Alonso and Michel’s Lowlife Reunion

The last day of Hippfest began, for us anyway, with a Laurel & Hardy triple bill — restorations of DUCK SOUP, TWO TARS and LIBERTY, all of which brought the house down, or would’ve if the Hippodrome had been less solidly constructed 110 years ago.

This was followed by A STRING OF PEARLS (YICHUAN ZHENZHU, 1926), one of the few surviving Chinese silents, a loose adaptation of Maupassant’s The Necklace, complete with happy ending. Though the whole point of the story, if it has one, would seem to be the utterly miserable ending Maupassant provided, the plot’s reworking was done with some skill and logic, and might have succeeded had not the screenplay, by Hou Yao, resorted to every possible means to pad the story from the original few pages to feature length. This became tiresome, but then hilarious, especially when we discover that one character, a wealthy businessman who looks oddly like a twelve-year-old girl in drag, is being blackmailed.

Little girl man looks thoughtfully at the blackmail note which demands a thousand pounds, “or I will reveal your secret.” Flashback: little girl man receives his first-ever blackmail note, demanding a mere one hundred pounds. Carefully he removes the money from his safe. Goes to meet the blackmailer. Pays him. We come out of this flashback. Little girl man wistfully remembers his second blackmail note. We see him receive it. It is identically worded, but demands two hundred pounds, “or I will reveal your secret.” He takes the money…

John Sweeney on piano accompanied this insane, ritualistic repetition with a straight face, somehow bringing out the comedy without spoofing. It was cheering to learn that the screenwriter published a book on the art of writing for films.

The intertitles were also a joy: decorative and bilingual, the English parts obviously penned by someone just as skilled at bluffing as Hou Yao. Maybe Hou did it himself. When little girl man (back in the present tense at last) refuses to pay the thousand pounds, the blackmailer sets about him with a dagger. Mrs. Little Girl Man visits her injured husband in hospital and asks, “Tell me. What’s the trouble between you and your murderer.”

The titles also featured some nifty animation (including pearls rearranging themselves into the Chinese character for “misfortune” and some random drawings of camels. This was probably the worst Chinese silent yet (I don’t even like the classic, THE GODDESS, that much — too much propaganda) and my favourite.

Then we had two films for which I wrote the notes — THE UNKNOWN and L’HOMME DU LARGE. Since the notes for the latter were written back in 2020 the programme has changed, and it was John Sweeney who accompanied that one with Frank Bockius, and very glorious it was. Johnny Best, who threw himself into a rambunctious accompaniment to the L&H trio (with Frank ram-Bockius on percussion), played solo for the Browning-Chaney film, where Alonso the armless knife-thrower finds that the course of tearing one’s rival apart with wild horses never does run smooth. Best, in this case, opted for a restrained, even muted approach, since what was going on up there on the screen was more than demented enough. In the L’Herbier, Charles Boyer somehow gets top-billing for a fairly tiny supporting role (well, he’s electrifying to watch even if Nosferatu-gaunt) and L’Herbier’s partner Jaque Catelain plays Michel, the no-good son of a sea-worshipping fisherman. Paul McGann narrated, since it would be a crime to stick subtitles on those beautiful art intertitles. Impossible to believe this film was made in 1920. The music, sonorous voice-over, and conducive setting all worked their magic…

The full array of Hippodrome programme notes is available here. I seem to have written quite a few over the years.

Teardrops

A weekend double-bill of Powell & Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH and Fritz Lang’s LILIOM provided food for thought, as well as entertainment and awe.

It feels certain that P&P were familiar with the earlier film, and as a cultured Hungarian, Emeric Pressburger was probably familiar with Ferenc Molnár’s source play. But the fact that Lang ends his film with a closeup of teardrops, which then find their way into Powell’s film, makes me think that the movie was at the back of somebody’s mind.

The concept of bells ringing in heaven also recurs from Lang to the Archers, and the whole idea of the afterlife as a bureaucracy, a very specific concept, seems to have been ported over. True, Molnar & Lang portray the place as a police station — the way the film’s carny antihero (Charles Boyer) might imagine it — and P&P give us something more benign, a kind of anticipation of the welfare state.

