Rivetted

More Harry Piel from Pordenone’s festival of silent film. RIVALEN or RIVALS.

Piel, as stated before, was a maker of sensational adventures, based around stunts, daring escapes, massive explosions and the occasional robot. As cinema’s leading demolitionist he’s a sort of Nazi Fred Dibnah.

The titles preceding the Piel films praise him as a forgotten master of cinema and note that many of his films were lost/destroyed in WWII. They don’t mention his enthusiastic Nazism. If you’re going to have lost films — and I’d rather we didn’t — it’s at least satisfying that they were made by someone who got really into Nazism, and that they were destroyed by Allied bombing. The fact that the filmmaker specialised in explosions is just the ironic icing on the cake — an unnecessary flourish from the hand of fate, but one we can appreciate for its dark humour.

(It seems to have take Piel six years to get de-Nazified, as he made no films between 1945 and ’51. That tells you a lot. Same sort of gap as Veit Harlan who made JEW SUSS. The next stage up from that is Riefenstahl, who never made another film in Germany, and then the next stage up from that is they hang you.)

Like so many of Piel’s films — including the last one I viewed, the Joe Deebs adventure (DAS ROLLENDE HOTEL) — this one deals with inventors and explosives. I finally figured out how to enlarge the tiny subtitles on the Pordenone streamer, so I could follow the plot better. But then more or less chose not to and just enjoyed the pristine images of smartly-dressed men doing elaborate industrial espionage.

We get a mad scientist’s laboratory within the first ten minutes, and the promise of a costume party (“Maskenfest”) to come, so I was immediately at home. And a robot! Piel’s love of robots, before it was popular or fashionable, suggests that Houdini’s THE MASTER MYSTERY was an early influence on him, and given that his given name was Heinrich, the adoption of “Harry” might even be in emulation of the great (Jewish) escapologist and film star.

The big party scene is entered via a Hellmouth, before Moloch’s guest spot in METROPOLIS but after Joe May’s big gob in DIE HERREN DER WELT and of course CABIRIA. So the history of big architectural mouths in silent European cinema just got a bit more involved.

When dancers in spangly devil costumes strut their stuff on a big turntable in the middle of the party, Piel does not think to put the camera on the platform with them. But he does glide his dolly across the dance floor later… and then, ahah! when our protags get on the turntable he spins them with the camera — I was wrong to doubt his visual flair.

Stunts! Harry leaps from one balcony to another, but balcony no.2 collapses, tips him into balcony no.3, which he falls off of, and thence to the ground. Performed in three shots, but each one involves a real stunt and a substantial drop. Fairbanks is doubtless also a formative influence on the young Harry.

The action, by the way, is laid in England, German anglophilia being another irony of fate.

The bad guy, with his round glasses and huge travelling hat, puts me in mind of a young John Ford. Over at Silent London, Pamela Hutchinson, who’s seeing the films in person in Pordenone, wonders if the retractable bridge is meant to represent Tower Bridge, or at any rate a cut-price version thereof. I’m thinking “They CAN’T have been that naive” but some verification is provided by the fact that the bridge control lever is marked with the single word LONDON.

Harry, of course, attempts to vault the bridge in his (commandeered) roadster — and crashes! No idea how they did the stunt — if it’s a model it’s a very big one. The movement of the car seems not quite naturalistic, so maybe a huge model with a car on wires? A second camera angle showing the car settling in the river makes it seem definitely full-scale… Impressive, anyway.

The print, by the way, pristine like new. The weird tinting and toning effect is caused by reflections as I take snapshots off my laptop.

John-Ford-as-villain not only has a private mansion, a lab and a robot, he has his own U-boat. Ian Fleming invented nothing.

The heroine is bland, as usual (looks good in a beret though), but there’s a feisty vamp to make things more interesting.

Harry gets suddenly attacked by enemy henchmen disguised as boulders! My new OBLIGATORY SCENE which every movie is the poorer for lacking. “Put him in the bell,” says Herr Ford, and it now transpires that he has an all-glass diving bell for just this purpose. Be prepared, I always say.

Get out of that!

Of course the diving bell has a slow leak so Harry’s life can be imperilled in a suitably suspenseful manner. An error in subtitling causes Herr Ford to say that Harry will be released “as soon as he agrees to marry me,” a plot wrinkle that would enliven many a melodrama. The nasty but flexible Ford has arranged the marriage with “the pastor of Wighton.”

The trouble with these death-trap infernal devices (I mean the diving bell, not marriage) is they usually require the help of a rescuer. Houdini would have contrived his own escape, but Piel, the piker, must be saved by someone else, which is less dramatically satisfying. But then he can proactively save the heroine from wedlock with the German John Ford.

