The Sunday Intertitle: Old Scenes

So, in our Dickens double-bill, it turned out that, surprisingly, the director of RED-HEADED WOMAN was a better match for the author than the director of A WOMAN’S FACE, or maybe it’s only that the rambling picaresque of DAVID COPPERFIELD is less readily adapted to cinema than A TALE OF TWO CITIES, which is more of a rollicking thriller.

Both 1935 films resort to montages, title cards, hastily summarised scenes in order to compress their sources into a decent span of celluloid. At times, COPPERFIELD seems like lightning sketches stitched together with glass paintings and Vorkapich effects.

George Cukor abandons any hope of a unified style in his cast’s performances, wisely, I think, since it allows W.C. Fields and Roland Young to do their respective things to the fullest of their mighty talents. Fields is terrific, of course, a cartoon made flesh, even his costume design marking him out as an inhabitant of a different genre from everyone else. Young had a brilliant understated schtick as a light comedy sidekick, but when given anything more to do he always delivered — his Uriah Heap is strikingly oleaginous, viviparous, a cringing Gollum seething with pass-agg resentments. It’s hard to process the idea, though, that Freddie Bartholomew and Frank Lawton inhabit the same world, or film.

Freddie is a weird little phenomenon. Given business to do, he does it skillfully (wiping his hand after Heap has shaken it, with a barely-suppressed shudder). Given dialogue, he often appears extraterrestrial, inhuman. Asked to weep, he becomes a disgusting, bleating animal, repelling sympathy. Halfway through the film, we lose him, as Lawton is airdropped in to take up the role, replacing his younger self. Lawton is puppyish but a little dull. I guess Copperfield in the book is just an innocent set of eyes observing the other characters, but in a film we have to look at him.

Hugh Williams spends much of his small part appearing outwardly honourable, a waste of his oily talents — when the scenario permits him to hint at inner rottenness, he’s terrific.

Una O’Connor and Elsa Lanchester add pep — and make me wish James Whale had gotten to film Dickens. Basil Rathbone, whose non-Holmesian career was spent embodying evil, embodies it in a fresh way here, making of his wicked stepfather an alarmingly genuine sexual sadist who gaslights his wife and delights in beating her child. (The purportedly autobiographical FANNY AND ALEXANDER seems to have drawn its inspiration from this sequence, though in fairness not getting on with one’s stepfather is probably quite a common experience.) Herbert Mundin and Edna May Oliver are good living pen-and-ink caricatures. And the extraordinary Lennox Pawle, as the pixillated Mr. Dick — a kind of creature never previously or since represented on film — single-handedly justifies the whole enterprise.

Books on my floor

I did crazy good this week on book purchases —

The Laughton and Altman books came from the All You Can Eat book shop, which is rarely open but always affordable. £1 each. I know Simon Callow’s Laughton book is probably better than Charles Higham’s, but a cursory glance revealed this one to have some merit, and Elsa Lanchester cooperated in it. The Altman book is great and makes me think I should spend a week just catching up with oddities from his long career which have hitherto escaped me, from Combat to THE COMPANY.

I figured I’d read a few snatches of the Laughton — page 17, maybe, and in fact I did read the bit on Sternberg — and then forget it was there, but Fiona grabbed it and devoured it cover to cover so it’s paid its way. Also, there are some wonderful artists’ impressions of the Great Man:

Two by Elsa, and —

One by James Mason and one, a collage, by Brecht.

The Polanski book came from a nearby charity shop. A pretty handsome volume for £5. Polanski provides quotes on each film. There’s not a lot of meat to it — I read it in an afternoon — but it’s glossy and handsome. Many many of the pictures show Polanski doing other people’s jobs — sewing or arranging fights, swinging a log at an outsize opponent.

