Ugly Americans

Look, I write extremely black comedies. The third one, Kill Baby Hitler!, will be about just as soon as Fiona finishes proofing it. Maybe one reason I aim for the dark and disturbing is that as a kid I was frequently upset by black comedies because I couldn’t process the lighthearted attitude applied to dark subject matter. So I try to toughen myself up through my own work, on Nietzsche’s principle that “a laugh is an elegy for the death of an emotion.”

Still, when black comedy goes wrong, it IS upsetting. Often this can happen when the authors don’t realise how dark the territory they’re getting into really is. Or when some kind of naked sadism intrudes. Comedy can be cruel, and as with drama the author’s job is to take a bad situation and make it worse, but the attitude informing these choices is all-important (see comedian Richard Herring’s great line “When you enter an area carrying a joke, you have to know why you’re there.”)

I just watched IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD for the first time since I was a kid, and it’s made me miserable. 12 hours after finishing it I feel like Spencer Tracy just before the final gag, wondering if I’ll ever find anything funny again. Maybe I can write myself out of this mood, or maybe I can at least vent my spleen at it, reciprocally. (The movie’s stated intent was to be “the comedy to end them all” — why would anyone want to do that? But it feels like a partial success right now. My sense of humour is bleeding out.)

I warned Fiona going in that when I first saw this thing, as a kid, I laughed maybe twice. This time we laughed quite often, I’ll admit: the film is put together with immense skill and these comics, put in desperate situations, are bound to eke out some comedy: most of the real laughs come from niceties of playing, if one can speak of niceties in a riot.

The mystery behind Stanley Kramer’s bloated Cinerama slapstick shoutfest is not how the serious, well-meaning liberal Kramer made it — in some ways it’s just the kind of comedy a message picture guy might make — it teaches a moral lesson! It has social significance! — and in other ways maybe it connects to aspects of Kramer discoverable elsewhere — the bigger mystery is surely how William Rose went from (mostly) writing THE LADYKILLERS, a perfect miniature of black comedy, to co-writing, with his wife Tanya, this deafening, discordant, gigantic, sprawling, destructive, brutal cascade of misanthropy. But this too may be answerable.

If IAMMMMW resembles anything in Rose’s earlier work tonally, it’d be the Frankie Howerd/Kenneth Connor bit in LADYKILLERS — where an Ealing film gets invaded by two future Carry On stars and the movie momentarily devolves into a lot of yelling, destruction, the ruination of innocent bystanders’ businesses, and the film stops being funny. The scene is structurally important — it establishes Mrs. Wilberforce’s fatal intransigence — but I never found it enjoyable, just upsetting. IAMMMMW is like this sequence magnified by a thousand.

We might also implicate THE ‘MAGGIE’, Rose’s innocuous Scottish comedy, his other collaboration with LADYKILLERS’ Alexander Mackendrick: we have another expensive journey, another “ugly American” archetype (Paul Douglas, beautifully cast), another would-be catharsis of mass laughter. Per Wikipedia, IAMMMMW was originally set in Scotland, provisionally entitled SO MANY THIEVES, and then SOMETHING A LITTLE LESS SERIOUS. The idea was later dug from his trunk, presented to Kramer, and went through the titles WHERE, BUT IN AMERICA? then ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER — both of which I like better than the eventual one (I forget which critic summed the whole movie up with “One mad too many.”) I’m very curious as to what a Scottish version of this story, maybe produced by Ealing with Mackendrick in charge, would have looked like, and who’d have been in it.

Who is in it? Not quite everybody. Although, interestingly, the main characters asides from Tracy are more a mixture of TV stars and character players than comedy film legends. The real megastars have mainly walk-ons. I’m not absolutely sure how famous Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Jonathan Winters were at this point outside America. But it doesn’t really matter at this stage — and Winters is maybe the most consistently funny actor in the film. And they had to save money SOMEWHERE, this thing is HUGE.

