Today our graduating students at Edinburgh College of Art have their public screening of their films, and yesterday Rishi Sunak announced the next general election — effectively his resignation speech, hilariously carried out in a torrential downpour with a genius of a troll playing “Things Can Only Get Better,” the Labour part’s 1997 election campaign theme tune, in the background.
My mind went back to 1997 when our graduating class got their degrees immediately after Tony Blair’s election, and I recall sitting on the grass and one of them pondering why he felt so good — “Oh yeah, I’ve just graduated, and oh yeah, Labour have just got it.”
Having lived all that, I now view Labour’s forthcoming victory with some cynicism, I’m waiting to see in what way they’ll disappoint us, but at the same time they CAN only be better than the current crowd.
The students, meanwhile, who went through the pandemic in their first year, did us proud in their fourth. I hope you’ll be hearing from them soon, at the movies.
Everybody gets seasick in this next part of A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG. No evidence that Chaplin has paid to put his set on rockers, thus inviting comparison with the climax of THE GOLD RUSH or with the similar scenes in THE IMMIGRANT. He’s just having the camera rock to and from — the most extensive use of camera movement in a Chaplin film.
A reasonably well-choreographed bit where an ashtray with fuming cigar is pushed around, nauseating Sid, then Marlon, then Sophia. If the three actors were comedically in tune with each other, their roles, and the material, this might have been really good. Chaplin never had to worry much about chemistry, since he was always the lead, and everybody danced to his tune.
Weird grainy bit where the film has obviously been blown up, to reframe and hide a defect, or what? It certainly results in an odd composition.
It comes right before Chaplin’s cameo, where he says, of the stormy seas, “Just a little sloppy, nothing serious,” which they should have used as the movie’s slogan. Comparing the cameo with the matching one in A WOMAN OF PARIS, we can note that they both snap the film into sharper focus, but also make us want to abandon the main characters’ story and follow this little fellow. But Chaplin’s scene here is just a LINE — nothing visual. Obviously you could top the line by having Chaplin stagger or look bilious, but that doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone.
Film is, in most cases, a young man’s game. There’s a terrible danger in thinking you’ve figured this lark out, that your efforts are following the established rules, that they are good enough. The doubt felt by beginners is nearly always preferable to the comfortable certainty of the veteran — except with those rare veterans who have things figured out CORRECTLY (for them), or who have retained both the youthful terror and the what-the-hell bravado.
Ahah! Chaplin comes back, and now he’s feeling the mal-de-mer himself. So I was wrong, he does top the topper. And Brando was apparently moved and amused by his performance, so that his own behaviour improved and he started speaking to his director again.
For some reason we now learn that Ogden/Marlon has recurring bouts of malaria, and Sophia nurses him through this sickness — but we never see any of this. Odd, since this seems to have changed Ogden’s attitude to Natasha/Sophia. In other words, a critical character scene is missing. On the other hand, it doesn’t sound like a GOOD scene.
Suddenly Angela Scoular tears into the film, the only actor to date who seemingly knows she’s in a comedy. Scoular, an inventive, sexy and startling presence, shakes things up a bit. The movies never quite knew what to do with her, though her bit in ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE is impressive. If only all Bond girls were like that. She’s decided, for the sake of something to do, to make her meaningless character here insanely posh, and this is fun. Did Chaplin not notice that she was in a different (but better!) register from everyone else around her? Maybe he did, because he cuts away from her talking to show Loren playing solitaire, and then cuts back — how much Scoular gold is on the cutting room floor?
Later, he cuts to a random trumpeter. Anything to escape this damned ENTERTAINMENT.
What’s funny about this character, in the way AS has decided to play her, is that she talks only for her own amusement and wonderment, and enjoys all her own amazing thoughts, with no interest whatever in who she’s speaking to. One would hope Brando, usually terrific at reacting in-the-moment to other players and situations, would come to life in response, but his work here continues to be flat and grudging, although there are hints that he’s realising he’s dancing in the arms of a madwoman…
I’m reminded of George Miller’s words to his cameraman on MAD MAX; FURY ROAD (it’s on my mind as I’m very much looking forward to seeing FURIOSA on Friday) — “Forget everything you know about widescreen cinematography. Always put the subject in the exact centre of the frame, because at the speed I will be cutting, the audience won’t have time to search the screen for the subject…” (paraphrasing)
Chaplin doesn’t need to forget about widescreen framing because he’s never learned it, so he puts his characters in the exact centre for their medium shots, making this a super-easy film for the pan-and-scanners to crop for TV. They wouldn’t need to touch a switch once. It accounts for some of the weird deadness — it might have been shot by Lars Von Trier’s robot cameraman.
