The Paris Exposition

MONSIEUR VERDOUX finally continued. A couple of Basil Expositions are strolling the boulevards, apparently with the sole purpose of filling in Verdoux’s backstory. This might be the kind of writing Billy Wilder had in mind when he called Chaplin the talker as “an eight-year-old child composing lyrics to Beethoven’s Ninth.” Or it maybe have been a nine-year-old for the Eighth. It IS a wee bit inelegant, and it’s neither dramatic nor comic: it’s just raw intel. We would have to learn this stuff at some point, but it should ideally be uncovered via a proper SCENE.

The prelude to this guff, however, showing Verdoux on the prowl for prey (a metaphorical prowl, he’s sitting down at a cafe) is very good. Light fluffy music, dark undercurrent. Close attention paid to the serving of coffee.

Naturally, Verdoux’s office is on the traditional Chaplin T-junction. He stops to feed a street cat, a play for sympathy which may have been borrowed from his old employee Von Sternberg’s UNDERWORLD (screenwriter Ben Hecht was appalled by the added cat business, claimed JVS, crediting himself with the populist instinct to make his gangster loveable — decide for yourselves how trustworthy that account is).

Verdoux keeps this sinister warehouse stuffed with his victims’ belongings — odd, since he seems to sell things in a hurry, monetising murder being his whole raison d’etre, and all he really needs is a telephone. It’s also odd that he plays the stock market, having lost his bank job in the crash. This keeps him on the go, however, which is good for the plot. Notified that he needs money fast, he must now embark on another murder, a grim highlight of the film.

First, Verdoux talks to himself a lot, which is unnecessary. Chaplin not only has a weakness for unadorned exposition, he’s anxious that we should understand him. Since he’s patterning himself somewhat on Lubitsch (who patterned himself somewhat on Chaplin), this is an error. See that your audience understands, but seem as if you don’t care either way. “An audience would rather be confused than bored,” says Mr. Schrader, very soundly.

Australian bit player Margaret Hoffman does well with the substantial role of Lydia Floray, Verdoux’s next wife/mark/victim (homophonic with Chaplin’s asst. dir., Robert Florey). So far we’ve had an unseen murderee, represented only by her house and her awful relatives, and therefore not inviting too much sympathy, and a woman who resists Verdoux’s charms and earns our respect. Now we’re getting much closer to actual murder, Chaplin makes the victim a grim scold — but allows a few little humanizing touches. He also allows Verdoux to see frightening. Whatever clumsiness we detect in the use of dialogue, however many dead scenes Chaplin serves up to prod the narrative along, the tonal balancing act is extremely nimble.

The IMDb has eliminated many of the weird conjoined filmographies, such as the credit ut gave Michael Powell for sound recording on a short film made years after his death, but Hoffman has a writer’s credit on a short about Lee Harvey Oswald, made in 2012. She died in 1968. Also, she wasn’t a writer.

The killing, played with moonlight and soft music (and a frisson of horror at the end), is brilliantly shot from the end of a hall NOT facing onto the bedchamber where the crime will be committed. Verdoux lingers at the threshold, working himself up into a romantic fervour before he kills. His silhouette in the wide shot slightly recalls the Tramp.

Of course, the miniature town seen from the window is very flat and unconvincing — the loss of Charles D. Hall as set designer is felt. Still, Costa-Gavras felt there was a purpose behind the cardboard backings of THE GREAT DICTATOR and it may be so here also. The direction is more than assured, otherwise: the discrete distance implies classic Hollywood romance, but of course maintaining a distance, staying outside the room, is also a strategy for dealing with violence (see THE PUBLIC ENEMY). The combination of the two starkly clashing modes is electrifying, and not in the slightest bit funny.

Maintaining the distance, the film calmly dissolves from night to morning — an elegant ellision that hints at ghastliness while showing us nothing but moonlight and sunshine.

TBC

Big Bertha

The trenches of Woodland Hills.

Chaplin opens with a surprising tracking shot — a pre-Kubrickian vision of WWI. Lewis Milestone and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT might be the influence. Dissolves link different bits of tracking shot, as if Chaplin wouldn’t quite get the oner he was after, or as if he wanted to make this a series of glimpses implying a much bigger conflict.

The hills in the background are recognizable as the view from the back of my friend Randy Cook’s house in Woodland Hills.

As in MODERN TIMES, we have two cinematographers, but this time it’s Rollie Totheroh (as usual) and Karl Struss — as contrasting a pair of Hollywood artists as youcould choose. Struss had shot things like Griffith’s ABRAHAM LINCOLN and Mamoulian’s DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE. It’s tempting to associate him with the mobile camera and any mood lighting, and Totheroh with more straightforward head-to-toe prosccenium framing.

David Robinson’s Chaplin confirms this — Chaplin was for unknown reasons growing dissatisfied with Totheroh’s work — perhaps an obscure feeling that it was old-fashioned, which was true. But Struss “wasn’t giving him enough light. He was getting in tree branches and things to achieve ‘mood’. It might have been ‘mood’, but it wasn’t what Chaplin wanted,” AD Dan James is quoted as saying.