RIVALEN is the ultimate sensation-film, or nearly. I haven’t even mentioned the proto-Thompson twins. But this is only Part One — the story continues in THE FINAL BATTLE. Which is not streaming from Pordenone, and may not even survive…

A Tuesday Intertitle:

LA PASSAGERA is no CABIRIA… or is it? Only fragments of Giovanni Pastrone’s 1917 drama seem to survive, disconnected moments of lovers walking in the street, men at desks, Spanish intertitles I prefer not to translate. Nothing which passes for visual storytelling (which usually, let’s face it, translates as “action”), a film viewed from the outside, a series of clues or perhaps a mystery with the clues omitted. Easy to believe these scenes are all intersticial, taking the characters (who are they?) from A to B, set-ups for mislaid punchlines, establishing shots for action that never actually happens.

Translating the walls of text might help, but fragmentary films are invitations to use our negative capability, so I prefer being in the dark in this case.

Peplum Pudding

Anne Heywood is an inflection point of cinematic eroticism. Like the late Catherine Spaak. Nudity had only just gone mainstream in 1968, and immediately Spaak was being full-frontal, and getting up to all manner of kinky BDSM stuff in THE LIBERTINE. And she had just made a bland Hollywood movie, HOTEL. How did she know this was a good idea? How did she know it wouldn’t hurt her career, as actors have found in the years since, when they go just a little bit too far?

Heywood has always been saucy. She made her debut as a beauty contestant in LADY GODIVA RIDES AGAIN, spent most of FLOODS OF FEAR soaking wet and some of it barely clothed, and then here she is in CARTHAGE IN FLAMES, a hokey peplum, apparently about to be be human-sacrificed in a blatant riff on CABIRIA (our old friend Moloch). Since, unlike Cabiria, her character’s not a little kid, someone’s decided she might as well play it in diaphanous veils and a thong. So she does. In 1960. The nudity is fleeting, but it basically kept me watching to the end of the movie in (vain) hopes she might do it again.

She still has to look forward to THE VERY EDGE (nudity, rape), THE FOX (nudity, lesbianism), I WANT WHAT I WANT (nudity, gender reassignment), THE NUN AND THE DEVIL (nudity, sadism), GOOD LUCK, MISS WYCKOFF (nudity, rape, interracial), RING OF DARKNESS (nudity, satanism)… probably some more outstanding sexual deviations lurk in her filmography.

A number of the sword-and-sandal flicks were piloted by old timers — Viktor Tourjansky, who had made his name in Russia and France, ruined it in Nazi Germany and wound up in Italy playing traffic cop on Biblical, classical and other historical epics, With committed leftist Damiano Damiani as co-writer on most of them. They were churned out with unbelievable speed, with a thrifty reuse of sets and even footage from one to the next, whether the setting was Ancient Greece or Tsarist Russia. But this one, intriguingly, is under the control, barely, of Carmine Gallone, whose career stretched back to 1913. He made the original AVATAR in 1916 (no relation to Cameron’s movies), MALOMBRA with Lyda Borelli the following year, and the 1926 version of THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII.

By now I’d say he’s pretty exhausted, but he has a surprisingly good multinational cast — Daniel Gelin, Pierre Brasseur, Paolo Stoppa, Terence Hill when he was still using his birth name, Mario Girotti, before he was a NOBODY, and of course la Heywood, whose own birth name is Violet Pretty, which I guess everybody decided was altogether too much of a good thing.

It’s not exactly GOOD. But it trumps the Wyler BEN-HUR by staging its sea battle full-sized. I’ve seen this goofy ship before, in a Hercules movie I think. Oh no, my mistake, a MACISTE (pronounced McChesty). This one. The design throughout is good camp fun.

It’s evidently been dubbed in London, and I kept expecting to be able to recognize the plummy tones emerging airlessly from the flapping lips onscreen, but I never could. Everybody sounds very proper and distinguished, like they assembled a roomful of Leo Genns of various sizes and pitches. You can’t quite believe these sounds emerging from a callow Terence Hill. Imagine Matt Berry dubbing a man in a skimpy tunic. It’s the world’s plummiest peplum.

It’s a shame to be missing Pierre Brasseur’s mighty voice, but whoever’s dubbing baddie Gelin, the best character, does a decent job. An oily purr with a bit of gravel thrown in.

The most interesting choice is Sarepta the Black maidservant, played onscreen by Edith Peters and on the soundtrack by some anonymous interloper. Her dialogue suggests she’s been intended as a somewhat comic character, an opinionated and backtalking figure in the Hattie McDaniel mode. Yet all the offensive possible approaches the dubbing artiste could have taken are somehow skirted, and the character speaks in moderately posh, extremely wooden tones with very occasional hints of a northern English accent. Flat, awkward and ridiculous, but at least not stereotyped. And she gets a below-stairs interracial romance with Paolo Stoppa.

The writers have tried to concoct some characterisation, so everyone’s in love with the wrong person. It’s like The Seagull with short swords.

Big fire at the end — only five minutes worth, but mostly full-scale and quite impressive.

CARTHAGE IN FLAMES stars Frédérick Lemaître; Louis Bernard; Roy/Wendy; Giraffa; Don Calogero Sedara; Inspector Alberto Bassano; Dr. Frankenstein; Inspector A; Oedipus – King of Thebes; and Trinity.