Sidney Chaplin has a lot of screen time but a thankless, purposeless role. As Ogden’s friend and fixer, he might have productively been used as antagonist to Natasha, who after all could derail his friend/boss’s career. Or he could fall for her himself. Instead we see him trying to play Cupid, and express Ogden’s romantic feelings for Natasha, which seems a peculiarly useless way of filming romance. I guess if it were done brilliantly, it could be brilliant… Lubitschian indirection or something. Trouble is, it’s not that Ogden is unaware of his own emotions (which can be effective in a love story) — he’s just kind of indifferent to them.
Oh, adding to the deadness — Chaplin tends to cut between actors on their lines, as if this were a Jack Webb Dragnet-style procedural. Very little in the way of reaction shots or thinking. Again, a roboticism invades the process.
“I’ve been wondering about the immortality of the soul,” says Geraldine Chaplin, suddenly appearing for no reason as Marlon’s new dance partner. What is it with these spacey narcissistic women all at once running amuck in this ballroom? They’re very welcome, but they also make us realise what we’ve been missing during the first my God HOUR of this thing.
I guess their function is to make Ogden realise what he’s been missing — a woman who eats food and takes an interest in corporeal matters and understands what a conversation is. If the stars were able to suggest any real connection this would work better. And sadly Chaplin doesn’t think of making Sophia’s male dance partner’s equally bananas. This would be a perfect venue for Skye Dumont, the suave Hungarian loverboy from EYES WIDE SHUT.
Occasionally the film offers up a composition that feels like a comic situation. Loren eventually does dance with a character, a pushy fellow (impossible to work out who the actor is) who knows her as a dance hall hostess or bar girl. Everybody ends up at the bar. I wish the shot was held longer. It LOOKS like a fun scene from a sophisticated comedy, doesn’t it? God knows it isn’t.
Producer Jerry Epstein played his own cameo as a barman, but, though he enjoyed performing, didn’t like doing it on camera, so his stuff seems to have been cut.
This corridor does NOT look like a fun scene from a sophisticated comedy, though, does it? But it’s nice.
If you want to resurrect the ghost of screwball — which nobody has managed to do, alas — I think lots of white or cream would be useful. But then, there’s lots of cream in Ogden’s suite, and whenever I’m in there I get cabin fever. The gold trim doesn’t help, nor the hotel furniture and that chair the colour of zombie mustard.
At the exact one hour mark, we get the first clinch, which seems like a good time to say
Until I got interested in Awful British Comedians my experience of the n word in old British movies was limited to THE MYSTERY OF THE MARIE CELESTE, a moody but soporific thriller-melo with an imported Bela Lugosi. I can’t quite recall how the word turns up in it but I believe it’s spoken by a sailor, and could be interpreted as rough realism. (The poster image looks amusingly like a man who has just caught himself accidentally saying a racism.) I do remember that it was fairly gratuitous and quite shocking, though: the Hays Code seems to have banned such expressions in American films of the time — either under (1) Profane and vulgar expression or (11) Willful offense to any nation, race or creed. Or both, quite possibly.
I’m sympathetic to the intention behind (11) but of course it stifles realism. It’s notable that when American movies were finally allowed to use profane and vulgar expression and show characters giving willful offense, they used it to display and condemn unpleasant social mores. But it’s questionable if that’s the use they’d have made of such license in the 1930s.
I’ve already written of the startling use by Will Hay (not to be confused with Will Hays, he of the Code) in HEY! HEY! USA! of the offending word. The attitudes that come bounding out of the screen at you like labrador puppies with leprosy are truly startling — it’s like coming across the word in P.G. Wodehouse (he does, alas, use it intermittently). There’s no awareness of possible offense at all, it’s just presented as casual informal speech. The movie also contains cinema’s second most uncomfortable use of a statue of Lincoln (Tim Burton’s PLANET OF THE APES places a distant third, I guess).
