Silents is Olden

A pretty full Sunday at Hippfest — starting with a Laurel & Hardy double-bill — THE SECOND HUNDRED YEARS and THE FINISHING TOUCH — then QUEEN OF SPORTS, then THE NORTULL GANG and then THE WIND.

It was interesting to look at the early L&H and see how nearly-fully-formed the act was right from the off — Stan shaved his head to play a convict and his hair grew back all tufty and this became a trademark. At one point, Ollie blows a raspberry and gets Stan in trouble. In future, this would be rearranged so that Ollie is the main victim of Stan’s stupidity, and is craven before authority.

At the end of the double bill I noticed that my ribs were aching. So it was a good work-out, a way to burn off all that ice-cream I’d eaten in Bo’ness at the marvelous McMoo’s ice cream parlour.

I’m not a huge fan of the Chinese silents I’ve seen — early talkies suit me better. But I decided to give QUEEN OF SPORTS (1934) a try. LOTS of nice camera movement in this one, tracking aslant into the action, in something like a Michael Curtiz manner, plus lots of elevator rises. I seem to recall director Yu Sun doing similar moves in his DAYBREAK, with maybe a Borzage influence.

I tend to get distracted by the naivety of the Chinese films, which is just a different form of the naivety found in American and European silents. But it’s a form which usually comes with a chunk of nationalist propaganda, and the same happened here, but not till the end. I don’t care for nationalism and I hate sports so this movie had two strikes against it as far as I was concerned.

Doing away with the underdog story that animates COLLEGE and THE FRESHMAN, QOS deals with celebrity sprinter Li Ying (Li-Li Li) who comes to Shanghai from the country and is really really good at running. So they have to come up with a couple more sources of tension, but they don’t develop any of these consistently. There’s a potential romance with Li’s hunky coach, and a school figure with a pencil moustache and neck to match. Then there’s a brief interlude where fame goes to Li’s head and she neglects her training to go to a football match and a youth club (scandalous stuff). But that only takes up ten minutes.

Then there are the mean girls who plot to defeat Li, but their plot just involves trying to win against her, which I thought was the point of the sport anyway. And one of them has a weak heart (new kinds of unconvincing acting are tried out to portray this — a “cough” that causes the actor’s hand to flutter from chest to mouth, plus a lot of writhing about).

I enjoyed seeing 1930s Shanghai, and seeing 1920s college movie fashions ported over from Hollywood — pennants! a ukulele! a tiny silver megaphone! And the training montages with wipes galore, something you didn’t really see in American silents, so this is a combination of silent movie and early talkie visual storytelling. And all those camera movies were lovely.

THE NORTULL GANG (1923) was odd in totally different ways. Four working girls share an apartment in Stockholm (and again, nice to see the city) — their lives and loves and so on. This was based on a novel, and the intertitles went for quite a novelistic approach: events were set up before they happened, but in a mysterious and wry way, so it wasn’t like those 1910 movies where the titles act as spoilers, here they’re TEASERS. This was done so frequently, though, that it all felt like the set-up for a story that was just about to kick off. I was waiting for the story to begin, then realised it had, sort of, and then it ended really nicely. An experiment in narrative — the film has a real tone of voice, ironic, self-deprecating, feminist.

And Nils Aster turned up for the second time this weekend, playing a different kind of louse with a different moustache (he plays a jealous guy in OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS).

Per Lindberg directed sensitively (his other films sound interesting too, mostly talkies) — I spent a lot of time just enjoying the streets, and the kind of stuff people had in their houses and offices. (Incidentally, in a short piece about Dickens’ London, called I think DICKENS’ LONDON, we saw an ad on a bus for something called “Iron Jelloids.” If you can score me some Iron Jellloids, I would be appreciative. In JUST AROUND THE CORNER a cigar store was selling “Egyptian Deities.” I don’t smoke but if a free cigar is offered I take it. This has only happened to me once so the risk of addiction seems slight.)

