Enough Rope

Um. This is the first time I can remember feeling the pressure that I suspect broadsheet reviewers suffer from. The way they seem to go in lock-step so much of the time, even remarking on the same points in the films under discussion. Occasionally you’ll get a “look at me” review where someone will defend a movie that’s been trashed by everyone else. Rarer to get a lone negative review. One feels like one is missing out on something perceived readily by others.

So it feels vaguely sacrilegious of me to be writing that I found Jane Campion’s film THE POWER OF THE DOG a little… dull. Incredibly lovely-looking. Good performances. But neither Fiona or I felt the dread that others have talked about. We felt a notable lack of tension, actually. It may be because Benedict Cumberbatch isn’t a natural tough guy. I’m not sure tough is something you can act. Though certainly a lot of movie tough guys were probably not so tough in reality, they looked it on the screen, and Benedict doesn’t. There’s nothing wrong with his acting. He’s clearly committed to the physicality. His character is nasty — Fiona wanted someone to hit him, immediately. It wasn’t clear why nobody did, because he didn’t seem like the kind of fellow they’d be scared of.

Kubrick reckoned that intelligence was the only quality that couldn’t be acted, which sounds good, but doesn’t seem true to me. If the actors learn the lines and how to pronounce the big words, they can make it seem like they’re thinking them up — that’s what actors do. OK, maybe Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist is pushing it, but usually the illusion is achievable. As John Huston cruelly observed, in FREUD, Montgomery Clift makes us believe he’s thinking.

So I think a certain kind of danger, toughness, hardness, is the unactable quality, it’s a matter of physiognomy and essence. If R. Lee Ermey can’t make Matthew Modine look like a killer, what chance does Jane Campion have with the lovely Mr. Cumberbatch? In fact, BC may have the opposite problem: he can’t hide his intelligence. So he can’t say “It’s time she faces up to a few — whatchacallum? — facts!” and make us believe he’s that inarticulate. The solution would be for him to get so furious he starts to lose his language, but does he have that kind of anger in him?

Without the fear seeming real, the movie becomes a succession of attractive scenes of people who don’t communicate. Which is of only mild interest, until things get strange with Kodi-Smit McPhee.

THE POWER OF THE DOG: KODI SMIT-McPHEE as PETER in THE POWER OF THE DOG. Cr. KIRSTY GRIFFIN/NETFLIX © 2021

We did get really excited about the bit with the dog though. There’s a shape in the hills — a barking dog — and only two of the characters can see it. It’s a shadow. The hills themselves vaguely resemble crouching animals, but when they talk about the dog, it took me ages to see it. And then I helped Fiona see it. It’s good and subtle. Imagine what a scene we’d have made in a cinema. (We watched on Netflix.)

Can you see the dog?

I guess I’m doing something human and stupid — assuming that because I wasn’t bowled over by the film, others who say they were are being insincere. I guess also if I felt my opinion had any chance of affecting Campion’s employment prospects — it’s been too long since her last film, and the climate is not favourable to anyone making dramas without people getting punched through buildings — I would bite my tongue. And if I were interviewing Campion and she started talking about getting Benedict Cumberbatch and Jessie Plemons to waltz together so they would learn each others smell and feel like brothers, I might not suggest getting them to wrestle instead. But I would think it.

Clip Joint

Essanay released TRIPLE TROUBLE in 1918, over two years after Chaplin had left the studio, and they claimed in advertisements that it was a complete Chaplin film they’d been hanging on to. In fact, it’s a couple of sequences from the abandoned feature LIFE, a few bits of POLICE, and the last shot of WORK, patched together with new footage specially filmed by Leo White.

Chaplin sued, arguing that this fraudulent Frankenstein of a film would damage his professional standing. Essanay successfully argued that critics, many of whom reviewed the film favourably, couldn’t tell the difference, and so neither could the public. So much for newspaper reviewers.

