. After a rousing performance of his new composition (Hitch’s low-budget version is like a rough sketch for Duvivier’s delirious THE GREAT WALTZ, with both filmmakers cutting to the beat to create visual music), Strauss’s personal problems are wrapped up with a certain amount of effort and contrivance, but Hitchcock leaves the oedipal drama unresolved until the last moment.

Strauss the elder walks disconsolately through the beergarden, scene of his son’s triumph, as the lights are turned out one by one around him. A little girl asks for his autograph. He signs it, “Strauss”, then calls her back and amends it. “Strauss Snr.” He walks on, reconciled to his place, and his son’s place, in history. Not only is it a good piece of Hitchcockian (and Lubitschian) indirect storytelling, it unleashes the wealth of sweetness which Gwenn possesses as an actor, and which his director will not allow him to use fully until THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY, twenty years later.