As for THE WIND… that might merit a whole series of posts…

Beck #1: Inspector Kafka Calls

The first Martin Back novel, Roseanna, came out in 1965 (it’s set the previous year — the novels chart the changes in Swedish society over a decade). The film emerged in 1967. It’s pretty faithful to the story, but has notable differences.

ROSEANNA was directed by Hans Abramson, who also adapted the script. He came from TV, and would go back there just a few years later. A shame, he’s quite deft, stylistically. His movie begins, like CHINATOWN would later, with a series of b&w photographs in extreme close-up, and the images are shuffled before us. This time, though the images show a woman’s naked dead boy on a slab. She’s supposed to have been retrieved from a canal after several days, but of course she looks great. This is pretty near the beginning of the crime show trope of corpse porn, where nude cadavers are lovingly lingered over by the camera. The next example I can think of is Makavejev’s THE TRAGEDY OF/LOVE AFFAIR OF THE SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR, the same year.

Moviemakers have an unfortunate tendency to see the phrase “sex crime” and automatically translate it into “sexy crime.” On the page, Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall’s stories are defiantly anti-erotic, with their clinical descriptions of pubic hair, and they’re at pains to point out that their murdered girl did not have appetising breasts. Nothing is glamourised.

I was immediately cheered by the sight of this gloomy Gus, and felt that at any rate Abramson had somehow found a perfect Beck. Our hero constantly has a cold or seasonal illness, is dyspeptic, smokes and drinks coffee too much, doesn’t eat, has no sex life. He’s a walking example of the unhealthiness of the policeman’s lot in the western world.

Unfortunately, this guy, Tor Isedel (what mocking fate named this glum grey accountant type, essentially, Thor?) is playing Gunnar Ahlberg, the local cop who helps Beck. Beck himself is played by the saturnine and suave Keve Hjelm (Zetterling’s NIGHT GAMES). This is all wrong. But he’s a good actor, so it still kind of works. It’s just a shame to make the character sleek like that. Beck in a Van Dyke beard? No no no. And having the right actor for the part standing right beside him the whole time just reminds to. It’s like Bronagh Gallagher having a small part in MARY REILLY beside the woefully miscast Julia Roberts.

Hjelm does eventually get the sniffles, which was good to see. Well, what actor can resist the opportunity to blow his nose in the middle of someone else’s line? (Donald Pleasence, stand up, and put that hanky away. And no, the nasal inhaler is no better.)

In the novel, Roseanna McGraw, homicide-victim-to-be, comes from the American midwest. Abramson evidently wasn’t lured by the fleshpots of Nebraska so he relocates her to Puerto Rico and gets Svensk Filmindustri to pay for his vacation. Maybe he is a cinematic genius.

One person who definitely is is Sven Nykvist, who shot this, in an airy, light, slightly washed-out summer style. A dark story filmed in a bright manner. The novel tells you about the summer, but you don’t feel warmed. The action of the book covers months, and so Sjöwall and Wahlöö get to write passages like “7 January arrived and looked liked 7 January. The streets were full of grey, frozen people without money.”

Now, I’m watching ROSEANNA without subtitles, because the Swedish DVD has none. But chunks of it are in English because Beck has the assistance of American detective Elmer B. Kafka (!), who interviews Roseanna’s lover and former flatmate. The latter is played by Diane Varsi, the film’s most familiar face (to me — PEYTON PLACE, COMPULSION, BLOODY MAMA). The English language scenes are NOT GOOD. The laid-back, informal style of the Swedish dialogue (dunno what they’re saying but it sounds l-b. and i.) yields to hilariously stiff, robotic delivery much like the English-speakers in Japanese movies who I always enjoy. Varsi is actually fine but Michael Tolan as Kafka is one for the ages. Blame the language problem (lack of direction) because he had a long, perfectly successfully acting career and was no just some bozo off the street as the performance would suggest.