I’m writing about the film now since all the Chaplin footage in it was shot in 1915. I’m writing about it at all because it does include material, the LIFE outtakes, which is not available elsewhere. (Cutting together the scenes Chaplin himself repurposed for POLICE with the scenes here would give us a stronger idea of the unfinished movie’s narrative.)

The film begins with a chaotic series of random shots of context-free characters — a mad scientist, a count, a butler, a cook, Charlie and Edna as a skivvies. Which is pretty much how it continues. In the fuzzy print on YouTube, few intertitles seem to survive, so White’s plan, if he had one, is obscured. He himself is playing a count, though, and he’s trying to buy the radio-controlled explosives from the scientist. The scientist is refusing — we can imagine him saying “I intended my radio-controlled explosive to be used for peaceful means!” (credit to Simon Kane for this joke) — and so White seems to send hired thug Wesley Ruggles to achieve something or other.

As David Robinson says, some of White’s scene matching is quite clever — Charlie exits carrying a bin, and White cuts to new footage of himself in typical silk hat mode, walking down the street, only for the bin to rise over a high fence and tip its contents over him. The montage makes us believe Charlie is wielding the second bin, and that there’s in fact only one bin. As with his mangling of A BURLESQUE ON CARMEN, White is also reasonably adept at match-cutting entrances and exits filmed some time (two years?) apart. He doesn’t have much of the original cast to play with, but Billy Armstrong, extravagantly moustached, matches his own exits with new entrances and ties the various separately-shot sequences together, bodily. The trouble is, White — as we know from ABOC, is really shit at narrative.

Oh, he’s helped by something else — Wesley Ruggles apparently was to appear in LIFE as a thug, wearing the same costume he has on in POLICE, but with bigger fake eyebrows. And his trousers don’t seem to be torn yet in LIFE. Curiously, Chaplin shelved all the Ruggles material from LIFE, but kept other footage for use in POLICE, along with Ruggles and his pinstripes. So White is able to use film of Ruggles in both LIFE and POLICE (optically flipping the latter into Looking Glass Land, which shows a certain scrupulousness about disguising his perfidy) along with new material of Ruggles running around firing his gun indoors, which he cuts together with Charlie reacting in unflipped POLICE shots.

Actually, this may not even be Ruggles in the LIFE footage, just a guy wearing his suit.

None of this micro-cunning matters because on a macro level the film is a mess. But let’s look at the Chaplin bits.

The stuff in the house which isn’t from POLICE shows Charlie being incompetent with a bin, which he tips on Edna through carelessness. It’s not particularly inspired, and is interestingly mainly because we discover that, in LIFE, Charlie was to have worn a top with striped sleeves, revealed whenever he removed his tiny jacket. Why this insignificant change in the customary costume? We may never know.

The flophouse scenes, a different batch from POLICE’s, are much more interesting. In LIFE, there were apparently to have been two flophouse nights, a contrasting set. TT uses the second sequence, in which Charlie arrives with a cigar, probably filched from his new employer. He was penniless in the scene that appeared in POLICE, now he has money to hide from a thief who’s robbing the snoring schnorrers.

The IMDb mentions Snub Pollard, who’s evidently too well-disguised for me to identify, and also Albert Austin, in what would be his only Chaplin Essanay appearance, as “man.” Didn’t clock him either.

Ruggles’ motivation here is opaque, but he’s evidently a bad guy. No sympathetic character could sport such caterpillarish eyebrows.

Charlie is pretty nasty too, using one drunk’s mouth as an ashtray, and later silencing the fellow with one of Essanay’s sugar-glass beer bottles. It’s a return to the viciousness of THE PROPERTY MAN — interestingly, both derive from Chaplin’s early life experiences — the workhouse dormitory and backstage life. This seems to bring out his sadism.

“A laugh is an elegy for the death of an emotion” ~ Nietzsche.

“Chaplin is a very simple case. He is compelled to endlessly reenact the humiliations of poverty” ~ Freud.

There are more extravagantly outlandish rags being worn in this sequence — Chaplin could give Terry Gilliam a run for his money when it comes to using the homeless as set decoration.