“I love broken-down actors,” said Kramer, or words to that effect. I would like him to amplify and explain. But he certainly got astonishing work from Judy Garland and Monty Clift in JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG, and he’s certainly assembled an incredible array of the walking wounded here: alcoholics, recovering alcoholics, depressives, manic-depressives, and one tragic victim of advanced Mickey Rooney Syndrome. He has clearly encouraged them all to perform at the top of their lungs rather than their games. These are all one-note performances, which they probably needed to be (one-dimensional characterisation in ensemble farce is no bad thing) but sometimes you have multiple actors assigned the same note (noisy desperation, say) so that they get into a scrimmage over it like starving dogs at a bone, not very enlightening.

It should be admitted that the Roses’ script is very well constructed — the way the characters come together, separate, multiply, hit walls both physical and emotional, is extremely well organised. But starting at top pitch is an obvious rookie mistake, especially in a three hour movie…

A friend who has a soft spot for the film admits that while it has a good story, it’s not a suitable story for a comedy. The misadventures of the various characters on the trail of the loot are broadly (and I mean broadly) comedic, but Spencer Tracy is living in a tragedy. Nothing the actor (who could be funny) can do changes this. Putting in William Demarest as comic foil just points up how miserable this storyline is — a good man losing everything, even his virtue. It’s horrible. The whole story might make an effective film noir — it’s about greed and false values and the slow decay of the moral sense.

Now THE LADYKILLERS is about criminals. Criminals who die. Producer Michael Balcon, after hearing the pitch, protested “There are six characters and at the end five of them are dead, and you say it’s a comedy?” But it is. Maybe part of why it works is that the criminals don’t deserve to win, so while we can get interested in their schemes we maintain safe comic distance from their fates, and their downfall is highly ironic: they’re defeated by their own squeamishness about killing Mrs. Wilberforce, who raises no finger against them, and by their own internal divisions.

Let’s jump to Spielberg, a great fan of this film, who made 1941 (1979) in emulation of it. He showed the script to his hero, Chuck Jones, who advised against making it on the basis that there were no sympathetic characters. I’m not sure if that’s 100% true of 1941, but it feels true. (One could demand of Jones who is the sympathetic character in the Road Runner cartoons? — the Coyote is both villain and protagonist and the Road Runner can’t really be called a character at all, more of a feathered McGuffin, a passive embodiment of speed. But different rules apply to six minute cartoons and three hour features.)

Spielberg realised 1941 was in trouble by the time he hit post. “I was relying on John Williams to pull it back in,” he may have said (I’m quoting from memory here) “But then I realised John was overplaying his score to match my overdirection of Zemeckis & Gale’s overwritten script.” And so, while I’m trying to mention the good things about IAMMMMW, I should mention Ernest Gold’s soundtrack, which is big and bombastic to match the visuals, but also witty and even delicate in places. It often aims for a graceful counterpoint, like Chaplin’s music. It only goes wrong at the end, I think, and then it’s hard to blame Gold. I’ll get to that.

Back to IAMMMMW’s themes and why it’s not, to me, a successful comedy. The theme of greed lacks irony. The principle characters are mostly motivated by it, and destruction follows. But they aren’t really offered any more positive choices: money is dangled before them and they go after it, as who wouldn’t? Their real crimes are perhaps their inability to work together or even get along socially, and their increasing ruthlessness along the way. The men all become monsters pretty instantly; the wives are more reasonable, like most sitcom wives, rather thankless roles; walking, raging mother-in-law joke Ethel Merman is a monster already, and Michey Rooney radiates malevolence from the off. If you channel-hopped to BABY-FACE NELSON you might not notice.

That working title, WHERE, BUT IN AMERICA? certainly suggests a satiric intention behind this. Rose and Mackendrick had been accused of being anti-American in their mistreatment of Paul Douglas in THE ‘MAGGIE’. To which Mackendrick had pointed out, truthfully, that he and Rose were both Americans. Still, though — surely Americans can be just as anti-American as the rest of us?

