The Sunday Intertitle: Mixed Signals

Clarence Brown’s THE SIGNAL TOWER seemed quite a bit more old-fashioned than THE GOOSE WOMAN, but this was almost certainly because I saw the former at the plush Hippodrome in Bo’ness with a well-dressed audience and a spiffing live accompaniment, whereas I saw THE SIGNAL TOWER as a ratty print telecined to VHS, transferred to AVI and then to DVD and screened on a tiny television at our friend Marvelous Mary’s house. A television that may be older than Brown’s film. One is aware that the slightly antique feeling has nothing to do with the film-making itself, but one can’t help but be influenced.

In the days before the World Wide Web, intertitles had to be transmitted by telegraphy.

It’s not fair to judge under such circumstances, but I suspect the movie is not quite as good as THE GOOSE WOMAN, which has an unconventional heroine, a twisty plot, and twisty storytelling including flashbacks, one of them false. THE SIGNAL TOWER tells a very simple story, with Wallace Beery an obvious heavy from the start (we all admired the wisdom of dressing him in a stripey shirt, thus making his evil manifest), but it builds to an extremely exciting climax whereby the railroad employee hero must struggle to derail a runaway freight car in a thunderstorm to prevent a catastrophic crash, while his wife repels Beery’s vile advances a short distance away. Will our hero rescue his wife at the expense of his official duty? Or what? As the movie has been content to show us one thing happening at a time, and quite slowly, this parallel montage suspense sequence feels all the more exhilarating.

It’s beautifully shot too, with big blasts of movie lightning smacking the scenery, the eerie sputter of signal flares, and scary POV shots from the oncoming train, hurtling along the tracks. The movie shows us a large-scale collision earlier in the story, just as a sort of illustration of what could happen — it’s arguably even more impressive than the bridge collapse in THE GENERAL, though it’s insubstantial context (a flashback as dad (the inspiringly-named Rockliffe Fellowes) tells kid about what happens when signalmen blunder) means it doesn’t carry the same impact.

Following in the size twelve footsteps of door-smashing pugilist Donald Crisp in BROKEN BLOSSOMS, Beery smashes through not one but two doors in an attempt to satiate his vile lusts upon the person of Virginia Valli (from Hitchcock’s THE PLEASURE GARDEN, made the following year).

“Here’s Wally!”

Thanks to Christine of Ann Harding’s Treasures for recommending this one.

The Sunday Intertitle: Indian Summer

LAST OF THE MOHICANS was started by Maurice Tourneur and completed by his assistant, Clarence Brown, after Tourneur was injured on location. Ironically, the silhouetted figures shot against skylines or magnificent valleys are among the most Tourneuresque moments in the film — Brown, a major talent himself, had been working for MT long enough to be able to mimic his style skillfully.

Classic Tourneur/Rembrandt mood-lighting.

The action stuff is also impressive at times, with a knife-fight between old Chingachgook and fiendish Magua (a svelte Wallace Beery) particularly striking — the men circle each other, daggers drawn, each filmed from the other’s POV, intercut to conjure a swirly, disorienting feeling of tension and unease.

The last thing Ted Healy ever saw.

Politically, the film is certainly progressive for its time. In fact, it’s striking to compare it with the Michael Mann remake: since Mann’s era deemed it unacceptable to cast white actors as Indians, Mann simply rewrote the plot to make the white trapper Hawkeye into the romantic lead, sidelining Unca and rendering the relationship with Alice a mere side-show, so that her dramatic climax is ineffective because we’ve barely spent any time with her and we haven’t followed her love affair. In a sense, the Tourneur/Brown film is more politically progressive.

The romance between Uncas (Alan Roscoe, Theda Bara’s usual leading man) and Cora (delicate beauty Barbara Bedford) is chaste but somewhat taboo-busting (though of course having a white man play Uncas sweetens the pill for concerned racists) — politically, the novel and film both dance all over the map in the interests of storytelling and not offending anyone. The white men who give whisky to the Hurons, provoking a horrific massacre (complete with Von Stroheim-style baby-hurling) go unnamed, although presumably they’re French — so the violence of the redskins is caused by completely anonymous white folks, which allows the film to show some disturbingly nasty acts while pointing the finger of blame off into an out-of-focus offscreen limbo.

The ability to do creepiness and menace may be hereditary…

Mann: The Last of the Mohicans: Director’s Definitive Cut [Blu-ray]

Tourneur/Brown: The Last of the Mohicans

Spangles

Watched TRADE WINDS and CHINA SEAS this week, two movies using rear projection footage director Tay Garnett gathered on a round-the-world cruise in his boat. One way to make the trip pay for itself.

CHINA SEAS, watched after a meal of buffalo and marmalade sausages, in the company of Fiona and our guest Marvelous Mary. I saw this as a kid on TV, when I guess I was twelve or something. Watched it with my granny, and I *think* I had Halliwell’s Film Guide so I could look it up. It’s probably the earliest example I can recall of what became a weekend afternoon film viewing ritual, back when BBC2 could be relied upon to run an old movie on a Sunday afternoon. Robert Benchley’s drunken writer character seemed a lot funnier then, but I still like his last line ~

“These streets are in deplorable condition.”

Hilarious to see Clark Gable playing an Englishman, an ex-navy officer — this is the kind of casting that really should necessitate a swift (and not too tricky) rewrite. Ros Russell, as his old flame, lays on the accent real thick, so it’s bizarre to see them together, him with his Ohio tough guy persona, her with her phony cut glass. I guess her character was so dull she had to do something. Fortunately, Jean Harlow is authentic enough for everybody — we get more of her braying than we’d expect in an MGM show. We also get her falling out of her dress (and she has competition from the lustrous Lillian Bond).

Co-written by Jules Furthman (with seven other guys), this is pretty close to a rehash of his SHANGHAI EXPRESS in story, though of course Garnett’s robust style is a mile from Sternberg’s elegant filigree. Thinking about it, maybe Clive Brook would have played the lead if they’d made it a few years earlier. It might’ve been more credible, but it wouldn’t have been better. Wallace Beery has a grand role and a grand time — interesting how the film can make him loathsome and kind of admirable in alternating instants — it’s really kind of an amoral, man’s-man view of the world, where horrible people can be admired if they’re good at what they do.

Sadistic, too — an ankle-breaking is maybe more suggested than shown, but it’s wince-inducing nonetheless. Clark is tortured in a hideous hand-cranked metal boot (much talk about how he’ll never walk again, but he’s hopping about a scene later, quite chipper), and worst of all, a typhoon breaks loose a steamroller being conveyed to Singapore, which slides about the rain-slicked deck, graphically squashing “coolies.” Garnett recalls in his fine autobio that he refused to have anything to do with such a dangerous scene, but was assured that Cedric Gibbons was building a fake steamroller to replace the five ton original. He did, and his replacement weighed a mere two tons.

“I’m so glad this thing is three tons lighter than it could have been.”

Garnett continues with the long, fluid camera moves he enjoyed so much in HER MAN and PRESTIGE, only somebody at the studio sabotages them at every turn by cutting in inserts.

It’s one of those films where the pre-code spirit survives a little, and the MGM spirit (glamour, “class,” sentiment, sanctimony) is made palatable by an infusion of added weirdness — violence, exoticism, wit, a shipment of contraband ladyboys, Akim Tamiroff at the piano, Hattie McDaniel, Soo Yong as a Chinese snob (a welcome anti-stereotype), berserk plotting and nonsensical character reversals, and a happy ending that makes no sense but is accepted in the desperate spirit in which it’s trumped up out of nowhere.

China Seas