I’m not 100% sure than Chaplin intended LIFE to be a feature, but that’s what the sources say. What survives looks like maybe half a two-reeler. Charlie struggles to get a place in the flophouse, then gets a job emptying bins at a house where Mabel works, returns to the flophouse (comparatively) flush with money.

The scientist thing is entirely White’s invention, but forms an interesting antecedent to Laurel & Hardy’s DIRTY WORK, where the boys are chimney cleaners arriving at the home of a mad scientist, an odd juxtaposition of story elements which may have been inspired by White’s desperately improvisations here.

The scientist’s invention is accidentally detanated at the “climax” of TRIPLE TROUBLE, a sequence which, for obvious reasons, barely involves Charlie. The most interesting shot in the film shows the kops (of course there are kops) apparently tumbling through the air, having been blasted skywards by the almighty boom. The crummy print and video interlacing render the image almost incoherent, but it seems like an interesting effect.

And then Charlie pokes his head from an oven, stolen from the end of WORK. Ruggles, in a new shot, lobs a brick at him — a callback to Keystone days — White cuts back to Charlie reacting to random rubble in WORK, and the thing ends.

I find repurposed footage movies sort of interesting, from WHAT’S NEW, TIGER LILY? to HERCULES UNCHAINED to DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID and TRAIL OF THE PINK PANTHER. They never really work, though. You would think that those which have the luxury of being able to shoot new material with some of the same actors would be the most coherent, but Blake Edwards and Leo White can prove the contrary.

On Sunday, we begin Chaplin’s Mutual period — I’m excited! These are the Charlie Chaplin films I grew up with, or failed to grow up with, on BBC2, accompanied by the Goed Nieuws Orkest. Alas, their lovely Chaplin violin theme is nowhere to be found today…

The Hitman and Her

I didn’t like PRIZZI’S HONOR that much at the time — but I just read Richard Condon’ s source novel, which is terrific, so I gave the movie another shot. Nope, still don’t like it much, but for different reasons.

I wondered at the time if John Huston were getting a free pass from critics because was obviously nearing the end of his run, and because everyone was relieved this wasn’t another ANNIE or ECAPE TO VICTORY. I’m pretty sure now that’s EXACTLY what was happening. But I’m kind of glad it did: we got THE DEAD, maybe as a result of this one doing quite well, and THE DEAD is maybe a great film, certainly a great note to end on. Its cinematic qualities are very slight, but everything is good enough to let the writing and performances carry it, and they do. Result: majesty.

PRIZZI’S HONOR is quite extraordinarily faithful to its source, which turn s out to be a good thing in this case: even the photographs mounted behind William Hickey at the ceremony he throw s to announce his son’s quasi-retirement are as Condon describes them: Toscanini, Pope Pius XII, Enrico Caruso and Richard M. Nixon.

The supporting actors resemble their characters as described in the book to a startling degree: Don Corrado has tiny, steely eyes so William Hickey, playing a man thirty years older than himself, causes his normal-sized eyeballs to shrink by will alone. He’s a 100% convincing octogenarian in his late fifties, and it has nothing to do with the vampire makeup they’ve given him. (A critic once complained that Hickey wasn’t realistic in some play he was doing: Hickey remarked, “People don’t go to the theatre to see REALITY, they go to see AAAAAAAAAAAAAAACTING!“)

Here’s Condon describing Maerose Prizzi through protagonist Charley Partanna’s eyes:

“Maerose was a great woman even if she had messed up. She was a very wop looker, all eyes and beautiful bones among the grabbing domes and dunes. She was almost as tall as Charley, with sad eyes and long fingers. She was a woman who had done everything right — except once.”

Easy to picture John Huston reading that and thinking, I know who’d be just right for it. Of course, Anjelica Huston isn’t Italianamerican but of all the WASP actors in the cast she gets it the most right. And she’s stylised but real, like Hickey. She overplays everything and makes you like it.

