Stock Company

After worrying about the vexatious question of KING KONG/SON OF KONG stock footage in CITIZEN KANE, it’s a pleasure to pin down another example of stock footage in an RKO movie.

The ship in KING KONG, the Venture.

The ship in Val Lewton and Mark Robson’s THE GHOST SHIP — the Erutnev.

Not really, of course. It’s the same ship, same footage, flipped into mirror-world by the optical printer in order to create a different shot for the Lewton movie. We’ve heard for ages that Lewton was ordered to make a shipboard movie in order to make use of an existing set — was the set the ship from KONG too? It seems unlikely that it would still be in place ten years after Cooper and Schoedsack’s ape movie was shot, although the Skull Island gate was apparently still there by the time they started shooting GONE WITH THE WIND in 1938-9, when they supposedly set fire to it as part of the burning of Atlanta (what colossal threat did the antebellum Atlantans fear so much that they constructed this giant barrier? Perhaps the thought of a 50ft high black guy carrying off white women was preying on their superstitious native minds.)

Unfortunately, all ships look alike to me, so I find it hard to tell if the deck of the Kong boat is the same as that in Lewton’s modest masterpiece — I will leave this to someone more nautically expert.

“…an area the size of Belgium…”

From NURSE EDITH CAVELL. Dull film — director Herbert Wilcox shows little of the panache of his sado-psycho-romance THE SEVENTH VEIL, except during a few scenes of peril late in the proceedings, and prefers to shoot the action from as far away as possible – but notable for being the RKO release (from 1939) which supplied CITIZEN KANE with the theme for its fictional “News on the March” newsreel. I always assumed that was a spoof score by KANE’s composer, Bernard Herrmann, but it turns out to be another example of the cost-cutting that led to footage from SON OF KONG being recycled in the Welles masterpiece.

“No, not Binche! And they were just going to get a public library…”

In NURSE E, the theme basically stands as the Belgian national anthem, and maybe it is. I must ask my Belgian friend to hum the national a. of her country. Who knows, maybe generations of Belgians have been laughing at CITIZEN KANE (or saluting it?) behind our backs.

“You’ve only gorn an’ done it.”

KISS THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS is the finest title ever conceived by human typewriter, I insist.

If you don’t believe me, try coming up with another variant on the VERB / BODILY FLUID / PORTION OF ANATOMY schema that isn’t utterly gross or ludicrous. The least offensive one I can manage is BLOW THE SICK OFF MY SHOULDER.

So director Norman Foster and the film’s gaggle of writers (one for nearly each word of the title) are clearly onto something. Although I think they miss a trick by not having any of the characters in the film actually SAY THE TITLE. Whenever anybody SAYS THE TITLE in a film, either Fiona or I, if we’re watching at home, generally cry, “He SAID THE TITLE!”

(I think it dates back to an anecdote about FACE / OFF. Nick Cassavetes was improvising in a scene with Nicholas Cage, and Cage said “I wanna take his face… off.” Cassavetes freaked. “He said the title!” he thought to himself. “I can’t let him get away with that! I’m gonna say the title too!” So he comes back with, “You wanna take his face…off?” and then they go on like that for like an hour until John Woo gets tired and has them start shooting at stuff. Or something.)

Anyhow, there’s a bit where Burt Lancaster, playing a war-troubled yank adrift in Hollywood’s version of London, punches an artificial fertiliser salesman by the name of Widgery and then, fleeing the scene with Joan Fontaine, punches a copper. Well, what could be simpler than to have big Burt, when hauled before the judge, plead, “But your honour, I didn’t mean to hit him, I was just trying to get him to KISS THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS.” It could work.

But Burt, being less imaginative perhaps than myself, an award-winning filmmaker, doesn’t come up with any convincing excuses of this kind, and is sentenced to a flogging. At this point we wondered about the film’s jurisprudential accuracy. Did they practice flogging in post-war Britain? I mean, as a legal sentence? I Googled the words “History of English flogging” but the stuff that came up wasn’t really very educational, so I’ll forget the research and go with my gut instinct: no they bloody didn’t. Somebody just wanted to shoot a gothic s&m scene with Burt. Which is fine.

For all its fogbound atmos, the film struck me as quite French in a way, rather than being American or British — it has the doomed romantic feeling of the pre-war poetic realists, very close to film noir already. It can’t quite end as perfectly as it might because it’s trapped between the commercial dislike of unhappy endings (nearly ALL great noirs have unhappy endings, and it was a very popular genre, so why does anybody worry?) and the Production Code’s insistence that crime must not pay. So it has to contrive a vaguely unsatisfactory hopeful ending, in other words it hedges its bets all over the place.

But it’s a pleasure to watch Norman Foster’s stuff, with its Wellesian dutch tilts (Foster directed JOURNEY INTO FEAR with Welles at R.K.O.) and chiaroscuro flourishes. Foster is a considerable noirist in his own right — his MR. MOTO films are glossy, shadowy and hugely fun, and he would carry his canted angles with him right onto the ’60s Batman show. The film is as lopsided as those angles, with an odd structure and shaky character motivation at times, but it’s affecting because Big Burt is such a lovable lunk, Joan Fontaine always does nervous and troubled extremely well, and despite what nearly everybody has said about this film, I think actually make a great onscreen couple. My theory — IMDb reviewers notice that something isn’t working in this film — it’s the script! — and ascribe the fault to the unusual screen pairing. But that pairing is one of the film’s strengths. This is exactly why asking your audience for advice can be dangerous. They’re pretty brilliant at feeling when something’s wrong, but they’re not trained at identifying what it is. I, of course, being an award-winning film-maker, get it every time. That’s probably why I’m unemployed.

Anyway, the French poetic realist thing — Robert Newton, playing a black marketeer called Harry, is not a bit like Harry Lime, but as he insinuates himself into the protags’ lives and practically insists they murder him, just by being so damn evil all the time, he is very much like classic murderee Jules Berry in LE JOUR SE LEVE, I think. “You were born to be murdered,” Trevor Howard tells Joseph Cotton in THE THIRD MAN, and it’s true of Newton in a different way. He pushes his luck, see. You can’t leer like that while Joan Fontaine’s around and not expect Burt Lancaster to completely kill you.

Wait a minute, here’s one:

FLICK THE MUCOUS OFF MY NIPPLES.

Yes. I’d definitely watch that.