It’s a real problem — the most important quality for photography in a visual comedy is CLARITY — the figures need to READ. Everything central to the gag needs to be absolutely clear. The slightest ambiguity squashes the laugh. There are no effective slapstick noirs, no slapsticks with impressionistic visuals, and quite possibly what doomed Spielberg’s 1941 is the very attractive, diffuse, backlit cinematography and the Louma crane movement.

Big Bertha — the first character we meet with a name. The Jewish Barber remains anonymous. There was a real BB howitzer in WWI, the 42 cm kurze Marinekanone 14 L/12, but it was much shorter and less dramatic than the one constructed by J. Russell Spencer and Chaplin’s art department. (A shame Charles D. Hall had just stopped his collaboration with Chaplin — their first film together was SHOULDER ARMS and it would have been nice symmetry if this were the last. There’s one account from the set of ALL QUIET — which CDH also designed — suggesting that the designer served in WWI, but no family tradition confirms this).

VO! Who is this narrator? The IMDb is silent on the matter. His voice is deeper than Chaplin’s, but has similar clipped diction. Could CC be lowering his timbre, or just drilling someone else to deliver the lines as he would?

Horribly, Bertha’s target is Notre Dame, which would survive the war, and then survive the next war (IS PARIS BURNING? showcases the cathedral standing proud at the end) and then get gutted by fire due to human error, bad luck, poor contingency planning.

But, with Charlie the Jewish Barber pulling the trigger, Bertha merely explodes a nearby outhouse. The film’s first visual joke is a very Burt Reynolds type gag.

I was thinking I’d cover the whole WWI sequence in this post, but NO — we need to stop and ask WHO IS THE JEWISH BARBER? In what ways is he or is he not the Tramp/The Little Fellow/Mr. Wow-Wow?

NEXT

The Sunday Intertitle: The Idiot Stick

Afternoon, everybody.

Before Charlie meets the blind flower girl in CITY LIGHTS he was at one point going to spend five solid minutes struggling with a stick stuck in a grating outside a department store.

An entire sequence without a single intertitle, pure pantomime, and with no discernible connection otherwise to the film’s plot. Since the statue unveiling sequence is also non-plot-related, this would, I think, have delayed the start of the film’s real story by a dangerous amount, so cutting it was the right decision.

Still, I think it’s a great sequence — depending on the company you watch it with, it’s either progressively more hilarious or more frustrating. If you’re into it, the frustration is part of the hilarity.

Great supporting performances. I remember being astonished at who was playing the idiot messenger boy, then forgetting, then finding out again and being astonished all over again. It’s Charles Lederer, future screenwriter for Howard Hawks among others — he was Marion Davies’ favourite nephew, and Chaplin may have met him at San Simeon, where he was a regular guest, or through Marion, with whom he seems to have been intimate, or maybe through socialite-AD Harry Crocker.

Crocker himself plays the window dresser who gets so infuriated with Charlie, and he’s excellent. Though short, and ultimately deleted, it’s a much more challenging role than Rex, the King of the Air in THE CIRCUS. Long takes, lots of business and expressive pantomime. The actors have to sustain it and communicate it without the aid of title cards or cutaways.

The scene depends for its effect on a hierarchy of stupidity. The mouth-breathing Lederer, barely conscious or alive, is at the lowest end of the idiot spectrum, regarded with horror by Charlie. In an earlier film, at Keystone or Essanay, Charlie might have bullied the dolt, but here the only cruelty is in the simple observation. It’s still a bit cruel. We can call him an idiot, maybe, because he’s just a comic type, not a specific syndrome, though David Robinson goes further and calls him “a haunting figure whose malevolent, wooden-faced idiocy gives him the look of a distant and mentally-retarded cousin of Buster Keaton,” a beautiful turn of phrase except for the slur (if you look up the origins of the phrase “mental retardation” you discover it’s actually racist).

Charlie himself is in the middle phase of the idiot scale — his obsession with pushing the stick through the grating, even though he’s just passing the time, is one symptom, his inability to understand that pushing one side or the other results in an identical effect, and only pushing the centre can be expected to work, is the other plank upon which his dumbness rests.

But Crocker’s shop man is the third kind of idiot. Like Oliver Hardy, he’s just intelligent enough to think he’s smart, but not smart enough to realise he’s an idiot. He gets obsessed with Charlie’s stick problem, and excited and infuriated about it. Charlie at least is smart enough to know it doesn’t matter one way or another. He’s never agitated about his dumb stick. Although he does get possessive of it when the message boy shows an interest.

Charlie’s incomprehension of Crocker is a subtle joke in its own right: the gag being that Charlie is completely unable to understand a clear and explicit pantomime.

The fourth form of idiocy, I guess, is that of the street gawkers who stop to watch Charlie. They don’t even have any ideas to suggest. Their passivity may tell us something about Chaplin’s attitude to his audience, or that may be a reach. But once again, as in THE CIRCUS, Charlie finds himself an unintentional entertainer.

Chaplin was very pleased with this sequence — “a whole story in itself” — but it had to go, precisely BECAUSE it was so self-contained, so it was left to Kevin Brownlow to issue it as part of Unknown Chaplin, thirty years after it was shot, by which time Chaplin, Lederer, Crocker and probably everyone else in the crowd and behind the camera, were gone.