Rap Sheet

The Sunday Intertitle: Writing

I’m cheerfully busy at the moment — making three video essays at once. They’re nicely staggered, though, so I can be writing one (with Fiona) while editing the other two. The box set the two films are intended for can be revealed, as it’s already announced:

My first job for Imprint and a fun delve into some films I mostly didn’t know. My two pieces focus on Furie’s work with actors, and the politics expressed in these films, areas which aren’t much talked about. Furie’s remarkable visual style is covered in depth in other essays by a host of talents including Furie expert Daniel Kremer, Scout Tafoya, Brad Stevens, Howard S. Berger, Samm Deighan, Bill Ackerman, Anthony Francis, and others.

The other project is still under wraps: watch this space, or the space that replaces it.

Meanwhile, there’s this:

Is it the first gangster film, as the Youtube poster suggests? Could be: predates Griffith’s “musketeers” films. It turns out extortion isn’t as immediately well suited to movies as shoot-outs in alleyways and rooftops: the opening scene in which two goons write a letter isn’t as gripping as one might hope. The letter itself is worth waiting for.

BEWAR!

The random alternation between lower case and caps recalls Coppola’s GODFATHER notes, appropriately enough since he’d immortalize the Black Hand in GODFATHER II. Maybe he was influenced by their epistolary style here.

The movie is shot by Billy Bitzer, of later Griffith fame, and directed by one Wallace McCutcheon, a prolific Mutoscope workhorse who packed it in a few years later after directing 70 films and photographing 52. So he’d earned a rest.

After the hand-painted flats of the conspirators’ lair, the shop is reassuringly solid and well-stocked — McCutcheon takes advantage of this to show the entire purchase of some meat products, from selection to wrapping, payment and departure. Unfortunately buying meat hasn’t changed all that much in 117 years so this doesn’t convey any dazzling glimpse-into-history insights. We then get to watch the delivery of the letter and its opening and reading…

The slushy NYC street scene is an icy breath of fresh air, letting reality into the film. What follows is an exciting blend of fiction and documentary, as presumably real New Yorkers mingle with actors and possibly a few extras. Can we guess which figures are choreographed and which are moving naturally, sometimes blocking the action?

A problem for McCutcheon is that getting his important action to register clearly against/behind an uncontrolled setting isn’t as easy as working in an open-air set on a rooftop: there’s so much going on it’s hard to know where to focus. As a result, though, the exteriors are the most exciting material in the piece, as we scan the Edwardian hubbub for scripted incidents. It’s just possible to make out the kidnapping of the butcher’s daughter amid all the real-life pedestrianism.

The Black Hand operate out of a junk shop, which is not quite the Corleone mansion. Interesting how most shops try to make their things sound better than they are but at the bottom of the market we can basically say Crap Dispensary or Cheap Rubbish Here. The alternative to junk shop is even worse — rag and bone shop. Yeah, there’s a crying demand for those, isn’t there?

I just spent a bit of money on some old electrical switches for a thing I’m constructing. Had to get them from an antiques shop because, alas, there are no proper junk shops left. The place in the Grassmarket where I acquired my collection of Victorian china doll heads no longer exists, alas.

But, back to the Black Hand in THE BLACK HAND, and their unconvincing HQ.

To aid in the childminding aspect of the caper and prevent any Ransom of Red Chief trouble, the gang have taken the trouble to engage a rough slattern. These dedicated professionals were readily available for hire in those days, I’m led to believe.

Spoilerish intertitles announce the happy ending before it arrives, and emphasise the documentary verisimilitude of all this gesticulating in cheap sets. The butcher’s shop does for the setting of the kidnapper’s arrest, and the lair sees the rest of the gang rounded up, and little Maria rescued.

The fate of the slattern is unknown.

Floral Arrangements

Two dedicated professionals: M. Verdoux is still sending flowers to Mme. Grosnay; Det. Morrow (shouldn’t it be “Moreau”?) is trailing him, an indefatigable Javert of Justice. A single, slightly wobbly tracking shot takes us from Verdoux floral purchase to the watchful flic — this kind of storytelling camera move is extremely rare in Chaplin’s work.