Needless to say I enjoyed greatly the ineptitude, which was all the more amusing since it would burst into the film intermittently, with everything else very professional and slick. I also enjoyed the film’s use o/f pseudodocumentary techniques grafted onto the police procedural form and looking like they were made for it: home movie footage, interviews with witnesses that play like movie interviews. Even the soft, reassuring purr of the camera motor, a near-constant presence on the soundtrack, brings a vérité vibe. Also, the most cups I’ve ever seen on a ceiling:

Someone once described my old acquaintance David McKenzie’s YOUNG ADAM as an “existential barge thriller” and at long last I’ve found another film that fits that sub-sub-genre. Oh, I guess Compton Bennett’s beautiful DAYBREAK (1948) is another.

Deciding to cast an angelic, baby-faced young actor as the killer is a nice touch — the book’s psycho seems a little harder. And it makes me think — around this time Hitchcock was planning his own sex killer pic, the never-made KALEIDOSCOPE, which would have borrowed much of its look and technique from European art cinema, notably Antonioni. Hitchcock remarked that it was hard to tackle this kind of story without falling into the convention of the police hiring a girl to act as bait, which is exactly what Beck does in this story. In the book, a chance traffic accident hinders the cops from getting to the scene: professionalism is continually undermined by the ridiculousness of happenstance in the Beck novels. That slightly conventional suspense device is jettisoned here, which is OK, but I feel they deal a blow to authenticity by having their decoy welcome the killer into her bed. Good luck getting a conviction against him after that.

ROSEANNA seems pretty fine, from what I could tell — it makes the shrewd decision to fragment time, as if were being shown a case file in cinematic form, full of stray bits. An early case of Resnais and Godard’s innovations getting pumped into more mainstream cinema. It allows Abramson to unfold a slow story without much looming jeopardy (detectives are rarely in danger in a true story) while keeping things lively and unpredictable. It’s just a shame they didn’t have the nerve to reproduce the book’s most radical elements, the uncharismatic hero and unglamorous victim. Maybe if they had, they’d have gotten a series out of it. That would have to wait…

Martin Beck will return in THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE — soon!

The Sunday Intertitle: Yeast

A full day in Bo’ness at last, soaking up the Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema. Four shows on Saturday —

Buster Keaton & Eddie Cline’s MY WIFE’S RELATIONS — world premiere of newly discovered ending!

Doubled with Garvin and Marion Byron in A PAIR OF TIGHTS, a Hal Roach farce from the mind of Leo McCarey!

VARIETE by EA Dupont in a fresh restoration of glistening quality!

DAYBREAK, a fascinating Chinese rarity from the thirties in a hideous DVD, cropped and lacking contrast!

WUNDER DER SCHOPFUNG — German space documentary — a film that is to sci-fi what HAXAN is to horror, using a factual basis as pretext for as many startling images as possible.

I also saw Jessie, a volunteer who mentioned that she never makes it into the videos about Bo’ness, so I thought I’d give her some publicity here.

Just time maybe to comment on the new ending of MY WIFE’S RELATIONS. The original cut fizzled out with Buster battling his in-laws in their newly acquired mansion, then swiftly cut to him on the back of a sleeper car — a favourite escape ending. This time the train is the Reno Express, so a quickie divorce is intimated. As a final shot it’s perfect, but the film doesn’t seem to get as there. A colossal ellipse gapes, not entirely complete-able by the imagination.

This new ending gets Buster out the house at least, but then the film simply stops, sans resolution. It’s absolutely clear to me that the two endings must be combined — Buster escapes the house AND boards the train. Then you got an ending. I’m even wondering, based on another error in the restoration involving the Polish intertitles (don’t ask), whether a combined ending was intended and then overlooked. Such blunders do happen — I saw several in Bologna involving restored Chaplin shorts which were still works-in-progress.

More on the rest of these soon. I’m in the edit today! If I’m VERY lucky and efficient I might make it to STELLA DALLAS (1925) this evening.