Shadhov Show

The trip to the movies is probably my favourite part of A KING IN NEW YORK. The parody of rock ‘n’ roll isn’t particularly accurate or acute — though the song is about shoes, apparently a major element of popular tunesmithing — see also “Shoe, shoe, shoe, baby,” broadcast into the afterlife in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH — but the swooning bobbysoxers are funny, as are the movie trailers, even though they look like bizarrely 1930s Warner Bros jobs (only in widescreen), not fifties ballyhoo.

I wish there were more trailers — they allow Chaplin to do, effectively, sketch comedy, a mode we haven’t sen him try before, and the pace peps the film up. We get a joke about sex changes/gender reassignment, then a big news story thanks to “the Danish girl” — Edward D. Wood’s GLEN OR GLENDA? appeared the same year, and then a parody of widescreen in which a western shoot-out forces the audience to turn their heads as if spectating a tennis match (or at least a movie tennis match, as in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN).

This stuff is faintly Tashlinesque, and Tashlin would have been a decent role model for Chaplin’s acidic attack on America. The guiding principles would be — (1) keep things moving, get one gag out of the way fast so you can bring on the next (2) fire in all directions (the motto of Fassbinder) (3) have a narrative throughline kept taut with tension that serves as a laundry line to hang the jokes on.

Well, outside of this brief bit, Chaplin doesn’t do any of that. The film doesn’t have a clear central reason to exist — yes, but what about a king in New York? — save for the anti-McCarthy stuff and the odd crack at American culture, which are shunted into the margins in favour of just watching this king try his hand at various things. He has a mission in America — to promote a revolutionary plan for nuclear power — but this depends on meeting the men from the Atomic Commission, who won’t meet him. So we have that dreaded thing, a passive protagonist, twiddling his thumbs…

Chaplin does his best to keep himself occupied, but a king staying at the Ritz does not face the immediate existential dilemmas of a tramp. The money King Shadhov has stolen (the movie tries to fudge this, but it seems he has stolen at least some of the nation’s wealth, before the crooked prime minister steals that from him) sets him up pleasantly, and then the blandishments of the advertisers who try to lure him into debasing himself are regularly rejected on the grounds of integrity, which makes it hard for us to believe in him as hard up, until suddenly they aren’t, which makes it hard for us to believe in his integrity…

Another general point: Chaplin revisited this film some years after making it, making fourteen short deletions. These don’t remove anything funny or important, but they do tend to wreck the flow. One scene ends with Shadhov asking where his overcoat is, and being told it’s in the outer office, but we never see him go there and fetch it, making the exchange more pointless than it already is. (Since THE GREAT DICTATOR, Chaplin has ceased to critique dialogue on the basis of necessity. He just lets them chatter.)

Sometimes we can guess why the cuts were made: outside the cinema (showing THE BABY AND THE BATTLESHIP, a British picture), every single extra seems to glance at the camera, a surprising gaffe. The assistant director on this is René Dupont, and I suggest we hold him to task for this — he’s apparently still alive at 96, and we share the same birthday apart from me not being 96 (yet).

It’s as if Chaplin’s tendency to look at the camera, establishing a rapport with his chums in the audience, which he’s now weaned himself off, has spread to the background artists. Or as if they shot this on location with real people and an insufficiently concealed camera.

Since Shadhov doesn’t have one big thing to do (as the Tramp always did), Chaplin diverts him with little tasks. Sometimes these show promise, and aren’t developed long enough. Ordering food in a restaurant where the loud band makes speech inaudible seems a good opportunity to remind us of our star’s mime skills, but the scene is brief and Oliver Johnston gets as much gesticulation as Chaplin.

At other times, the diversions are bafflingly pointless. The Queen shows up, played by Maxine Audley (blind woman from PEEPING TOM). Nothing of the slightest interest passes between the royals. There is no dramatic tension, not even unresolved sexual tension, and though divorce is discussed nobody has strong feelings about the subject one way of the other. This is a blast of dead air arriving mid-way through what I suppose we must call the first act, occupying five deadly minutes of screen time and stopping the film in its tracks like a blunderbuss to the head. I *guess* CC must have wanted some kind of Noel Coward air of sophistication with everybody behaving in a tebbly civilised way, but there’s no MEAT to be skirted around. There’s an elephant-shaped hole in the room. Nothing to be civilised about.