There’s also a tirade by Terry-Thomas’ character against American matriarchy which seems heartfelt, and is borne out by the Merman character’s unbelievable obnoxiousness, but not really by the other female characters, who often try to act as moderating influences on their men’s excesses, and usually don’t have much luck with it, which seems to undercut this critique.

While many of the characters are nasty, mean, vicious and loud, there are occasionally quiet or sweet ones, but the film doesn’t treat them any better than it does the bastards, whom it ruins and mangles. The two garage guys played by Marvin Kaplan and Arnold Stang, seem inoffensive, and are only inspired to do wrong because Phil Silvers tricks them. They’re then set upon by Jonathan Winters (they say a madman has the strength of ten) and their entire garage is pulled apart around them, while their attempts at self-defence rebound against them. (“You broke my arm!” is the kind of line we don’t need in a slapstick routine. Occasionally, the film’s attempts at exacerbating its characters’ woes does work, as when Rooney and Buddy Hackett, trapped in the air in a plane with an unconscious pilot, get Bilko‘s Paul Ford on the radio to talk them through landing, and discover to their horror that he’s a dithering, blithering fool who can’t come to the point. “He’s not gonna help us!” wails Hackett. When this stuff works, in the context of so much that doesn’t, it feels miraculous, alchemical, and makes the surrounding misery harder to explain.)

The short version of the film lacks even a mercy shot to prove that Kaplan & Stang survive the building collapsing on them. The long version does include a mercy shot of the boys emerging from the rubble, complaining bitterly to the cops about their non-intervention. “They’re still alive,” says one cop, in wonderment, to establish that they were calmly watching from a distance what they fully believed to be a doublehomicide in progress. Yeah, for plot reasons the cops are letting all these characters run amok. This might otherwise fall under the heading of “an amusing conceit,” but no, not really. Massive property damage and personal injury to Jewish business owners while the authorities look on, indifferent? A very Keystone Kristallnacht.

I want to congratulate the art department for creating props, vehicles and buildings which collapse not only spectacularly but with artful comic timing — but I have to deduct points for making a billboard out of the wrong material, thereby nearly killing the pilot who had to crash through it.

What disturbs me in a comedy and makes me unable to enjoy it is when we get glimpses of a sick mind at work, or maybe there’s an accidental misjudgement of tone which results in something only a sick mind would deliberately create (it’s kind of how I feel about the universe, surely not the product of a well-meaning deity who knows what he’s doing). In THE HANGOVER, everyone is nasty. A doctor, asked if he knows a location, replies “Sure, it’s on the corner of Fuck You and Get a Map.” And this is a doctor. And, in IAMMMMW we have a firefighter, played by Sterling Holloway, admonishing the male leads against using his ladder all at once — the fire escape they’re clinging to is collapsing, so we understand their haste — “You’ll see, you’ll see!” With a grin that reads as kind of sadistic.

It all ends, finally, with the main male characters being flung from the malfunctioning fire engine ladder, to land in various painful circumstances. Two hit some power lines on the way down, causing Fiona to say “This is torture porn.” Ernest Gold’s music treats the scene as a sort of fairground waltz affair, which is a brave stab at lightening the tone but creates instead a painful, sadistic mismatch.

It’s interesting that Kramer is a liberal and a maker of worthy tracts on social issues, because he has Eddie “Rochester” Anderson land in the lap of a statue of Lincoln. I did sort of cough out a laugh here from sheer shock, but this is surely a racist joke if ever there was one. The horrible landings dealt out to the other characters don’t seem to be coded to fit their personae. It’s like they said, well, we could have him land in white paint or whipped cream, but let’s try for something more elevated.

(This sequence features the film’s only obvious dummies — the stuntwork is amazing elsewhere, and Kramer is really good at cutting around the substitution of stunties for thesps — and also some stop-motion animation courtesy of Jim Danforth, with Willis H. O’Brien supervising I believe.)

