Johnny Hines, supporting player of ALIAS JIMMY VALENTINE and A GIRL’S FOLLY turns up in Maurice Tourneur’s THE CUB — immediately!
JH actually lugs the titles into view, as big idiot boards, and then stands very still so a dissolve can fade up each co-star in turn. Sadly, this copy of the film seems to be badly misframed, or else the (unlisted) cinematographer was Ben Turpin.
Then we get Bad Anse Hatfield, of the Hatfield-McCoy blood feud — is it the real dude? That’s the implication, but if so, the IMDb hasn’t caught up with the fact. As with JIMMY VALENTINE’s look at Sing-Sing and its governor, this seems like an attempt to bind the film’s fiction to reality with a moment of documentary. The film even has Bad Anse look both ways, so Tourneur can serve up two scenic point of view shots.
Lots of nice mountain scenery in this one, as in A GIRL’S FOLLY only more so.
As if that weren’t enough — and it wasn’t, even in 1915 — with each intertitle we get two free elephants. Pretty sweet deal.
TO BE CONTINUED?
In other news, I contributed the occasional word and thought to a piece at Bright Lights Film Journal, but it’s basically by Daniel Riccuito and Tom Sutpen. Win $$$! if you can identify any of my sentence fragments.
It’s a good piece, but for some reason the intended image from the Lindisfarne Gospels has been subbed out with a highly inappropriate alternative. This image may be illuminated, but it is not illuminating.
I bought HOW THE WEST WAS WON from a charity shop for £3, or I thought I did. In fact, what I bought was disc 2 of 2, so all it had on it was the “smilebox” version of the film, which “recreates the Cinerama experience” in roughly the way that squirting acrylic paint in your eyes replicates a trip to the Louvre.
I would have liked to own the Cinerama documentary, but I’ve seen it so I’m good. And I’d never watched anything in smilebox so I did. At first Fiona felt she would be unable to endure staring at the world as if between two jet-black buttocks, but then she got sort-of used to it and actually enjoyed the movie more than I did. Buffalos!
Also — Walter Brennan as Sawney Bean! Patriarch of a bandit family operating out of a cave, a sequence with a lot of backwoods spook atmosphere. No actual cannibalism, but Walter has his teeth in for the role so it’s not technically impossible.
Ford’s section — on the civil war — lacked a plot but had some impressive night-for-night shooting (or maybe dusk-for-night, some of it), even more impressively matched with some fake studio exteriors. Nobody ever did real night stuff in westerns, despite the fact that all the various fake solutions for it looked like shit in colour. But neither Ford nor anyone else has figured out how to shoot and cut in this crazy three-lens format.
Every single shot-reverse-shot moment makes the mind bend — one is either shocked to discover a character all on their own in a cast expanse where we’re certain we should be seeing the foreground figure they’re talking to, or else they’re accompanied by people who ought to be on the other side. The three vanishing points make for some strange space warps, including a Caligariesque conversation in a train which induces mental vertigo.
George Marshall handles the climax, Henry Hathaway does the lion’s share, all the early scenes. There are some spectacular moments, but the all-star cast is slowly whittled away to a latex-covered Debbie Reynolds and George Peppard as her son. Carolyn Jones doesn’t get to do anything fun.
The multipart structure with characters drifting through and aging and turning up in different phases of their lives is sort of interesting, in a miniseries kind of way.
Big choral travelogue at the end shows the West well and truly won, and converted into freeways.
Next time I watch this, if I ever do, I hope it’ll be shaped like this —
I’d go to see it in Cinerama, for sure.
HOW THE WEST WAS WON stars Baby Doll Meighan; Johnny Friendly; Admiral Chester W. Nimitz; Morticia Addams; General Omar N. Bradley; Gen. Douglas MacArthur; John ‘Hannibal’ Smith; Dr, Irving Finegarten; Molly Brown; Ellwood P. Dowd; Silva Vacarro; Col. Davey Crockett; Col. Jim Bowie; Salome; Stumpy; Friar Tuck – A Badger(voice); Jonathan Brewster; Fanny Minafer; Col. Sherman T. Potter; Moe Williams; Sgt. Leva; Tom Thumb; narrated by Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.
