The Death of the Arthur: Me and my Galahad

“See what happens in PASSAGE OF PERIL, Chapter Six of ADVENTURES OF SIR GALAHAD…” And it’s true enough, you will see what happens. What happens may not be very exciting or intelligent, but you do see it. Unlike Sir Bors, here:

Not much funny stuff, the early episodes were deceptive. True, there’s an appearance by Ray “Crash” Corrigan, unrecognisable without his ape suit. There’s a hovel with a PORCH, a bit of anachronism that somehow isn’t absurd enough to be worthwhile. There’s a dungeon, slightly more convincing than the one in that Three Stooges medieval mess, but the script requires this dungeon to have separate cells, so it ends up looking like a couple of stone cottages transported to the inside of a cavern. It’s a medieval dungeon in spirit, sort of, but in layout it’s still a western jailhouse.

Sir Bartog the bad joins a group of outlaws, which entails dressing up as Robin Hood, sort of. He hasn’t really got the figure for it.

The existence of cheap magic is the main quality separating this from a western serial (which I would never watch — the repetitive action would be just the same as this, but the comedy relief would be louder and more grizzled, wouldn’t it?), but there’s no funny business from either Merlin, Morgane le Fay, or the Lady in the Lake between episode two and episode nine, so my craving for fantasy was experiencing a drought. There are altogether more tavern/barroom brawls than fancy spells cast.

Escapes, captures, escapes, captures.

Finally, some magic — the cheapest kind, invisibility! As I said in my Bill Rebane feature, having people vanish is actually cheaper than NOT having them vanish: just stop paying the actors and they’ll disappear of their own accord. Here, Morgane Le Fay has an enchanted ring borrowed from The Hobbit. The jump-dissolve in which she faces from view is marred by mistiming — you can actually see her shoulder slipping away on the right of frame: so they filmed her speaking, then had her step out of shot to produce an empty frame, but when they mixed the two together you get a marginal overlap where you see one-and-a-bit Morganes at the same time.

Bottom right corner of first pic.

You might wonder how such a screw-up can happen, and also how the clapper boy makes a similar spectral appearance in Kubrick’s LOLITA. It’s because when a dissolve or fade is being indicated by the editor, he makes a cut and draws a couple lines on the work print to indicate the duration of the transition. There’s no way to actually check what the effect will look like until the lab has done its work, but the editor is supposed to check the material before the incoming shot, and after the outgoing one, to see there’s enough good footage to make the mix work. Sometimes, they forget. Easy to see how that would happen in a cheap serial, harder to figure when the Great Stanley K. is at the helm.

When Morgane reappears, the effect is better managed, but her dress is swaying even though she’s supposed to have been standing still. It’s like the wobbly top had in Mrs. Kane’s lodging house in CITIZEN KANE — a winking spyhole into the creative mysteries.

TO BE (I hope) CONCLUDED

Food Fighters

Maybe, just maybe, the food fight in THE GREAT DICTATOR was an influence on the deleted pie fight from DR STRANGELOVE? Is it even possible that the fruit-slinging that concludes the Marx Bros’ DUCK SOUP lies behind both? Maybe that’s a stretch. But reducing the horrors of war to the absurdity of food-flinging evidently has an honourable tradition. Maybe Laurel & Hardy suggested the theme by naming their great custard pie fight film THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY?

Chaplin is no slouch when it comes to foodstuffs as ammunition. A childhood of near-starvation left him with a complicated relationship with food — nearly every Chaplin film seems to have a gag about the absence of food, the smelliness of food, the noisiness of digestion, the perils of ingestion, or the use of various platters as ballistic weapons. BEHIND THE SCREEN featured one of comparatively few pitched pie fights in the silent screen’s history.

“To the buffet!” proclaims Billy Gilbert as Garbitsch, and audiences who like anticipating things may already be imagining some sploshy chaos. The swank dinners in Chaplin films always feature bizarre menus, selected not for compatibility but for slapstick possibilities. Here, the presence of the dictator of Bacteria, which stands for Italy, excuses the ever-present spaghetti. Surprisingly, mustard will prove more significant in the battle of the buffet.

Great reaction from Gilbert after he clears the buffet of undesirables, and then finds he’s to be included in their number. The actor has a unique ability to make his eyes stand out like horrified plums, loosely embedded in a slack pudding of a face — only the affronted orbs display emotion, but they compensate by sheer intensity for the limpness of the surrounding flesh.

Chaplin immediately recoils from an odorous Camemberg, a callback to countless cheese jokes in his past, most relevantly SHOULDER ARMS, where a similarly noisome cheese becomes a chemical weapon of devastating power.

Considering this kind of thing is new to him — dialogue played over the silent set-up for a gag where cream and mustard will be confused — he manages it very well. I can’t say that he’s as great a talking comic as he is a silent one, but he shows skill at combining the two forms — only Harold Lloyd and Laurel & Hardy really got to try the same thing.