It’s almost a relief, then, when sex rears its particularly creepy head — King Shadhov (and his equally aged secretary) discover Dawn Addams bathing in the adjoining bathroom — and by “discover” I mean they enthusiastically peep at her. This inspires more pantomime — Shadhov disappointed miming that he can only see her head, then that the shower curtain’s in the way. On the one hand, a bit of farce-comedy energy is injected — on the other, it’s all very grubby and off-putting. Chaplin has been careful not to be lustful onscreen since his sex/divorce scandal in the twenties. The Tramp’s priapic imp side hasn’t had an outing since the mad scene in MODERN TIMES (alibied by insanity) and Hynkel’s extremely brisk wooing of a secretary. Verdoux is all business and Calvero is all muted romance. In a way, this new frankness could be refreshing, except that, despite all that tennis, Chaplin is not a particularly youthful-looking 68-year-old, and anyway, this is PEEPING.

(Movies used to assume peeping was something all males would indulge in, given the chance. It’s interesting to watch

Dawn Addams — who is extremely beautiful — is an interesting presence here. As a lure inserted into Shadhov’s luxury hotel in order to get him mixed up in something shady, she’s performing the same plot function she does in THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR MABUSE, where millionaire Peter Van Eyck discovers her on his window ledge at the Luxor. And the voyeurism seems to connect the two films too. Fritz Lang, of course, had not forgotten how to keep a plot motor running at all times.

Shortly after falling into Addams’ bathtub, Shadhov washes in his own, under the electronic eye of a TV screen oozing sexy commercials at him, with a built-in windscreen wiper for condensation a decent bit of satire which also recalls the lavatory CCTV in MODERN TIMES. A reminder that if Chaplin doesn’t want to do Tashlin, he might do Tati. But on the whole I’d prefer him to do Chaplin. But he won’t…

Buenos Aires, England

Very happy to catch up with LA BESTIA DEBE MORIR — (THE BEAST MUST DIE) — from the novel by Nicholas Blake. Now I’ve seen all the adaptations. Claude Chabrol’s French version quite sensibly removes the gentleman detective hero, Nigel Strangeways, and makes the murderer the protagonist, which he essentially is in the book. The recent Ridley Scott-produced miniseries retains Strangeways but makes him a boring policeman with boring PTSD, and you wish the focus was on the killer, who is now a woman (Cush Jumbo, magnificent) which works just as well.

(There’s no werewolf break in any of these, though. In my view, every movie deserves a werewolf break — a moment of silent contemplation when we consider which of the characters would be the werewolf, if only this were a werewolf movie.)

This Argentinian version comes from Román Viñoly Barreto, director of EL VAMPIRO NEGRO, a quasi-remake of Fritz Lang’s M which is quite impressive. This one might be even better, except for the unconvincing false beard you have to look at for most of the movie. But there are bravura moments, and the film retains the novel’s unconventional structure — there’s a looong flashback which breaks the movie kind of into thirds.

The revelation is that this works — Blake’s structure was sound, if you play it pretty much the way he intended. Surprisingly, the titular beast, the worst man in the world, George Rattery (Guillermo Battaglia), gets somewhat de-emphasized. Also surprisingly, he dies in the first scene, then re-appears in the flashbacks and is so awful you can’t wait for him to die again. One of our friends watching along with us remotely would have been quite happy for the guy to die twice, in the best Karloffian tradition.

The other weird thing is that the filmmakers retain the English setting and character names, though everyone speaks Spanish and many of the actors are very obviously South American. It’s possible that making the story happen in a far-off land diverted the censors from inferring any social critique.

Cameraman Alberto Etchebehere has developed the X-Files approach to night shoots, blasting a big light through the treetops to simulate moonlight, only there seem to be moons everywhere you turn. Whatever, it’s dramatic and beautiful. He gets the same effect with some strange streetlights, which certainly don’t look British, although the fog is authentic.

Also, lovely Hollywood-style hallucinatory dream-flashback montage.

First Deebs

Harry Piel is big in the Giornate Del Cinema Muto this year. And I was excited to see, finally, a Joe Deebs thriller. These detective yarns were big Germany during and immediately after the great war — Joe May made his name in them, and Fritz Lang got his first movie job by selling a thriller plot to May (DIE HOCHZEIT IM EXCENTRICCLUB). Harry Piel, who specialties as star-director was stunts and explosions, would obviously fit right in.

While I was researching May for our video essay on THE INDIAN TOMB, I got interested in these capers, but there were none available to see. I would have liked — would still like — to see one helmed by May himself, but Piel should be a capable substitute.

Meanwhile, here are some posters and ads for some of these detective flicks. The first detective hero was Stuart Webbs — the detectives were always English, in honour/imitation of Sherlock Holmes, and the German populace flocked to these Anglophile adventures even as we were killing each other en masse in the trenches.

And Webbs begat Deebs — May split with his star who went off to make more Webbs films, so May started a rival character with the strange name of Deebs.

As with James Bond, Deebs was played by several different actors, and they tended to pursue separate careers as soon as they’d made a name for themselves. Deebs was also known by different names in different territories — Prof. Nick Fantom is a much cooler name.

Can’t wait to see this vintage malarkey. Cover me — I’m going in.