Page Seventeen III: The Revenge

And yet my ideas and convictions on this subject have not changed. I still consider legalized cohabitation to be foolish. I am certain that eight husbands out of ten have wives who are unfaithful – and that is just what they deserve for having been idiotic enough to fetter their lives, give up the freedom of love, the only good and cheerful thing in the world, and clip the wings of the romantic fancy that constantly urges us to take an interest in all women . . . More than ever I feel incapable of loving merely one woman, because I should always be too fond of all the others. I wish I had a thousand arms, a thousand lips, a thousand . . . personalities, so that I could embrace at the same moment a whole regiment of these charming but insignificant creatures.

I will give a few instances of each of the three methods of changing bodies mentioned above. Freya and Frigg had their falcon dresses in which they visited different regions of the earth, and Loki is said to have borrowed these, and to have then appeared so precisely like a falcon, that he would have escaped detection, but for the malicious twinkle of his eyes. In the Vǫlundarkviða is the following passage:-

Her mouth was not rouged, but yet was pomegranate red. And she smiled so unconsciously down at the beverage that it caused the other girls to laugh aloud.

She turned her back on Transition. There was a thickness in her throat. She knew she should feel shame at the enormity of her mistake – and yet she could not. She knew that her identification with Andro had been too intense, and yet she did not wish it any other way.

In her own mind the tall dark girl had been in those days much confused. A great restlessness was in her and it expressed itself in two ways. First there was an uncanny desire for change, for some big definite movement in her life. It was this feeling that had turned her mind to the stage. She dreamed of joining some company and wandering over the world, seeing always new faces and giving something of herself to the people. Sometimes at night she was quite beside herself with the thought, but when she tried to talk of the matter with the theatrical companies that came to Winesburg and stopped at her father’s hotel, she got nowhere. They did not seem to know what she meant, or if she did get something of her passion expressed, they only laughed. “It’s not like that,” they said. “It’s as dull and uninteresting as this here. Nothing comes of it.”

Like Joyce, Dorothy too begins her letter by discussing her “strict upbringing.” She can remember lying in bed as a child and thinking about her fantasies. “I was never able to banish these deliciously nasty thoughts from my mind,” she writes. What heightened her pleasure in these erotic fantasies was to imagine them while she could hear her mother moving around in another part of the house. Right under her mother’s nose, so to speak, she could play with these forbidden thoughts. In the secrecy of her mind, she could be sexually defiant.

The first few times nothing clicked. The fantasies were O.K. but belonged to nobody important. But the Firm is patient, committed to the Long Run as They are. At last, one proper Sherlock Holmes London evening, the unmistakable smell of gas came to Pirate from a dark street lamp, and out of the fog ahead materialised a giant, organlike form. Carefully, black-shod step by step, Pirate approached the thing. It began to slide forward to meet him, over the cobblestones slow as a snail, leaving behind some slime brightness of street-wake that could not have been from fog. In the space between them was a crossover point which Pirate, being a bit faster, reached first. He reeled back, in horror, back past the point – but such recognitions are not reversible. It was a giant adenoid. At least as big as St. Paul’s, and growing hour by hour. London, perhaps all England, was in mortal peril!

Seven passages extracted from seven page seventeens from seven books cluttering up the Shadowplayhouse.

He from Tales of Supernatural Terror by Guy de Maupassant; The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould; Metropolis by Thea Von Harbou; Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson; Escape to Chaos by John D. MacDonald, from Galactic Empires 2 edited by Brian W. Aldiss; Forbidden Flowers by Nancy Friday; Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

The Sunday Intertitle: Four-Legged Fiends

Let’s try to finish THE CIRCUS. This coming week is what they call Flexible Learning Week at Edinburgh University, meaning I have no teaching. They used to call it a non-teaching week, which sounded really bad. “Oh yes, the swimming pool is open. You can go there. But it’s a non-swimming week.” Flexible Learning implies the students will still be acquiring knowledge, just without the aid of teaching. And in truth, quite a bit of learning is done that way, independently, if the student is any good.

