The Sunday Intertitle: Three to Get Ready

So, didn’t make it in for STEAMBOAT BILL, JR but rocked up in time for Frank Lloyd’s OLIVER TWIST, with Neil Brand on piano — great stuff, actually a revelation on the big screen and with proper accompaniment. Our second remember of the Standing theatrical family appeared, Joan Standing, a Standing by marriage (Herbert Standing was in JUST AROUND THE CORNER way back on Friday was it?). John Standing, perhaps the last of the line, is still with us. I said this to friends and Mark immediately volunteered “I’m Still Standing” while Steph offered “Last Man Standing.”

My programme notes for this one are here.

Next up was OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS, a glossy MGM se-and-morality fable. You get not only Joan Crawford but also Anita Page and Nils Aster and Johnny Mack Brown and Dorothy Sebastian and Edward Nugent — all very sleek and elegant. Much as I enjoyed the funhouse visage of Ernest Torrence in MANTRAP, his facial contours a slalom for the eyeballs, there was much to be said for this panoply of male and female loveliness, surrounded by Cedric Gibbons’ moderne sets and aglow with studio moonlight. Maude Nelissen wrenched such heartache from the piano it had to get an emergency retuning in the interval.

Final film would have been THE ORGANIST OF ST VITUS (Martin Fric) but if I’d stayed for that one I wouldn’t have made it home, so the actual last film was THE RACKET, my man Lewis Milestone, and livelier than I’d remembered it, aided by more thugs with ugly mugs than you could shake Percy Marmont at — Louis Wolheim leading the mob with his impacted fender of a fizzog, and George “the Runt” E. Stone playing his equally lovely son. It’s a Howard Hughes production so some of the subsidiary goons may have been picked up from the real rackers, as was purportedly done on SCARFACE. Marie Prevost was ace, and director Milestone himself cameo’d as a speakeasy doorman (“Swordfish!”) ~

“Skeets” Gallagher played a drunken journo with a marked air of Frank McHugh avant la lettre. I googled the play to see whether McHugh had perchance originated the role and sleepy-eyed Gallagher mimicked his perf, but no. (But my research reminded me that John Cromwell starred in the play, and got to direct the remake.) Perhaps McHugh patterned his schtick on Gallagher, or perhaps the McHugh archetype was haunting the Jungian unconch for some time before manifesting — for Milestone! — in THE FRONT PAGE a few scant years later? (There are a few earlier McHugh appearances, but his role in TFP — as “McCue” — seems to set the seal on his persona.)

Mike Nolan (piano) and Frank Bockius (percussion) enhanced this one considerable. I had a ringside seat for the drum kit — RACKET is right! — no sleeping through that one. A riotous jazz-age end to the evening.

More tomorrow!

Elmer Takes the Stage

SPITE MARRIAGE is a transitional Buster Keaton film: he plays a character called Elmer for the first time, his face is starting to show signs of age and dissolution, it’s not always as funny as it should be. All clear markers of the MGM influence which would destroy Keaton’s filmmaking and movie star career as soon as he starts talking.

Elmer is a pitiable dope and a sad sack, qualities that would be forced on Keaton repeatedly in the coming years. On the other hand, Elmer wins out by showing typical Buster fortitude in the name of love, so he’s not the fully warped character of the early thirties.

Next time I watch this movie, (and though it’s not a patch on even THE CAMERAMAN, its immediate predecessor, it’s good enough to reward repeat viewings) I must mute the soundtrack (or get the new restoration). For the first half, crappy sound effects highlight every pratfall or reaction, ruining them. It’s like adding exclamation marks to every sentence in a PG Wodehouse novel. Overemphasis kills.

Buster/Elmer is a stagestruck fan in love with actress Dorothy Sebastian (his real-life mistress for some years). When her beau takes up with hot society dame Leila Hyams, she marries Elmer to spite him. Some stuff happens and there’s a big fight on a boat.

Not much holds this narrative together — Buster was aware that THE CAMERAMAN was in danger of losing its throughline by not concentrating enough on Buster’s mission to succeed as a newsreel photographer (modern observers note the movie as a benign ancestor of NIGHTCRAWLER) — but by echoing the situations in Sebastian’s play (a Civil War melodrama), the climax just about fools us into thinking the film hangs together.