And then everybody winds up in hospital, baroquely decorated in plaster casts, a hideous groaning set of gargoyles. (Anderson alone is hung in chains; Peter Falk gets an eye patch.) It reminds me of the expressive war hospital in Borzage’s A FAREWELL TO ARMS or the agonizing end of Pabst’s WESTFRONT 1918. Other laugh-fests I’m reminded of are SECONDS and THE TENANT. Tracy, appropriately I guess, has been bandaged up in a crucifixion pose, and bemoans at length the complete destruction of his life, family, future. Then Ethel Merman slips on a banana peel and everybody laughs.

This is, I guess, some kind of “testament to the healing power of laughter,” but the only occasion for hilarity the movie can imagine is a woman falling down and getting hurt.

That’s all. I had to get it out of my system. I’m finishing this three days after watching the film and it hasn’t left me yet. I admit this review is overlong and overly-bitter — but have you seen the movie lately?

IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD stars Henry Drummond; Kappy Kapstetter; Chief Caveman; Tennessee Steinmetz; Lieutenant Hurwitz; Mr. Yunioshi; L.S.D. – Lorenzo St. DuBois; MSgt. Ernest G. Bilko; Cadogan de Vere Carlton-Browne; Wilbur Glenworthy/Harry Glenworthy; Miss Olsen; Lily Olay; Little Joe Jackson; Mr. Magoo (voice); Luther Grilk; Osgood Fielding III; Mike Strager; Sergeant Towser; Col. John T. Hall; Sgt. Heffelfinger; Link Appleyard; Mrs Weinstein; Columbo; Slip Mahoney; Winnie the Pooh (voice); Frisbee; Mr. Witherspoon; Friendless; Barney Fife; Max Jacobs; Moose Malloy; Sebastian Sholes; Prunella Judson; Saul Bloom; Sparrow; Healy’s Stooges; J. Sinister Hulk; Julius J. McCracken; Joseph Tura; Stanislaus ‘Duke’ Coveleskie; Fatty’s Fiancée; and Norman Phiffier.

CAL vero

Picked up a copy of Charlie Chaplin and His Times by Kenneth S. Lynn. Kind of late in my Chaplin odyssey to start a new book, especially one of Mack Swain girth, but what the heck. I turn to the section on LIMELIGHT —

‘…the picture was strewn with references to Charlie Chaplin. Thus a photograph of Chaokin hangs above the mantel in the ageing comic’s rooming-house parlour. From the faded posters in his possession that date from the days of his top billing, it can be seen that he used to be known as the “tramp comedian.” And his very name, Calvero, with its combination of “vero” with three of the letters in “Chaplin,” proclaims him to be the true Chaplin. The proposition that Calvero is indeed Chaplin is underscored by such further details as his old-fashioned button shoes, his left-handed violin playing, and his gently mocking description of himself to the young dancer, Terry Ambrose, as “an old sinner” who has had five wives.’

Good catch on the five wives, I missed that.

I’m not sure that CAL = CHAPLIN and I think that “vero” is some indication of the character’s honesty, integrity, as much as a signpost to The True Chaplin. And since Chaplin is playing Calvero, a photo of the young Chaplin on his wall makes sense. And if he’s going to play the violin, he’s going to have to do it left-handed, because that’s how he in fact played it. But the passage above got me hunting for photos of Chaplin in his actual tramp costume on the walls, and, though they’re not there to be found, it’s interesting that Calvero’s tramp costume, though different, blurs into the same identical silhouette in long shot.

Same picture, different sizes, above the table and then above the lintel.

The name Calvero also has the same sonic beginning and end as Karno, which is also surely relevant.

The first act of LIMELIGHT is basically Calvero saving Terry, then a series of discussions about the miracle of life in which he pulls her back from despair with variations on his “Buck up!” speech from the end of MODERN TIMES. And some theatrical dream sequences.