[I’ve identified five principle motivations for the camera to move: exploring space; following a moving character; representing the POV of a moving character; evoking a psychological change in a character; and telling a story. The narrational tracking shot is common in horror movies and Hitchcock. By moving from one subject to another, the director self-consciously lets us in on what’s happening beneath the surface of a situation. Often, the movement takes us from a seemingly innocent wide shot to a detail that has sinister implications, as it does here. MONSIEUR VERDOUX, dealing with crime, murder, and detection, is next-door to a thriller. We can assume that had Orson Welles been able to develop his own idea (which Chaplin basically nicked), the thriller aspects may have been even more evident, since the Wellesian style leans towards noir.]

Of all the plot strands in the film, Morrow’s feels the most Wellesian, because it plays games with our sympathies and defies narrative expectations: Morrow is set up as Nemesis, but is neatly taken out of the game just when his purpose seems set to be fulfilled.

Morrow beards Verdoux in his den — the doorbell provokes a startled look, almost to camera (and thence to Charlie’s chums in the audience) in which his head is amusingly framed by a wall mirror, creating a halo effect. Verdoux is able to check Morrow out via the window, a POV shot that aligns us with the prey, not the predator. A series of elegant movements here as Chaplin moves around the room, expressing Verdoux’ discomfiture and his fast thinking. Another ring of the bell makes Verdoux look at us again.

Verdoux runs into the kitchen and we get an axial violation — the switch in camera position causes his movement to flip from left-to-right to right-to-left. This is supposedly the first thing Chaplin learned about movies, and the only thing he learned from Henry “Pathe” Lehrman. Possibly we should blame the production designer for forcing the issue, but Chaplin had the authority and money to order a set wall removed and another put in so he could maintain consistent screen direction…

It’s not that the effect is actually confusing — one man going through a doorway is unlikely to throw us off, comprehensionwise. But it’s inelegant.

Verdoux seems cool as a cucumber once he lets Morrow in (he has his poisoned wine in readiness). Then a nice bit of slapstick as he bumps into the dressmaker’s dummy from act one — not only does the clumsiness betray nerves, something Morrow notices, it’s clumsiness involving an object associated with his murderous career — the dummy represents the dead Thelma Couvais, rising, a stuffed torso on a pole, to accuse her assassin.

Chaplin can now play the scene for suspense — how prepared is Morrow to arrest Verdoux, and will he drink the poison laid out for him? I imagine it may have pleased Chaplin to reduce dialogue to mere delaying action: the cat-and-mouse game going on in the interrogation is secondary to the ticking bomb element.

Morrow has been conveniently silly, not telling police headquarters of his lead. This is a crime story trope, a fact pressed into my awareness by its appearance in Comencini’s THE SUNDAY WOMAN which I watched a week ago: whenever a supporting character says “I know who the killer is but I’m not quite ready to tell,” you can be sure they’re about to get it in the neck. Poor, overconfident Detective Morrow. When he stands up, the camera pushes in with vulturine eagerness as he turns to look right at us, perhaps already feeling the effects of the slow-acting mickey (he’s a touch shiny). Perhaps the Chaplinesque look to camera in this film is associated specifically with Death?

The familiar intersticial shot of racing train wheels leads us by quick dissolve to Morrow’s own dissolution. Like McTeague, antihero of GREED, Verdoux finds himself handcuffed to a corpse, but unlike him he has the key handy. (I worked out a solution to McTeague’s dilemma, although it would still leave him stranded in the desert. We planned to use it in LET US PREY, the horro movie Fiona & I wrote, but amid the innumerable rewrites it got pruned, saved for another day.)

Cut from Verdoux exit, leaving the snoring Inspector in his compartment, to the headline announcing the man’s death, to Verdoux’s smug reaction as he sits at a curbside cafe. As he stands, his eyes seem to catch our own, just as Morrow’s had done…

TO BE CONTINUED