The Sunday Intertitle: Nice Day for an Auto-da-fe

I feel like the words “take part” (parties) are doing a lot of work here.

The film is CONTE CRUEL, a silent 1930 long-short (34 mins) which is the only film directed by Gaston Modot, France’s most psychotronic actor of his generation (from L’AGE D’OR to THE TESTAMENT OF DR. CORDELIER). It’s based on The Torture of Hope by Auguste de Villiers L’Isle D’Adam from the collection Contes Cruels, hence the title. It’s the main example of an actually cruel tale in that collection, some of whose entries are more weird or fantastical than plain cruel, and a good thing too — pure meanness can get monotonous, as Sade could tell/show you.

I recently discovered Jan Svankmajer’s THE PIT, THE PENDULUM, AND HOPE (1983), which grafts this story onto Poe’s (you know which one I mean and while I’m here, RIP Roger Corman) to excellent effect. I always felt that the Poe story wasn’t exactly a complete story, just two good scary scenes/images which didn’t even necessarily belong in the same work, roughly carpentered together and then thrust at the reader with a slight wince. The ADVLIDA story is more like a real narrative, but the second act is thin (acceptable in a short story where the big finish is more crucial). Svankmajer really creates the dreamed-of latent form of both stories by suturing them together — the story with no second act is joined to the one with no first or third act.

Modot is Mr. Intensity. And surprisingly this translates into his work behind the camera too — TESTAMENT OF JOAN OF ARC vibes, not including the constant close shots, but every composition is splendidly overwrought and quite a bit of it is close-up. Handheld shots, too, used excessively for more than mere dynamic chaos (see the battle scenes in that other JEANNE D’ARC, the Gastynne one, or Bernard’s LES MISERABLES) — Modot is getting at a more personal, individual instability in his anguished wobbles.

The intent is certainly different from Dreyer’s, since this tale could be called anticlerical (it’s not strictly anti-clerical to admit that the Inquisition existed, it’s just recognising historical fact, but then maybe recognising historical fact IS anti-clerical…)

I was admiring the big torture chamber set when I noticed the head inquisitor’s breath misting in the air and realised that it’s a real location, though one hopes (that word again) that the instruments of cruelty (that other word again) have been shipped in as dressing. And this is confirmed when Modot attempts his escape, and the cell expands to include the whole world, an illimitable Gormenghast of church-state architecture stretching to infinity.

In the story, the poor victim is Jewish, I think, a rabbi. Here, he’s some kind of unspecified heretic, so it’s arguable that Modot has flipped the whole story in a dubious way — torturing heretics is easier to sell than torturing Jews, especially when the torture is “only” psychological. Is this going to be a stealth Catholic tract?

Through expressionistically lit dungeons worthy of Piranesi, Modot’s camera stalks his fright-wigged protagonist — who is Modot himself, self-stalked like Keaton in Beckett’s FILM, his Karloffian features aglimmer with agitation and terror. Subjective camera, shadowplay, suspenseful intercutting, trick effects which insert us into the protag’s anguished imagination, it’s full of coups de cinema, piled on thick. Modot may have abandoned directing with the feeling that he’d exhausted his trickbox.

Above, Modot feels a monk clutch his shoulder, then realises he’s merely snagged his rags on an outcrop.

It’s a story with the same kind of final snap as Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge or Gilliam’s BRAZIL — curiously, this moment is the one not-quite-fumbled but arguably undersold by Modot. But he takes care to make clear how the trick was pulled, with a lot of detail the original author left out, and the sadism of the whole venture is emphasised, so that ultimately the piece is faithful in spirit to the original. God wins, but God’s a bastard.

Poor Modot — his silent emerged at just the wrong time, when talkies finally began production in France. Given his dramatic training I see no reason why he couldn’t have made it as a big director in sound-eea films, but his calling card was obsolete before he got a chance to flourish it.

Sleeping Arrangements

Marlon does his Rodin’s Thinker bit.

Fiona got jealous of me watching A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG in ten minute sections by myself, and wanted to join in. After seven minutes she was ready to quit. But did laugh a couple times, more than I’d done in the first twenty minutes. Well, maybe I laughed three times, but all three of them were at the same gag, the flurry of activity triggered by the door buzzer. Pavlovian humour.

The third ten minutes of the film are devoted to Sophia trying to sleep on the couch while an increasingly grouchy Marlon tries to get her to use the bed, because he’s a gentleman. This chaste sex farce is somewhat anachronistic in ’67, seems to me. Though Sophia does use the word “prostitution.” Her character’s flight from poverty aligns with the star’s own biography and is the closest the film gets to emotional depth.

The main laugh was Brando’s devising of a secret knock, the old shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm, by which he assures Sophia that she’ll know it’s him. With very sharp timing, the knock comes at the door just as he finishes speaking, and of course it’s NOT him.

(I think the other main laugh was the buzzer again. Oh, and Fiona reminds me that Brando checking he has shorts on before answering the door was another.)

While much of the farce lacks speed/impetus, there’s one good slow bit where Sophia attempts to read while Marlon drums his fingers impatiently. It’s extended just long enough to be funny, and Sophia finds a few nice variations, or has been assigned them by Chaplin.