(I was struck as a kid, reading To Kill a Mocking Bird, by Atticus Finch’s explanation of why his daughter should not use the dread word: “It’s common.” Which doesn’t seem adequate to the issue, to me. But it’s an indication of a flaw in Finch, isn’t it, a less-than-Gregory-Peckish imperfection. And can everybody stop saying the book suffers from white saviour syndrome? Who, may I ask, does Finch save? The true white, indeed pasty, saviour is [spoiler] Boo Radley, but he only saves Finch’s kids.)
Well, Mr. Hay did it again. Or one of his films did. OLD BONES OF THE RIVER (1938) is a hugely problematic film anyway, with its casual, cheerful, unthinking imperialism. Hay is a teacher as he often is, this time in Darkest Africa, and his class consist of naked Black boys. Apart from the outmoded racial attitudes the frequent child nudity may be keeping this one on the shelf. The village has rival leaders, the kind and subservient Bosambo (argh — Robert Adams) — and his evil, English-educated brother Mbapi (Jack London — not that one). When Mbapi’s sinister schemes to drive the white man out of Africa (it’s made clear that his higher education has corrupted him) becomes clear, Bosambo curses him out: “You’re a damn n_____!”
Which is, uh. Ugh.
It’s really impossible for me to decide if this is meant to be in any way humorous — the absurdity of a Black man saying that to another Black man — or if it’s part of the film’s more serious side — questionable whether it truly has one, but the tribe, misled, revert to human sacrifice and Hay has to rescue a very cute baby from Moloch or whoever the local god is, and that doesn’t seem too humorous.
The Tom Walls-Ralph Lynn-Ben Travers films are maybe worse though. If you want casual…
So far none of them have been nearly as good as A CUCKOO IN THE NEST. And they’ve also had these startling moments…
FOR VALOUR has some fun stuff — Walls and Lynn get to play dual roles, as their own father and grandfather respectively — I got confused — thought they were both dads, but Lynn says “grandfather” a lot in act III. He also says the n word.
Not only do the comics play two characters but they play them at different ages, so it’s a real work-out. And Walls is only really effective, I think, in some kind of character disguise. Here his old age makeup includes a spectacular ridge to his nose, added on top of the real one, and an ear that’s bent double, canine-fashion. Splitscreen effects allow Walls and Lynn to play with themselves, if you’ll pardon the expression.
And in one scene, we see the younger versions as kids, and they’ve been dubbed with Walls and Lynn’s voices, which is amusing (Lynn’s throaty rasp is impossible to imagine emanating from a child. Disappointingly, he wears no monocle.) Since both kids are criminally inclined, they discuss various misdeeds, and Lynn says he’s committed “whitemail. That’s when you blackmail a n_____.”
This is a pathetically poor joke, quite apart from the racism. It doesn’t make minimal sense. There’s no logical reason why having a Black victim should put the crime into negative. It’s usually a bad idea when you shoehorn a joke into a comedy, especially a farce — what you really want is funny dramatic situations. But because these usually take time to establish, so writers get nervous.
STORMY WEATHER (1935) is a fascinating hot mess of a film, full of Limehouse yellow peril cliches (Walls, never the most exciting director, almost comes to life in his enthusiasm for Shanghai Lil debauchery), and there’s a kindhearted Chinese girl (played by beautiful Malaysian actor Stella Moya) who speaks an appalling pidgin English, helps the heroes, but is then treated as a passive sexual object by them. But the standout moment of racial discomfort is when Sir Duncan Craggs (Walls) checks up on one of his department stores. Since Lynn is running it (with a very young Graham Moffatt as sloppy office boy), the place is very poorly organised and the sales girls are uninterested in their jobs who won’t even return Craggs’ (uncomfortably predatory) flirtations.
One of them sullenly recites the three shades of ladies’ stockings they sell. I forget what the first two are called, because the name of the third has knocked them clean out of my head. You can probably guess what the third shade is called, huh?
Now that’s gratuitous.
I actually appreciate awful stuff like this in old films because it teaches us history. It shouldn’t be smugly taken as evidence that everything’s fine now, or wallowed in as anti-woke racist nostalgia, but you can’t really get a full sense of historic racism and sexism just from history books, and newsreels give you only a partial account. Movies add another facet to our appreciation of specific awfulnesses in our past. The shock of seeing the words spoken and the attitudes expressed in popular entertainment can be, I think, somewhat salutary.
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