The dispute as to whether the treaty will be signed before or after Napaloni’s troops are removed from the Osterlich border is classic vaudeville/music hall crosstalk. Anticipating the negotiation scenes in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA and A DAY AT THE RACES. Fiona points out that Chaplin told Groucho he envied his facility with dialogue, adding weight to my hypothesis that Napaloni is a straight steal of Chico’s mangling of English. Here, however, Heinkel is the one playing it deliberately dense, attempting to wear the Bacterian dictator down by sheer refusal to recognize the basis of their argument.

Heinkel makes an angry gesture and spatters cream on the head of a flunky who’s tossing the spaghetti. Napaloni, in a rage, accidentally bites into the treaty, having incorporated it into his sandwich the way he intends to incorporate Osterlich into his empire.

The battle then becomes a matter of demonstrating with the buffet what the military forces of each dictator will do to the other’s. Napaloni stabs a huge sausage into a Devil’s Tower Wyoming heap of mashed potato, then swats it sideways. Heinkel bombards the punch bowl with an orange (I think it’s an orange. We’re in black and white so it’s more of a grey.)

The blocking of the scene is very simple but very, very effective. The two bosses and their two underlings are lines up along the table. Sometimes the leaders face off, sometimes they turn and complain to their seconds, a babel of Tomainian and Bacterian tirades. Dialogue as sheer noise. Overlapping a year before CITIZEN KANE, but to rather different effect.

Heinkel slathers mustard on his fresh plate of strawberries, and —

Then Napaloni bites into a too-mustardy sandwich. Well, he asked for the extra-hot English mustard, and it seems he can’t take it. Notably, perhaps, Chaplin denies Jack Oakie his own close-up, but the two men writhing on the divan as their throats combust is quite amusing.

Mustard was, of course, fully weaponized in the First World War, with far from hilarious consequences.

“Aiuta!” screams Il Duce. Either Chaplin couldn’t be bothered coming up with cod-Italian and resorted to the real thing, or Oakie is improvising.

This is all to get the characters into a furious political discussion in which neither can actually speak — they just mouth at each other in scorching muteness in between stuffing their gobs with hankies.

Recovering a bit, Heinkel attempts to demonstrate on a fistful of spaghetti how he will tear the Bacterians apart. Unfortunately for him, the many strands of pasta exhibit the same unbreakable qualities of the stacks of sticks or fasces used by the ancient Romans to signify group strength — E pluribus unum –– and which give the Fascist movement its name. Heinkel is left huffing as he stretches the spaghetti like a minute Charles Atlas demonstrating dynamic tension.

At an opportune moment he releases one end and twangs Napaloni in the kisser. So it’s war! Chaplin wields a sausage like a short sword, while Oakie grabs a pie. As Chekov says, you can’t introduce a custard pie in act two without going splurch in the kisser almost immediately, so a hack from the international press is introduced, peeping into the buffet room, his snooping features plastered in pie at once.

By the time Henry Daniell reenters, Heinkel and Napaloni are threatening one another with huge platters of mashed potato and something unidentifiable. Mutually assured destruction. Herring defuses the crisis and the stage is set for Tomainia’s invasion of Osterlich.

Very nice closing gag where Napaloni hands his mash to the Bacterian ambassador (Carter DeHaven? Really?), a much (even) smaller man, who totters under the unexpected weight of the potatoes, before crashing to the floor, offscreen. We don’t get to enjoy the sight of him buried in spud, but again Chaplin is enjoying the use of the audience’s imagination, which has the added advantage that he doesn’t have to cut away from HIMSELF.

TO BE CONCLUDED

Listing (badly)

To be clear — the following is not my list of screenings for the coming semester. It’s my submission for the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll.