Long strange passage where Brando insists on loud music when he goes to the bathroom. This is apparently very discreet toilet humour, he wants to drown out whatever sounds he’s going to generate. I found it obscure on the one hand and vulgar on the other, but I guess that’s sort of the Lubitschian mode — handle delicately something which might be gross if handled bluntly, and you get both genteel good taste and a possibly humorous mismatch.

Brando supplies Sophia with yellow pyjamas, which provide her with outrageous baggy pants, which may remind us of someone we know. Any joie de vivre provoked by the canary-yellow Chaplinesque costume is wetblanketed by the depressing set. Pine wood at Pinewood. One thing that would be hugely improved if this were a thirties film as originally conceived: Charles D. Hall would have built a beautiful moderne ocean liner in opulent shades of cream.

And that’s about all that happens in minutes 20 to 30.

TO BE CONTINUED

Toffs

Farce, it is said, is simply tragedy at double speed. An Aldwych farce, on the other hand, might be called tragedy at half speed. But this proves no bad thing.

I knew nothing about the Aldwych farce tradition, except that they made films of some of them. Leslie Halliwell was a big fan. Oh, and Ben Travers, who write the plays, figures in an excellent story about Lindsay Anderson. Travers was celebrating his ninetieth birthday and somebody asked what he’d like on his tombstone. An urgent sort of question when you’re ninety. “I think I should put ‘And now the fun begins!'” said Travers. Lindsay Anderson was also there, so they asked him the same thing. “I think I should put,” said Lindsay, according to most versions of the story, “‘Surrounded by fucking arseholes.'”

That’s the version you mostly hear, but the version I was told by Anderson actor John Bett, I insist, was “STILL surrounded by fucking arseholes.” Much better, isn’t it? That way he’s not only insulted his putative graveside neighbours of the future, but his present company.

Anyway, I had little hope for my first Aldwych farce. I was unable to get copies of THARK or ROOKERY NOOK — a pity, I like those titles, so I settled for A CUCKOO IN THE NEST (1933). These early adaptations tended to be directed by star Tom Walls. Other members of the troupe are Ralph Lynn, Gordon James and Robertson Hare, but there are a couple of better-known thesps here too — Cecil Parker and Roger Livesey.

Are the Aldwych farceurs Awful British Comedians? I’m inclined to give them a pass. Hare is playing a vicar, which is always a drag, so I can’t say much for him. James is good fun in a minor character role. Lynn is a silly ass lead with a monocle who looks like he should be advertising cream sherry. He’s slightly awful, but somewhat skilled. When the material is there to support him, he can be rather good. And Tom Wall is very good indeed — he has the funniest character, which he apparently tended to play variations on throughout his career — a drink-fuddled retired major called Bone. Major Bone. His entire schtick is getting drunk, looking for drink, bemoaning the lack of drink, oh and being truculent. He has a fine line in truculence — I wondered if he might have inspired the more recent character of Count Arthur Strong a bit. There are also strong pre-echoes of The Fast Show‘s Sir Rowley Birkin too. I can understand people saying they don’t find him funny in other things, where he wants to be seen as a suave loverboy and it’s all rather unfortunate — but this is a comedy drunk for the ages.

Each of the characters has their single defining trait which you grasp at once and then get endless variations on. Most of them are quietly or loudly dotty. Each time a new one appears you have the fun of wondering for a second what his defect will be, and then you find out. There are some really fine stupid conversations in this, and what made me suspect I’d like it was Ralph Lynn, he of the screw-in monocle and raspy voice, assuring his wife that the train CAN’T be “nearly leaving” — trains are either leaving or they aren’t. Fatuous mansplaining, of course, but also nice comedy illogic.

The trouble with farce is that when it’s plot-driven it’s very hard to get laughs before the crisis has kicked in, but Travers shows this problem to be a false one: if your characters are rich and funny there are laughs to be got just from them manoeuvring through life. Of course everything gets better once you have a strong comic situation.

I’ve now watched a few of these and this one is still my favourite: things get a little icky once Lynn and Walls start behaving like sexual creatures. Neither one is somebody you want to think about being sexual. Here, Lynn’s whole story is about desperately trying to avoid the appearance of impropriety — he’s FORCED to spend the night in a hotel room with a nice French lady, and he HATES it. Major Bone has some grim moments of lustiness, but I found I could handle the discomfort.

Everybody in this is some kind of British archetypal lunatic, and there’s good angry fun had at the terrible inn, with its religious maniac woman in charge (Mary Brough) — shades of THE OLD DARK HOUSE, which it wouldn’t take much nudging to turn this film into. Escpecially since we have Alfred Junge as designer, making the pub look like a crooked charcoal sketch with floorboards laid in colliding swathes. Travers, like Val Guest, is very sex-positive but actually the funny stuff is a cold fury at the awful aspects of British life, and amusement at male sexual anxieties.

As director, Walls probably never became really fluid, but there are several moments when the fragmenting of the play, done to facilitate cross-cutting, gets actual laughs just by abruptly shifting scene. Directing cutting avant la nouvelle vague, delightfully unexpected in this slightly stolid film.

A CUCKOO IN THE NEST stars Fred Tutt; Darcy Tuck; Queen of Ardenberg; Dear Mr. Binky Rudd; Death; Louise Stoatt; Lord Loam; Cherry Buck; and Colonel Blimp.

Verdict: Walls and Lynn are awful when they’re being “sexy” but they’re very skilled farceurs.