A new status quo at the circus: Charlie is to be employed as a property man (a job he filled before, at Keyston) but his really duties are clowning. He just doesn’t know it. Trying to interpret this as a metaphor for Chaplin’s talent just isn’t going to get you anywhere, as Walter Kerr admitted, but you can take it to mean that Charlie is only funny when he’s in a somewhat real situation. I once chatted with a radio producer who was a former circus clown, and he said that he would argue with the other clowns that just running into the ring and throwing buckets of feathers at one another wasn’t any good unless it was part of a SITUATION. He was right! That was my purpose in making my own clown film: I felt the abstract nature of clowning — funny-costumed men doing strange things for no reason — would only be amusing if it were a compulsion, and then you put them in situations where they had to try to behave normally.

The ringmaster seems to be taking a big chance that Charlie will always find himself in an amusing situation when tasked with a serious job, but we’ve been following the guy for fourteen years now and we know that’s basically true. For his next trick, he’s tasked with assisting Professor Bosco, the magician (George Davis, Dutch-born background comic, a baddy in SHERLOCK JR).

All the best bits in THE CIRCUS in involve children or animals, as if you disprove a showbiz dictum. No sooner has he got Bosco’s desk into the ring than Charlie accidentally triggers… everything. Prolonged business with him trying to control the doves, rabbits, geese, balloons and piglets endlessly spewed from Bosco’s trick top hats. The act wouldn’t work well in a circus anyway, since a desk set up required the magician to face in one direction, and the circus works in the round, and are magicians usually featured in circuses anyway? Doesn’t matter. They are of the same approximate branch of showbiz.

The only downside of this plot idea is that having an audience laughing at Charlie is contrary to the usual rules of the Chaplin universe, and arguably makes things slightly less funny. Usually, only THIS audience, US, can see that Charlie is funny. We feel superior to everyone else in the films apart from him, and though we admire him we feel a little bit superior even to him because we know he’s funny when he often doesn’t. Only the leading lady is sometimes amused by him, which is her privilege.

Now the credits sequence crashes into the main body of the film, as the shots Chaplin stole and duplicated to accompany his introductory song get repeated, in their original context: Merna Kennedy on the flying trapeze. With the added business of Charlie throwing her food when the wicked ringmaster’s not looking.

Chaplin uses this routine to get an actual custard cream pie in the face gag in, which is another feature of this film: using the tired old slapstick elements, up to and including the banana peel, but in fresh and surprising ways. If I may presume a creative connection with the Great Clown, maybe we were both asking, What would make this dull stuff funny again?

Charlie is entrusted with odd jobs even when he’s not being held up to the delight of the crowd: cleaning a fish tank — he diligently wipes each fish — a real prop man has apparently divided the tank into two compartments, one with live fish swimming about in front, one in the back with dead fish for Charlie to grab and wipe; and blowing a pill down a sick horse’s neck, a job I could have told them would go wrong. Especially given Chaplin’s long tradition of gags about choking, which I trace back to a childhood trauma here.

Go wrong it does, and it leads somehow to Charlie running into a lion’s cage, which has carelessly been left unlocked, and then getting himself locked in.

As I say, the best bits involve animals. Here, the real comedy doesn’t come from the lion (“the bridge is just suspense!” as Keaton argued on THE RAILRODDER) but from the small yapping dog that happens along at the worst possible time. I’m going to jump ahead to the bit with the monkeys now, because Simon Louvish is very good on that in Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey.

Chaplin apparently told actor/gagman/restauranteur Henry Bergman that he had this idea about being attacked by monkeys while in a high place, and Bergman suggested that a circus might be a logical location/situation. Louvish takes leave to doubt this, speculating that the scene is too perfect a metaphor for Charlie’s plight, mid-way through the film’s troubled shoot, to be anything other than a creative response to the predicament of being in the public eye (up a tightrope in front of a circus audience, or the biggest movie star in the world) and assailed by lesser beings (monkeys, an estranged wife and her divorce lawyers and the press). It definitely works as a reading, and I’m ashamed it never occurred to me. I was too busy admiring the conception and execution.