“Conservative by instinct, Labour by experience,” says Peter D. Carter (David Niven), when asked about his politics. The Archers were nothing if not High Tory, it pains me to admit (I’m indebted to Andrew Moor, author of Powell & Pressburger, a Cinema of Magic Spaces, for the information that Pressburger was in the habit of sending his shirts to Paris to be laundered, even in wartime if memory serves, a detail Moor considered absolutely to absolutely clinch the filmmaker’s arch-Tory tendencies). I imagine, since AMOLAD was originally intended as a propaganda film during the last days of the war, with the intention of demonstrating that the USA and the UK can overcome their differences (“We were all getting along fine,” Powell was told, “until we started winning.”), the filmmakers would have been at least somewhat party to the great secret project, chaired by Sir Michael Balcon at Ealing, to prepare Britain for a Labour government. So the version of the afterlife portrayed, where there are no differences in rank (an enlisted man calls his officer “brother” when he learns this), and where everybody can do the job he likes, might be the film’s fantastical prophecy of Britain’s future. Carter on the afterlife: “I think it starts where this one leaves off, or where it could leave off if only we’d listen to Plato and Aristotle and Jesus, with all our earthly problems solved, but with bigger ones worth the solving.”

We were talking about influences. And not just political ones. I’m struck by the similarities with a work by another writer-director team, Marcel Carné & Jacques Prévert, LES VISITEURS DU SOIR. Both films feature emissaries from the afterlife (but in the French film they come from Hell) who can stop time, a fairly distinctive idea. But it’s far from certain that, with the war raging, P&P could have seen P&C’s film. I guess there was just time: France was liberated in autumn 1944, AMOLAD was shot at the end of 1945. How quickly did the backlog of French movies shot during the occupation get seen in Britain? I would imagine not very quickly and not very completely, but Powell would have been greatly interested and he probably would have had better access than just about anyone. So a direct influence seems possible.

If the influence wasn’t direct, then France should still get some credit because the first time-stop/fermata film I can think of is René Clair’s PARIS QUI DORT of 1925, which I’m certain Powell & Pressburger knew. Powell was actually working in movies in France in 1926. And so it seems not chance alone that explains the fact that Conductor 71, P&P’s heavenly emissary, is a Frenchman.

The Sunday Intertitle: All this, and Halloween too

“If l could get at Warner Bros a picture with Bette Davis, whom I considered an excellent actress,·or anybody of this kind, I was happy,
no matter how bad the subject was nor how little time I had to do the picture. The whole conception of picturemaking was not to do something too bad (this, already, made us very happy), for this weekly check we were getting.” ~ Anatole Litvak, Oral History.

The sense that the scenarists of ALL THIS, AND HEAVEN TOO are not quite on top of things is reawakened by the surprise appearance of two seasonal intertitles well into the second act. Given that the story is being narrated by Bette Davis during a French class — those kids are going to be utterly at sea in Le Havre — one wonders, did Bette include the intertitle in her recounting of how her arrival as governess for the children of Charles Boyer and Barbara O’Neil (Scarlett O’Hara’s mum; quite bad in this) caused everyone to die. You definitely get a much better experience with this mostly stodgy, “quality” drama from WB if you imagine that Bette is lying her ass off and she’s totally murdered everyone, including her class. We could come out of flashback to find her surrounded by corpses at schooldesks.

The Halloween sequence abruptly allows Anatole Litvak to conjure some nice spooky atmosphere, then it’s back to the wretched plot. The interesting thing about the true story this derives from is that it helped inspire the 1848 revolution, but we don’t see any of that.

My cunning plan was, or should have been, to make Anatole Litvak Week One take us up to the war, which caused a dramatic shift in Litvak’s whole approach to his work. But I’ve run out of weekdays and I have pieces to write on CASTLE ON THE HUDSON, CITY FOR CONQUEST, OUT OF THE FOG, BLUES IN THE NIGHT and maybe THIS ABOVE ALL (dunno, haven’t watched yet). Three of the above are going to share a single post, though. To hell with THE SISTERS. So what I’ll maybe do is run a couple of pieces next week on their own, just to keep the cauldron simmering, and jump back into Week Two, as planned, in November.

Still, ALL THIS, AND HEAVEN TOO stars Margo Channing; Adam Belinsky; Lloyd Hart; Ellen – his wife; Dinah Lord; Parthy Ann Hawks; Oliver Larrabee; Garbitsch; Colonel Skeffington; Walter Parks Thatcher; Lord Marshmorton; Mrs. Pike; Maureen Robinson; Randy Monaghan – as a Girl; Lars-Erik; Franz Liszt; Rameses I; Pa Dillinger (uncredited); Mrs. Stark – Jim’s grandmother; James Kirkham; and undetermined secondary role.