Flyboy

The Sunday Intertitle: When Acting Styles Collide

I *nearly* booked more expensive flights and accommodation which would have been DIRECT flights and INCREDIBLY central location and flying at very comfortable hours. Instead I’m flying to Frankfurt at 6 a.m. and then on to Bologna and staying 18 minutes away from most venues, not so ideal. But really cheap — because it was a last-minute deal, I have an entire apartment to myself and it’s all at pre-Covid prices. Which is psychologically important as I haven’t been to Bologna since Covid. This makes it less of a shock.

I’ll arrive mid-afternoon on Monday, and since Il Cinema Ritrovato now has a booking system where you have to decide in advance what you’re going to see (though you can change your mind subject to availability) I can tell you that I intend watching Carlo Rim’s L’ARMOIRE VOLONTE and Harry Kümel’s MALPERTUIS on my first day. Rim is the screenwriter of the wartime Maigret films which I enjoyed a lot, and his cupboard film stars Fernandel. Weird circumstances have caused me never to have seen MALPERTUIS but its reverie haunts my memory. As a kid I caught ten minutes or so on late-night TV and was alternately lured (Magritte title sequence!) and repelled (awkward dubbing!) but I know I’m going to love it this time. Unless fate intervenes again and I fall asleep in an overheated cinema.

I like the synchronicity of a Maigret-Magritte connection, the surrealist painter and the creator of the French detective being two of the legendary Ten Famous Belgians. Kümel is a third, depending on how you measure fame.

Meanwhile, here’s D.W. Griffith’s THE LESSON from 1910. A pivotal period. I have a big post written but unpublished about Griffith’s development of a more subdued acting style. This movie is a snapshot of that process. In scene one, everyone is using delicate pantomime to make it clear what the scene is about. It’s cleverly done — their gestures are more explicit than we might expect in a real incident, but they’re in character and in the scene, so it feels like they’re being used for the benefit of the other characters, not us.

Then our gesticulator-in-chief, Joseph Graybill, a lovely study in fatuous self-satisfaction, visits a bar. Griffith was almost as fond of inveighing against the demon drink as he was of the demon drink itself. Here, Graybill meets a friend — per IMDb, this seems to be Edward Dillon, Arthur V. Johnson or Charles West. I think it’s Dillon, going by the eyebrows.

Nothing about this man is human. His every movement feels mechanical: ball bearings are at work somewhere in him. The speed of his movements offers some simulation of humanity, but if you slow him down a little he becomes one of those arms that assembles cars. I can only assume this effect is the result of sheer hard work — he’s thought in advance about every gesture and so they emerge as a well-planned routine, with sub-routines, rather than as spontaneous life. It’s preposterous. And there’s Graybill on the other side of the screen demonstrating how it should be done.

I’m morally certain that if the set walls all fell down, or the bartender spontaneously humanly combusted, or the furniture all disintegrated, this guy would carry on delivering the same performance, sitting on a chair that’s no longer there and reading a newspaper that’s ceased to exist.

Griffith is so enamoured of this foolishness that he holds the scene for about a minute after his protag has staggered off, just to enjoy Dillon/Johnson/West’s unnatural mucking about.

The fact that Dillon/Johnson/West can get away with this silly performance seems like a strike against Griffith. The fact that, whichever of the three named actors this is, they were all in Griffith films for several years after, is worse. Why would you let this guy stink up your scenes? Maybe he improved, though. Some of us do.

We can even see this guy flicking his newspaper, a mannerism more usually associated with bad Shakespeare productions (i.e. Branagh). One thing you never, ever see in reality is people holding out a letter or newspaper and BATTING it with the fingers of their free hand for emphasis. And I’m prepared to lay money that no actual human in Shakespeare’s day ever did this either. If you can find a way to test this, I can collect my winnings. What makes this document-flick even more egregious is that — let’s call him Dillon — isn’t doing it for emphasis, for anyone else’s benefit. He’s just sitting reading. True, he’s drunk, but I have never seen alcohol produce either roboticism or this precise kind of rhetorical flourish.

Any time you see somebody flick a document in a film, walk out. No good can come of it.

If I’m right and this is Dillon, he went on to specialise in Keystone comedies — he’s in A DASH THROUGH THE CLOUDS with Mabel Normand, for instance. Where his acting “style” would fit in pretty well. You often see actors and filmmakers left behind by developments in their field but finding modes of filmmaking which haven’t moved with the times where they can still earn a crust.

Dillon’s last film seems to be 1931’s odd William K. Howard SHERLOCK HOLMES. it would be interesting — very very mildly interesting — to see if his “style” has changed in twenty years. The Inaccurate Movie Database also has him down for a 2001 episode of The Prosecutors: In Pursuit of Justice, but as he’d been dead for 68 years at that point I’m going to assume that’s a mistake.