The film’s problem is Jack Nicholson. It isn’t necessarily a fatal flaw that he doesn’t resemble the Charley Partanna in the book, a physically imposing tough guy. “Jesus he was big. He was like a tall rectangle of meat and hair.” But his dumpy appearance gives Kathleen Turner severe motivational problems when she has to act falling in love with him.

Huston at the time remarked that most of the takes in the film were take one, thanks to Jack. Looking at it now, I think it needed a few more takes, all the way through. Maybe not Kubrickian numbers, that had a weird effect, but just a few more to let him calm down and let his co-stars get used to him.

Nicholson plays the thing with a prosthesis in his upper lip which does make him look like a mook, but does nothing for his supposed seductiveness and is a bit distracting: we know he’s NOT a mook, just Jack Nicholson with a thing in his lip. He also overplays Charley’s dumbness, adding to our puzzlement about why Turner should be attracted to him. In the book this is all made clear with prose from her point of view: she needs to seduce Charley to pull off the scam she’s running, then falls for him because nobody was ever so kind to her, and he’s fantastic in the sack. None of this is really present in the film.

Kathleen Turner struck Fiona as “just kind of plastic,” which I think is because what she’s acting against makes no sense to her and she has to try to shut it out and project a fantasy co-star to act opposite. She must have seen Nicholson was a problem — dumb, slobby and ugly — but her director was apparently enamoured of the guy. Maybe JH should have taken Turner’s role.

The editor is obviously smitten too: scenes which could cut sharply on a funny line are allowed to expire slowly over a lingering dissolve. Nicholson has one of these unconvincing phone calls where nobody says “‘Bye,” and instead of cutting, which could have solved that nicely, we have to look at him vamp while waiting for his director to say “Cut.” Sometimes those moments are golden. One shouldn’t say “Cut,” until every possible thing has happened. But then one should be brutal in the edit. Here, Nicholson shifts awkwardly on his feet, then LOOKS AT THE PHONE QUIZZICALLY. Something nobody ever did. Ever! And it gives us plenty of time to wonder if the phone call is over. Aren’t they going to say goodbye?

Find a woman who looks at you like Kathleen Turner is pretending to look at Jack Nicholson here.

Stanley Kubrick wanted to cast Nicholson as Napoleon, which we all know would have been hilarious because we’ve seen him in uniform in THE TERROR, but his reasoning was that Nicholson projected intelligence, “the one quality that can’t be faked.” Ridiculously untrue: write intelligent lines for an actor and he can learn not only the words but their meaning, say them like he just thought of them, and look intelligent. Huston knew this from FREUD, where Montgomery Clift was barely functioning. “On the screen, he looked like he was thinking. God knows he wasn’t.”

Nicholson’s trouble is that he can’t fake dumb: he’s an incurable wise-ass and he has to wink at us to let us know he’s not really this dumb jerk of a mob guy.

A shame, because with DeNiro or… or maybe we’ve even found a role Stallone could play? … and a decent editor and a decent font and some better medicine for the director this really could be the film reviewers said it was.

But I’ve been wrong before. As an 18-year-old in 1985 I was confused by Huston’s uncertain period setting — it’s, in fact, a modern film made to feel like a period one, just like WISE BLOOD; and I didn’t like that the lovers were fatally parted. I thought the movie’s job, having put this insuperable barrier of mob life between them, was to somehow solve the problem. I think the film fails as a comic tragedy, whereas the book succeeds because you really feel something for the characters, loathsome as they ought to be (we hear a bit about Charley’s career zotzing people and it’s blood-chilling). A lot of the book’s best writing occurs inside the characters’ heads, and naturally, that’s the stuff the (really quite accomplished) script can’t do.

But it did lead to THE DEAD and it did give us Anjelica Huston, who was, whatever the reviewers said, GREAT in her dad’s A WALK WITH LOVE AND DEATH and is great again here.

PRIZZI’S HONOR stars Jack Torrence; Dolores Benedict Hfuhruhurr; ——Morticia Addams; Dick Laurent; Arthur Hamilton; Rudolph Smuntz; Anton Bartok; Joe Cabot; Mo’at; The Horla; and Stanley Kubrick.