In the second of these, Calvero is in his own tramp costume, and begins by eating a flower, like Gary Cooper in FAREWELL TO ARMS. And then Terry appears — retroactively incorporated into his dream-act, wearing a bizarre, rather distracting costume. It probably is accurate to the peculiarities of the music hall, and the tutu is there, of course, because she’s a dancer in reality, not a straight man. What all this proves, of course, is that she’s moved into his thoughts.

LIMELIGHT, in a way, reverses the romances of earlier Chaplin films — in THE GOLD RUSH, Georgia doesn’t realise she loves Charlie until very late in the picture. Here, Calvero will nobly deny Terry’s love, using all the reasons we might give — mainly that she’s much too young for him. This is surprisingly effective — Fiona said, anyway, that she believed the love story and didn’t have a problem with it.

It can also be said that LIMELIGHT echoes that earlier showbiz picture, THE CIRCUS — a more suitable romantic lead is offered, and Charlie/Calvero steps out of the way to make it possible. Only here he does it by dying.

The IMDb SEEMS at first to give thorough credits for this film, enumerating all the guests in the dress circle of the Empire, but it gives us no names for the people in the agent’s office. Who is the small actor? It might be the wonderfully named Teddy Kiss Atom, who turns up, much aged, in CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG and THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. I’m slightly obsessed with Teddy Kiss Atom because his name is Teddy Kiss Atom. But this might equally be his brother (?), Charlie Young Atom. But, come to think of it, those guys seem to have been UK-based. What American small people can we suggest, apart from the obvious Billy Barty?

Wheeler Dryden turns up again as the doctor. The question of Terry’s legs is gone into. As an investigation of a hysterical condition, in which the investigator becomes enamoured of the patient, LIMELIGHT might bear comparison with MARNIE, and it has a similarly studio-bound quality, with similarly patchy process shots. Another autumnal work from the other most famous English filmmaker in Hollywood.

What makes LIMELIGHT a more ramshackle construction is that its central problem refuses to coalesce — is the problem Terry’s despair, Calvero’s drinking, Terry’s paralysis, Calvero’s failure as comedian, Terry’s romances with Calvero and Neville, or what? Each of them is shoved forward, fails to sustain itself, and is yanked off by the stage manager’s dreaded shepherd’s crook (the Charlie cane turned into an annihilating thunderbolt). Flashbacks and dream sequences fragment things further. It’s not that a film can’t be about many things, but probably it has to be about one or two in particular, and those should be very closely related.

What it most successfully is about is two people who have lost heart, and who give each other courage. But Calvero has another Calvary to face first, at the Middlesex Music Hall…

Intertitle of the Week (+)

“Strong words from a strange man,” as The Simpsons’ Kent Brockman would say. SEVENTH HEAVEN, Borzage’s best-known work from the silent era. Apart from a few very early westerns, this film, STREET ANGEL and the surviving fragment of THE RIVER are the only silent Borzage I’ve seen. A few equally fragmentary thoughts:

Borzage’s silent oeuvre, even on the basis of these few films, looks like a very significant body of work, as major as any American filmmaker’s in this era. The forthcoming Fox box set should shine a light on this neglected area. Following it up with some more of Borzage’s talkies would be a nice idea too. But we should be grateful for what we’re getting: it’s so unusual for an underrated talent like Borz to get this kind of tribute.

THE RIVER is an intensely sexy experience. Unusually, the vamp (Mary Duncan, the uber-vamp in SUNRISE) who seduces a youth is here a sympathetic character, assisting his passage to manhood. (The movie has a broadly allegorical sweep, with the titular waterway representing life.) Farrell’s swim is one erotic moment (how rare to see a naked man and a clothed woman!), but our favourite was the scene where Duncan suddenly gets very interested in comparing her height to Farrell’s, standing close beside him, her bottom touching his pelvis — no wait, let’s try it this way round…

F.B. is also a brilliant example of a filmmaker making the leap to talkies — speech adds a further layer of sophistication to his already delicate and nuanced approach. And since he always favoured subtlety and understatement in performance, and had a fantastic sensitivity to human emotion, he seems to have had little difficulty adapting to the different performance style of talking cinema. All the more impressive since Borzage does not appear to have had much, if any, stage experience (but arguably stage directors coming to the new talking pictures tended towards a more rhetorical style of playing perhaps less effective than the informality of those directors who had come from silent cinema).