1. He Who Gets Slapped
   Year: 1924
   Director(s): Victor Sjostrom
   Comment: My favourite film. It’s not like anything else. Lon Chaney manipulates the audience’s emotions by making shapes with his body, within the shapes Sjostrom makes with his camera. A melodrama in which nothing is really credible but everything is incredibly compelling. The film that draws the line between the laugh of the clown and the snarl of the lion.
2. The General
   Year: 1926
   Director(s): Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
   Comment: Ten films is such a small number that maybe all the entries do need to be perfect. Formally speaking, this one is: every shot is an essential component. Keaton makes the camera’s observation part of the joke. Each shot says, in a perfect deadpan, “Here we are now. And now this is happening. And so…” Plus you have a cinematic icon as star, a magnificent comedian, an incredible daredevil, working on the biggest canvas he ever got.
3. Citizen Kane
   Year: 1941
   Director(s): Orson Welles
   Comment: What, I’m going to leave this off, so I can look more like a wild individualist? A brilliant cinematic mind jumps into the medium, determined to see what he can make it do. Tackle everything in a fresh way, from story to performance to camera to design, special effects, sound, editing. It may not actually invent anything but it packs in a ton of radical creativity and unconventionality. The filmmaker conveys his joy at all the tricks he comes up with, which makes the film supremely likeable to me, which it doesn’t get enough credit for.
4. A Matter of Life and Death
   Year: 1946
   Director(s): Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
   Comment: The Archers had to have a place on my list, and in truth it could be any of five or six films, but this one marries its experimentation to a story both real AND fantastical, enabling them to stretch themselves in every direction. I love their use of Technicolor and I have, I admit, a mysterious sentimental attraction to stories of WWII. And I have a deep sympathy for Powell’s rejection of realism: as he said, it doesn’t really exist in the cinema. It’s all an illusion. And we know it. Romantic, funny, epic, the film’s breadth of vision puts everything Britain’s made in the past 50 years to shame.
5. Eight and a Half
   Year: 1963
   Director(s): Federico Fellini
   Comment: There’s the sheer invention; the joy of looking through such a pair of magical eyes; Fellini’s roving camera; his carnivalesque world; Nino Rota’s galumphing score. I don’t know how many more times I can bear to see this one: the last time I was continually on the verge of tears over its beauty. And I don’t get that with other beautiful films. The love of cinema seems to speak directly to me, but to add an acerbic quality, Fellini is quite harsh on himself, via his stand-in Mastroianni.
6. The Knack… and How to Get It
   Year: 1965
   Director(s): Richard Lester
   Comment: The inventiveness and playfulness of the French New Wave is ported over to a grey London autumn and blended with native surrealism. Screenwriter Charles Wood explodes Ann Jellicoe’s play and, with director Lester, assembles a dazzling mosaic from the pieces. All the choices are surprising, and somehow coherent. And it’s all quite strange: John Barry’s jazz score and David Watkin’s beautiful photography combine with the oddball text to create a feeling that’s a bit mysterious, even while it’s mainly all just bursting with youthful exuberance.
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey
   Year: 1968
   Director(s): Stanley Kubrick
   Comment: “If he could get rid of the human element, he could make the perfect film,” joked Malcolm McDowell. But here he almost does. By acting, arrogantly, as if nobody had ever made a really good science fiction film, Kubrick solves all the problems methodically but also pushes the genre into epic, mythic, spiritual terrain that even the best sf literature rarely touched upon. Stately, bold, astonishingly beautiful. The great rationalist suddenly blasts us off into a psychedelic experience which doesn’t yield fully to reason. It’s not even certain if the film is optimistic or despairing (yet colourful).
8. Playtime
   Year: 1968
   Director(s): Jacques Tati
   Comment: Having become a national or international institution, Tati blew his career to pieces with a colossal folly, a two-hour-plus widescreen film about the purgatory of modern urban life, eventually transformed into a playground by the human imagination. With his character of Hulot reduced to one figure among dozens, spread across a vast screen, and with anything resembling a conventional gag or slapstick ruthlessly expunged. Only comedy that astonishes, laughs you can’t explain, comic abstractions, are allowed here. Jokes about things looking like other things, sounding funny, taking too long, not being audible, not being understood. The scale is dazzling, insane. The world received it with a puzzled frown. If you’re on the right wavelength, you’ll instead be almost embarrassed at receiving such a lavish gift.
9. The Conformist
   Year: 1970
   Director(s): Bernardo Bertolucci
   Comment: Bertolucci had recently cowritten a spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West (another obvious contender for this list). Similarly, here we have a cruel and cynical tale delivered in a lush romantic style. Delerue’s music and Storaro’s photography create an astonishing sweep. The political intent gives the film a sense of passion, even though Bertolucci is quite harsh about his characters. In Trintignant, he has the perfect star for this style, giving a performance that’s elegant, sardonic, sometimes robotic, sometimes a little crazed. I think all my choices have something in common, a sense of filmmakers breaking through all the conventions, asking “Why can’t it be like this instead?”
10. My Neighbour Totorro
    Year: 1988
    Director(s): Hayao Miyazaki
    Comment: Miyazaki’s films add to the traditional dynamism of the anime form a welcome and surprising poetry. He pays attention to things cartoons usually ignore. A major setpiece here is two little girls waiting for a bus, one of them almost falling asleep. The filmmaker is in tune with childhood because his ambitions are usually simple but profound. Here, he wanted to show city kids what life in the country is like. His version of that is quite idiosyncratic, with the little dust bunny creatures, the cat-bus, and the titular nature spirit, a huge cat-owl thing, utterly benign but a little alarming and obviously very powerful. Very little is explained, which seems like a good lesson for children to absorb: there are mysteries.

Your further remarks

This was difficult! I will wake up screaming as it occurs to me the thing I forgot to put in. Even now I’m dismayed at what I felt compelled to knowingly exclude. No Chaplin, Marx Bros, pre-codes, horror films, musicals, westerns… is this even a list at all?