Well, the dog and lion bit works in a similar way. What makes it hilarious to me is the irony of a man threatened by a slumbering lion, but the thing that’s going to get him killed is a wee dug, which doesn’t even mean him harm but has just decided to bark at him for reasons of its own. “You shouldn’t be in there, are you mad?” it might very well be saying, in its own canine idiom.

Very rapidly the sequence passes through plot (a) developments — the bar falling down and locking Charlie in, Charlie nearly dropping a noisy trough to awaken the slumbering jungle monarch, the dog, and Merna showing up — hope! — and promptly fainting — hope dashed! and (b) Charlie’s quicksilver emotions, fingers in ears (if I can’t hear the dog, it isn’t making a noise), trying to calm the dog, pleading with the dog, taking a firm line with the dog, praying to the almighty. It’s like the five stages of grief, minus acceptance. And another bit of cleverness, Charlie splashing water from the trough/tray he nearly dropped, to try to awaken Merna. He is indeed a Props Man.

The main lion here was exactly as peaceful as it appears, though I note that Charlie covers the scene with himself and the beast in separate shots as much as he’s able. He’s still in there are fair bit. And the next-door wildcat, the one he encounters when trying to escape through the partition, was every bit as savage as it appears. Now, we know from the deleted scene that Rollie Totheroh was pretty good at splitscreen effects when required, so Chaplin could presumably have faked all his more dangerous interactions here, but it looks like he decided to risk it. I see none of the exposure fluctuations that make the twins scene look ever-so-slightly fake, and the lions’ and Charlie’s responses seem too perfectly synchronised to be anything but dangerous reality.

Merna eventually recovers, Charlie feigns bravado, but a snarl from the lion sends him up a flagpole, which introduces the idea of him trying to impress Merna with aerial feats…

But did the sick horse ever get his medicine?

TO BE CONTINUED

One scene, three times. (3) Coen.

As mentioned before, the new THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH is very good, at least much of the time. There are lots of things about it I don’t think work, but lots that do and in unfamiliar ways. It has a nice blend of the cinematic and the practical. Its version of the Macduff news scene (Act IV, Scene II) isn’t the most interesting, but the bland shot-countershot approach is actually fairly good for clarity. I shows the three versions of this scene to my students and they found the cutting helped them read it as an argument, back-and-forth, question-and-answer. They found the Polanski version more emotional though.

Joel Coen seems to have copied Polanski & Tynan’s idea of making Ross a traitor, but takes it even further and makes him the third murderer who lays in wait for Banquo. Alex Hassall plays him as one sneaky bastard. Harry Melling is Malcolm and Corey Hawkins is Macduff.

In keeping with the film’s grey, misty, stylised look, Coen sets the scene along an avenue of curiously 2D trees. Any time you have an avenue of trees, you want to track, so that’s how he starts the scene. He’s also making a nice transition from the previous scene, the massacre at the Macduff home, so we start with smoke filling the screen, which becomes mist, which lifts to reveal first the trees and then Malcolm and Macduff.

It could be a little hard to figure out why these two guys are out for a stroll in this cultivated area, if we were encouraged to think about that, but we’re not. Shakespeare doesn’t really provide any clues, though it’s likely he imagined a road, but probably not one that’s had the services of a landscape gardener. We can dimly see other trees, so the idea seems to be that this path is cutting through a forest, but the evenness of the foreground trees make them seem deliberately planted, not wild.

Our chaps stop as they notice someone approaching. It’s Ross, power-walking in their direction, with long floppy sleeve-ribbons flapping by his sides. He’s apparently out for a stroll too — since it makes sense that we’re safe in England, he’s apparently power-walked from Dunsinane, a distance or a hundred or so miles, depending on how far south we are. But again, this needn’t matter.