Finis, Fin, Fine, Finale, Finally

“There’s very little time and so much to tell you,” says Marlon Brando as Ogden, and he’s right — the film has ten minutes left on the clock. The thing is, he says this SLOWLY. Brando is rarely a rapid-fire kind of guy, it may be part of why he seemed so fresh when he burst on the scene, his speech is almost as hesitant as John Wayne’s. He wants you to see the wheels going round. We see them, Marlon.

Brando is confessing to Loren that he has to stay with his wife for appearances’ sake, owing to his big job as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. While we’ve been watching Marlon’s wheels go round for the past ninety-seven minutes, very few of these wheels have indicated a deep emotional attachment to Sophia, so this falls rather flat for me. I want her to end up with Syd.

“I love you very much,” says Brando, lighting a cigarette with indifference. Sidney Lumet reports (in Making Movies) that Brando was in the habit of testing his directors. he’d do two takes on the first day of shooting, outwardly similar but one fully committed and alive, the other just going through the motions. If the director printed the wrong take, Brando stopped trying for the rest of the shoot. It’s possible that Chaplin did NOT print the wrong take, because Brando fell out with him a little later over his treatment of Sydney. But I think for sure at some point Brando started phoning it in, which accounts for his passionless work here.

Also: never play a love scene against ochre walls.

I’ve mentioned before that Chaplin’s camera is, for him, unusually mobile, and there’s a striking fast camera move in on Brando as he ponders his situation back on the boat. A psychological movement! To make up for the lack of a performance, possibly. COUNTESS can be compared to Hitchcock’s FAMILY PLOT in that both films do show the director continuing to think, develop, try things out, but it’s not at a very exciting level and it doesn’t turn the films into riveting entertainments. FP is a lot more engaging than ACFHK though.

It’s looking more and more obvious that Tippi Hedren, introduced as romantic impediment and chief source of “suspense,” will actually play a combination of Cupid and deus ex machine — she has rumbled the various deceptions which have resulted in Sophia masquerading as both Patrick Cargill the butler’s wife and Sydney’s wife (I forgot to mention the latter deception, I think. The multiple aliases should lead to some amusing confusion, but really they don’t). All that’s needed is for her to give Marlon a gentle nudge and this whole thing could be, God willing, over.

Tippi discovering one of Loren’s massive bras is about as post-Code as things have gotten. She carries it about in front of her like a sail, which function it looks like it could perform pretty well. “It looks like a two-ring circus,” she says. Then she pronounces Loren to be “a prostitute” — which IS slightly startling. The film has followed pre-Code patterns of deniability up until now, as most of Loren’s sex worker roles seem to do.

The ship starts to pull out of harbour in a mass of grainy stock footage and to the strains of Auld Lang Syne. Slow dissolve to Loren watching it leave, and the special effect — a simple cut-out sliding across a painted backdrop, I think — is really effective. The reflections of dancers help disguise the artifice. Only the stock footage was broad daylight and this is deep blue day-for-night with all the lights on. The Edward D. Wood Jr. approach to diurnal continuity. It ought to have been possible to grade the stock footage a deep blue, but nothing would compensate for the ship’s lights not being on.

Most films accelerate as they get into the closing stretch — but have you noticed? — this one has the pep of a glacier, a patient etherised upon a table, a poleaxed heffer.

BUT — the cut to maybe the biggest closeup so far in the film is extremely effective. Brando, I think, might or might not have made it as a silent star, but La Loren would. She has one of those faces we had then, only more so.

It’s followed by — shoe leather. The emotional information that Brando got off the boat before it left and is willing to throw over loveless marriage and joyless ambassadorship is revealed in a throwaway conversation over the phone between Brando and Syd. How much more effective it could have been if he’d simply shown up behind Sophia’s closeup! Chaplin has, it seems, forgotten that films are a visual medium and story, especially emotional story, is best exposited via action.

The Waikiki Hotel has an extraordinarily intense head waiter — I believe the actor may be Francis Dux. he steals every moment he’s in, partly because he’s trying to but partly just because he has a startling Dr. Terwilliker kind of appearance. There are only three minutes left on the clock (God! how will I survive this?) but I seriously want the movie to forget its leads and follow Mr. Dux on his wacky adventures.

“You see, you can’t get rid of me,” says Brando. A student of mine, Jeff Johnson, once remarked that everything Brando says sounds like a threat, and that’s particularly true here. “May I have this dance?” is a bit gentler, but seems ironic rather than tender. Chaplin likes ironic line readings, as we know from watching him deliver ironic line readings.

They dance, becoming part of the crowd on the dance floor, with the hideous ochre walls. The slowly dancing throng of course echoes the opening titles, and makes the appearance or titles here seem natural — also a blessed relief, I can tell you.

Chaplin’s name appears for the last time in one of his films and then, rather oddly, we fade to BLUE for the last titles.

Whew. Some kind of summary would seem to be in order, but a days-long sigh of relief needs to come first. How do you sum up Chaplin anyway? I’ll think about this, maybe, while I’m in Bologna. I leave in the horribly early hours of Monday morning, after tomorrow’s intertitle. Maybe I’ll see you there?

FINIS