Oops! Here’s a clip from LILIOM Borzage’s remake of Lang (!) — I’m absolutely ulcerating to see this film. It does reveal a good bit of that dreamlike clunk, crackle and pause of early sound cinema. Everybody seems to take a long time to respond to everyone else, giving the warm sussuration of audio hiss plenty of silence to fill. And dig those crazy sets! Boy!

(Maybe don’t watch the whole bit if you’re afraid of “spoilers”. But if you’ve seen the Lang, you’re safe.)

Here’s another example of a Borzage chime, where a moment in one movie recalls one in a previous:

Ascending to SEVENTH HEAVEN, Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, followed by Borzage’s camera crane.

Ascending through the circles of hell, on Hester Street, Joan Crawford in MANNEQUIN.

Both shots are elegant upward cranes, with a side-to-side shimmy following the spiralling of the stairs, though MANNEQUIN doesn’t rate quite as excessive a stylistic flourish as its predecessor. But instead we get a powerful sound mix of barking dogs, crying babies, elevated trains and other oppressive proletarian din — this is a place from which a person with feelings must escape.

We were so impressed by this film, which despite being from MGM (the Vatican of poshlust), had a genuine Warner Bros grit. Despite the title, Joan C is a fashion model for about five minutes, long enough to cram a parade of “gowns by Adrian” into the proceedings, but mostly she’s struggling to escape the slums, vividly embodied by her family and her no-goodnik boyfriend. I liked Leo Gorcey’s casting here as the kid brother: the unacceptable face of poverty, he’s possibly the vilest character in any Borzage film, although the boyfriend is only superficially better (I also liked that the bf manages a fighter called Swing Magoo).

Best of all, Joan Crawford and Spencer Tracy are just amazing here, empathic and charming and sincere in ways we tend not to find them. Two actors we often don’t admire, giving wholly admirable performances: proof of Borzage’s superior talent, as far as we’re concerned. The fact that Borzage was apparently screwing Crawford maybe helped, I don’t know. Maybe Tracy is mirroring Borzage’s own feelings. At any rate, Tracy’s adoration of his co-star is palpable.

In 1933, Borzage had the honour of making Mary Pickford’s last film, SECRETS. He also had the honour of making Mary Pickford. I was fascinated to note that this movie begins with a similar conjunction of the “real” and the utterly artificial as F.B.’s FAREWELL TO ARMS. We pan across a miniature countryside, rendered in detail so tiny that the roving lens can’t get everything in focus. The foreground fence is a soft blur, the tiny matchstick church in the background is mostly sharp, and the mountain range in the far distance is another gauzy smear. Then the view disappears behind some dark foreground shape, and when we emerge from the other side, we’re in a life-sized location. A life-sized horse stares straight at us.

THE DAY I MET CARUSO is a “charming” television film made for Screen Director’s Playhouse, whose charm is mainly delivered by Borzage’s appearance right at the start. The little girl in it is lovely, and there’s plenty of authentic Caruso on the soundtrack. There’s discussion of religion, as a little Mormon meets a big Catholic, and the Mormon faith’s dislike of luxury is found to be without real merit. not a major work by any means, but like CHINA DOLL, it’s recognisably a work of it’s maker. I liked the line “There was a terrible thing called war, and a wonderful thing called opera,” in the VO, and Caruso’s dialogue: “Enough about war, let’s talk about me,” and “When I sing, my shirt, she becomes attached to my skin.” Not something he should really be sharing with a little girl, but oddness is always part of The Borzage Effect.

Bye, Frank!