When I was a student we worked something out, before we had any great understanding of lighting. If you put a lamp on the floor, it would look interesting. But when you mucked about with fill lighting and three-point lighting and realistic lighting and you didn’t know what you were doing, you just spoiled it. So the cry went out, “Just put a lamp on the floor!” It was quick and easy and it looked great, even if it didn’t make any sense.
On Sunday we had a double bill of THE BAT WHISPERS (1930) and the following year’s THE BLACK CAMEL, the which I understood to be the first surviving Charlie Chan movie with Warner Oland. (Run-down of earlier entries — Paul Leni’s THE CHINESE PARROT with Sôjin Kamiyama as Chan is currently lost, alas; so is the serial THE HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY featuring George Kuwa; BEHIND THAT CURTAIN, the earliest surviving Chan, has a bewildered-looking E.L. Park in a tiny cameo as Chan, looking as if he just wandered onto the set by mistake, an interesting approach to the role. You can enjoy his strange performance here at 1.18:51. That’s the last time an Asian actor is trusted with the role, and the Swedish Warner Oland debuts in CHARLIE CHAN CARRIES ON in 1931, which is also lost — but I’ve just learned that the Spanish-language version, ERAN TRECE, survives, with Manuel Arbó as a Latin Chan).
Anyway, THE BLACK CAMEL is basically junk, but you can see director Hamilton MacFadden trying to get with the programme — he knows the camera should move on occasion, he’s just not sure why, and he continually struggles to set up a shot with three people who aren’t all facing away from the lens.
However, when Oland’s Chan SAYS THE TITLE, he puts a lamp on the floor and it’s very effective.
I would have given him more credit if we hadn’t just watched THE BAT WHISPERS in which Roland West shoots Chester Morris with a floor-lamp TWICE:
THE BAT WHISPERS is the only film in which Chester Morris is actually interesting, and it should be admitted that it’s not all due to the interesting lighting. His whole approach is different: when he gets his appeal to the audience not to give away the twist ending, he does it with a Wellesian twinkle absent from all his later performances. Maybe what he needed, like Welles, was to have the other actors removed so he could perform for us alone (Welles went so far as to have the jurors close their eyes when he did his big summing-up in COMPULSION). By a cruel twist of fate Morris found himself confined to B-movies so cheap there was no time to remove the supporting cast.
Roland West, something of a visionary, had very little interest in performance despite marrying an actress, but he certainly had an eye for a striking visual. In this case, it looks like his eye had landed on Paul Leni’s THE LAST WARNING which has one of the best lamps on the floor shots in all cinema, and conceivably the first:
Shots like this make the loss of THE CHINESE PARROT even more tragic.
One more example — James Whale was a great admirer of THE LAST WARNING, but doesn’t provide as much floorlamping in FRANKENSTEIN as he would in its first sequel, which features maybe the best example of the bunch, combing low-level light with a high-level camera to give us this beauty:
Best of all, it’s MOTIVATED by all that Kenneth Strickfaden lab equipment. Chester Morris is apparently generating his lamplight by star wattage alone.
shadowplay 