Caught up with Armando Iannucci’s THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVIS COPPERFIELD at last. Bought it secondhand on DVD twice by mistake. It was almost worth buying twice.
I’m naturally inclined to compare it to the Cukor film which we ran recently. Iannucci gains by putting the protag’s writing front and centre — the fact that Copperfield is a writer is essentially ignored in the earlier MGM movie — sure, he narrates it, and we see book pages, but this plays out the same as Lean’s GREAT EXPECTATIONS, and in that movie we kind of know that Dickens is writing the book, not Pip.
The new film begins with Dev Patel as David/Daisy/Dodi/Trotwood doing a dramatic reading, in the Dickens style, and becoming an author at the end saves him from all his troubles — he writes his way out of them. Somehow, this focus on authorship ties all the material together, in a way sorely lacking in the Cukor, which seemed like a random assemblage of stuff to me.
It helps to have a characterful lead — Patel is funny and loveable, whereas Freddie Bartholomew and Frank Lawton were like smiling stick figures. Iannucci’s actors are generally very fine, with Ranveer Jaiswal and Jairaj Varsani very natural as the younger DCs. Weakest link may be Peter Capaldi, although maybe the pruning of the novel has hurt Mr. Micawber as much as miscasting. He’s just a sponger here, not very likable, resulting in DC’s indulgent attitude coming across as just him being a pushover, which we see also in his relationships with other characters like Steerforth, who are MEANT to seem exploitative.
The other champions of Cukor’s film, besides Fields-as-Micawber, were Lennox Pawle as Mr. Dick and Roland Young as Uriah Heep. Ben Whishaw is a suitably uncomfortable presence here in his Ish Kabibble haircut, , although in our more egalitarian age the character seems harder to parse: Iannucci gives him sympathetic underdog moments, or anyhow he GETS them, DC’s horror of him seems to arrive too soon, and his comeuppance falls short of triumphant satisfaction or pathos.
Pawle-as-Dick seemed untoppable, a towering comic personification, but Hugh Laurie is magnificent — the script allows us to know far more about the character and every added moment is worth its weight in gold. Laurie’s British comedy roots saw him essay a range of appealing, dopey characters, but the pixillated Dick is richer and more tragic. The sensitivity Laurie has built up in his serious work is beautifully integrated into his comic skill.
Sometimes the script improves on Dickens, or tries to: rather than killing off Clara, conveniently so that DC can marry a more capable woman, Iannucci has her ASK to be written out of the plot: it’s more compassionate (in a way?), more writerly, it makes interesting use of the film’s quirky narrational devices — but I wonder how comprehensible it is to anyone unfamiliar with the book or previous versions? But probably I shouldn’t worry about that. This is a film for smart audiences.
There are lots of DEVICES — the stage reading, fancy transitions, surreal juxtapositions, fantastical images like the dome of St Paul’s wearing Clara/Dora’s hairstyle (a screen first, I believe). Some of these are marvelous — the ending, with dc addressing his younger self, I found very moving. Some are infuriating — the action projected on a bedsheet interrupts an emotional scene in a very off-putting way. Some are just a bit silly: the camera attached to a clock pendulum seems to achieve nothing of value.
All this sometimes fussy play does give us a break from the camerawork, which a frenetic stream of Steadicam thrusts and whirls, vaguely Branaghesque (not a compliment), sometimes well suited to a scene of chaos or strife, sometimes just meaningless decoration. I longed for stable, considered compositions for the actors to be funny within.
I found I had not much to say about THE DEATH OF STALIN, though I enjoyed it. Iannucci is trying a lot more things out in this one — not all of them work, but I feel like when he puts everything together and throws out what doesn’t work he could make something amazing.
THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD stars Sir Gawain; Malcolm Tucker; Adult Boris; Dr, Gregory House; Galadriel; Bernie McGloughlin; Q; The Ancient One; Wong; Poly; Diomika Tsing; Tite Barnacle Jr.; Brienne of Tarth; Stan Laurel; Yelena; Uzman; Anastas Mikoyan: and May Dedalus.
shadowplay 