The effect of Ross’s costume is oddly priestly, harkening back to the Welles version.

Coen has now set up a symmetrical shot/counter-shot scenario. He has a gentle track towards Ross, which suggests the POV of Malcolm and Macduff but isn’t, since they’ve stopped walking. Ross stops in medium shot and decides that M&M are a little ways screen right, so that’s where he looks. When we cut to them, the view is no longer so symmetrical and they look screen left. This ties these two shots together and means we don’t feel the immediate need for a master shot showing all three dudes.

As in the Polanski, Ross’s speech about how terrible it is in Scotland has to be played convincingly, but the audience knows it’s not really sincere, since Ross is playing both ends against the middle.

This creates a difficulty, potentially, when Macduff asks “How does my wife?” Ross looks very uncomfortable, as well he might, and says she’s fine. Well, he has to, because that’s what Shakespeare’s written, but asides from it being in the script, WHY? In both the Polanski and Coen, Ross has been rewritten as a traitor, so it’s a little hard to impute to him the delicacy of feeling that could cause him to fail to break the bad news at his first attempt.

I don’t hugely like Hassall’s perf, which mostly seems to telegraph sinister intent and insincerity. And, as in the Polanski, psychology gets flung out the window at this point, with Ross dithering about the facts for no good character or narrative reason. Hassall does at least get to be on camera for this moment, though, which was more than John Stride got in the Polanski, and he shows discomfort, uncertainty, which helps.

Unlike in the Welles and Polanski versions, there’s no attempt to provide visual evidence that Malcolm is raising an army in England. Welles inserts a chunky English knight and throws him some secondhand dialogue, Polanski comes up with an entire army in training, even if it’s quite small (maybe a hundred men?). Coen just has the principles stand and talk about it in the abstract.

So far the coverage is quite boring, I have to say. You can hardly imagine Coen being bothered storyboarding this. We now get a closeup on Macduff, balancing Ross’s shot for the first time. Melling also now gets a CU. So we have three talking heads in front of a photograph of trees. In fairness, there are much more interesting scenes in the Coen film. It’s like he resents having to leave Macbeth’s moral decay behind in order to carry on the plot here.

Forced to come to the point, it’s Hassall who turns his back on us, pirouetting away in angst and bounding back to deliver the fatal thrust.

Hawkins as Macduff now follows the familiar pattern or retreating into a longshot, rear view, but not before a long lingering reaction in closeup. Which I think he does quite well. You see the tremors as he tries to maintain control. It’s a subtle, intelligent rendering of an emotion that would, in reality, be much uglier, more unbearable to see, but it’s not certain that Macbeth would benefit from hysteria at this point. And does it make sense to do iambic pentameters while hysterical? The underplaying seems like a smart choice.

A reverse angle eventually shows us Hawkins’ face again, with everyone lined up geometrically. Malcolm consoles Macduff with a hand on the shoulder, just as Stephan Chase had done for Terence Bayler in the Polanski. Hawkins delivers “HE has no children,” with real rage, and better still, Melling shrinks back from this in mild alarm and shame. As well he might.

Hawkins does the rest of this with a smart study in grief and rage, building nicely to the determination to seek revenge. He turns away again so we can go back to the figures in receding sequence, then turns back and strides forth into a fresh composition, over Ross’s shoulder.

This is very stand-and-deliver standard delivery. It’s just basic coverage. Nothing is really emphasised by creative or expressive choices, though elsewhere in the movie there is more of this. It does foreground the performances though, even if the people seem sort of nailed to the ground, occasionally moved around like chess pieces, which is maybe a downside of storyboarding everything and just shooting the boards.

There are better scenes in the Coen film — some are inspired. Maybe I should compare the second witches visits in each film? At any rate, I hope you’ve enjoyed this little sequence of posts. Something I might do again with different film adaptations of a different source.