The only situation which strongly relates to the central idea as stated in the title is the drunken honeymoon night sequence, where Buster strives to put a comatose Sebastian to bed — and he had to fight to keep that scene in the picture, which is evidence of the incompetence he was up against. It’s an amazing bit of simple-yet-brilliant physical comedy. I guess you could say it slows the pace down, but it’s also, as Buster would say, “the biggest laughing scene in the picture.” The trouble probably was that once the suits had seen it a few times, they’d stop laughing and they only noticed the slowness. In this business, you have to NOTICE when you laugh and REMEMBER it.

The stuff involving the play is rather weak, though it returns to Buster’s obsession with the antebellum south. The trashing of sentiment here is probably easier to take, though, for those disturbed by THE GENERAL’s taking the wrong side.

When Buster accepts a small role in the play and destroys it, the mild malice involved in travestying its cliches is enjoyable, but it’s hard to laugh when the theatre audience is doing that for us, by way of frequent cutaways. For perhaps the first time in Keaton’s work, there’s an emotional confusion as to what response is being aimed at: are we supposed to guffaw along with the Broadway crowd or feel pity for Buster’s humiliation? Also, Buster is disfigured by the stage whiskers he’s incompetently glued to his face. One doesn’t like to see Buster’s beauty defiled.

Psychologically it’s interesting: in defending his vaudeville upbringing, Keaton would say that he got all the normal beatings a child would receive in those days, only on the stage. As if that made it OK. As if that wouldn’t be humiliating. It would be easy to overstress this. Keaton enjoyed performing and seemed able to ignore pain. But I suspect his relationship to performing, to audiences, to being laughed at, was a touch complicated. I mean, most performers seem to see the audience as a kind of opponent to be conquered. And Keaton’s comedy requires him to be a put-upon underdog. But he never wanted to ASK for sympathy. He wanted to WIN it.

Keaton might be the only slapstick star who’d wind up bloodied onscreen — he does it in THE SAPHEAD and one or two shorts as well as here. Others might don comedy plaster casts, but Keaton allows a touch of realism into the drubbings, although, as with Jackie Chan’s occasional bloody lips or bruises, it’s realism of a limited kind — our hero is still sort of invulnerable.

First Blush

The third in an informal trilogy (and really, everyone should make informal trilogies — they’re the best kind), following OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS and OUR MODERN MAIDENS, OUR BLUSHING BRIDES (1930) is the first full talkie in the sequence, and the earliest talkie I’d seen Joan Crawford in. (I’m now excited to see UNTAMED — as who wouldn’t be, with that title? — her very first speechifying role.)

Shaking up the familiar format of leggy girls and lush deco sets, the movie casts Joan and regular co-star/sacrificial lamb Anita Page as shopgirls, with Dorothy Sebastian completing the traditional trio. DS is really good in this, and it’s a shame she’s the one who slid into extra roles. The department store they work in (Crawford is a mannequin, her friends and flatmates sell perfumes and blankets respectively) is a relatively restrained, realist construction, so that we have to wait until the fashion show at the millionaire’s country retreat before we get any Cedric Gibbons elegance, but it’s worth the wait ~

Uncredited director Harry Beaumont directs fluidly — there are some long “photographs of people talking” scenes, but also some propulsive tracking shots with overlapping crowd dialogue and a dynamic mix of synch and post-synch sound: an early lingerie pageant has a Greek chorus of female customers babbling over it, perhaps to fix the scene as a fashion show rather than a skin show in the censor’s mind. Whatever, it’s a pleasingly weird effect.

Sociopolitically, we’re still in flux: the working girl stuff is quite Warner Bros, with sympathy for the gold-digging impulse (it’s what our current Glorious Leaders would call Social Mobility), but Joan is portrayed as the wisest of the three little pigs, the one who doesn’t trust men and won’t accept the advances of tiny-child-in-a-tux Robert Montgomery until he’s proved his intentions are honourable. Whereas Page and Sebastian both get royally taken by the predatory males they’re foolish enough to believe. This means we get to see Page’s shagging palace (above), a spectacular streamlined suite with leather-bound volumes just for show (“David says women shouldn’t ruin their minds with thinking,” gurgles Page), but the biggest treat is Montgomery’s tree-house —

Yes. This is a tree-house. By Cedric Gibbons. What, no swimming pool?

You can buy the first two films in the series —

Our Dancing Daughters
Our Modern Maidens