The Tod Browning one cost the most, from secondhand record-and-bookstore Elvis Shakespeare, a regular stop on my constitutionals. It happened to tie in with a little project I have on the go, so I couldn’t very well pass it up. £15. It’s pretty good — a series of essays on different aspects of Browning’s work. There are some howling factual errors — Roger Corman directing Christopher Lee in DRACULA — but they’re all sort of off-topic. On Browning’s films, the book is informative and insightful.

Horse Operetta

Chris Schneider’s back! With sort-of late Allan Dwan — Dwan’s career was so very long, he arguably has at least a decade of late work… DC

“Can’t you hear what the balalaikas are telling you?”
~ Ilona Massey in NORTHWEST OUTPOST.

“I didn’t think it polite to listen.”
~ voice from the audience

*

Operetta is difficult. Notably when, like the Allan Dwan-directed NORTHWEST OUTPOST (1947), it’s of the “Meet me by the stockade” variety.

NORTHWEST OUTPOST isn’t, y’see, the sort of Lubitsch-ian operetta concerned with mythical kingdoms and the lovelife of satirized monarchs (THE LOVE PARADE, THE MERRY WIDOW). Nor is it a Mamoulian-style tale (see. LOVE ME TONIGHT) of country-house assignations. No, it tells of a Russian settlement in 1830s California, a sheriff-like rep of the US government (Nelson Eddy as Capt. Jim Lawrence), and the arrival of a glamorous-yet-suspect Russian general’s daughter (Ilona Massey as Natalya Alanova) for reasons undeclared and suspicious.

In place of a ladies’ tailor we see forced laborers … and one can only raise an eyebrow at the implied *schadenfreude* of a romance precipitated by the sight of a convict being whipped. Or one where the first kiss comes after badinage about whether or not a plum has worms in it. “I deserved that” responds Massey, a tad fatalistically.

Perhaps this gamy, semi-rural atmosphere can be attributed to co-scenarist Richard Sale, author of the novel that became Borzage’s STRANGE CARGO. The prime mover, though, is probably the film’s composer, Rudolph Friml, whose ROSE MARIE had been a monster hit for MacDonald & Eddy some ten years earlier.

“I make a habit of scaring ladies’ horses” says Eddy at one point — though the line might apply to either OUTPOST or ROSE MARIE, what with the baritone-on-horse action.

What does director Dwan do with the singing objects that are Eddy and Massey — though Massey, to her credit, shows signs of dramatic involvement? Well, Dwan surrounds them with first-rate supporting players like, f’rinstance, Elsa Lanchester, who does heroic work as the governor’s wife both conveying plot points and getting her laughs while maintaining a Russian accent. Hugo Haas is no slouch, either, as her none-too-faithful husband. Or Joseph Schildkraut, who glowers as the prisoner Massey was forced to marry in order to save her father (blah blah blah). There’s even an appearance by Jay Silverheels, who is audibly referred to as “Silverheels.” A Brechtian alienation-effect? Not likely.

Dwan-the-director is felt mostly in an extended Orthodox Easter celebration, with tracking-shots, where Eddy is cantor. Also in a dialogue scene, with Lanchester and Eddy, where Lanchester is embroidering and it’s shot, Sternberg-style, through a huge lace screen.

The lyricist is Edward Heyman, who wrote “Blame It On My Youth” and “When I Fall In Love.” (The charitable will overlook THE KISSING BANDIT.) The number that comes off best is an extended duet called “Nearer, Dearer.” There’s also an over-the-top waltz called “Love Is The Time” which is reprised, at the end, by men on horseback who simultaneously guide their horses and balance a female singer on one knee.

One’s eye often rolls. When, that is, one is not cheering Elsa Lanchester.

The good end happily, the bad unhappily, and Yakima Canutt shoots the chase scenes. That is what Republic Pictures operetta means.

*

The players, as David Cairns might say, include: Sergeant Bruce; Elsa Frankenstein; Louise Patterson; Monsieur Walter; Judas Iscariot; Olympe the Courtesan; and Tonto.