ENOUGH IS SUFFICIENCY SCREAMS IL DUCE

Title above is a headline that appears towards the end of THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK, which I always found obscurely hilarious. I presume Mussolini must have been awkwardly translated from time to time in the early forties, often enough for the gag to be comprehensible, but it’s still funny even if not comprehended.

Salute envy — Napaloni’s salute is bigger than Heinkel’s. And the massive clock — not easy to devise a monument more outlandish than any real dictators have built to themselves, but Chaplin manages it — is two minutes slow.

This brief section of the film is full of visual effects — the kind of thing which, CC complained, took a long time to prepare and necessitated the precise planning of the script.

As the dictators drive off, poor Mrs Napaloni gets separated from her husband and mixed in with the crowd.

Planning scene: Garbitsch outlines how Napaloni can be made to feel inferior, by psychology. This kind of set-up is new to Chaplin, and it’s made possible by dialogue. One could, I guess, find ways to do it in a silent, but it would be even more laborious. The idea is to set out clearly what the intention is, so we can enjoy everything going wrong. A boring scene in itself, but one that builds anticipation and gets paid off in laughs.

I once had a brief conference with the acting head of my institution, Edinburgh College of Art, in his office. I was a mere student. He had an incredibly low chair for me to sit in, my arse practically scraping the floor, while he sat erect behind his desk. I remember feeling not so much intimidated as contemptuous.

I’ve forgotten who was it who told the story about Harry Cohn’s office being modeled on Mussolini’s. And Cohn described how Mussolini, after dismissing him, had the door open on cue, with an electric button on his desk. “That son-of-a-bitch!” Then Cohn dismissed his interviewee, and as he reached the door, it automatically clicked open.

So, things go wrong — Napaloni comes in via the wrong door, surprising Heinkel with a back-slap that knocks him from his chair, banging his chin on the desktop. Napaloni, of course, is oblivious or indifferent to this mishap.

A reprise of the very good salute/handshake gag from the station, the two men’s hands shooting up then out, always missing one another.

Jack Oakie’s Chico Marx imitation even goes so far as to borrow his unique truncation of words: “Ah, my brother dictate!”

The low chair works momentarily — Benzino is discomfited. He simply cannot perform from such a low position. Has trouble even crossing his legs. Chaplin tracks in to savour the triumph.

Sitting on the desk, he reverses the situation, and on “They like to see new faces, he not only does the weird Mussolini lower lip thing, emulated by Trump, he turns right to the camera, as Chaplin had advised Oakie to do if he wanted to upstage the maestro.

The barbershop gag is good, but curiously mistimed — it starts fading out too soon for my taste, “stepping on the gag” to use Jerry Lewis’s phrase. I think the situation is good enough that they could have extended the action of the two idiots cranking themselves ever higher. Curious also that nothing is made of the connection to Chaplin’s other character, a barber. But I don’t know what he could have made of it.

Review of the army: Napaloni eating nuts from a paper bag (DUCK SOUP?), discarding the shells with blithe malice all over his pall “Hinky.” This scene works by not showing any of the tanks or aircraft under review, just the reactions and a few sound effects. Chaplin is really embracing sound cinema. In fact, its use of the unseen approaches the medium of radio. It’s not, admittedly, as great as his silent sequences — the best bits of this film are more visual. But it’s funny and odd.

Ballroom — as seen in Syd’s colour home movies. All the women are blonde. Another planning session with Garbitsch. The Chaplinverse’s version of the Anschluss is prepared, and it involves Henikel going duck hunting — the set-up for the film’s final comedy of errors.

Brief comic dance with Madam Napaloni. We see more of this in Syd’s home movies, and I wish we had more of it here — it plays better in longshot, even in Syd’s makeshift compositions. “Can you see my feet?” was Chaplin’s most common question to his cameramen, and here we don’t. It’s a loss.

Next up — Napaloni’s last stand! (It was over too soon.)

Ceiling Hero

CITIZEN KANE images via Checking on My Sausages.

In between saying inspiring things like, “Remake ORDINARY PEOPLE. Do it in your apartment. Play all the roles. Make it in a day,” my host in NYC, the esteemed Comrade K, projection into our sphere of a numinous, n-dimensional shepherd-warrior from a land before history, got me started on the following set of thoughts by an offhand remark, which went something like, “People were amazed by the ceilings in CITIZEN KANE. Nobody had ever seen a ceiling before. People couldn’t look up before Orson Welles showed them how.”

He’s right! Welles made the breakthrough by practicing a unique form of yogic meditation taught him by Rudy Vallee. This resulted in the opening of Welles’s “third eye,” which coincided with him lying on his back, causing him to discover the ceiling of his living room. It has been argued that people intuitively knew of the existence of ceilings before this, since logically every floor must have an underside. Some feminist writers have suggested that the ceiling’s true discoverer was a woman, arguing that the prevalence of the missionary position in pre-war life made such an awareness inescapable for the fair sex. But this strikes me as akin to arguing that people “had dreams” before Freud taught them how in his hit book, Close Your Eyes and Move Them Rapidly About.

Some point to the glass ceiling shot in Hitchcock’s THE LODGER as a pre-Wellesian ceiling, but in fact this is nothing more than a glass floor, above which Hitchcock suspended his camera while two burly stagehands held Ivor Novello upside down so he could place his feet on the translucent surface and mimic the actions of a right-side-up walker.  So in fact the shot actually depicts a floor, with Novello on the other side of it. Incidentally, Novello enjoyed the experience so much that he spent a month traveling this way, and had it specified in future contracts that all his films must include upside down walks. Novello later composed “Rose of England” in an entirely inverted position, complete with upside-down grand piano strapped to the backs of a half-dozen burros.

In explaining his concept to art director Van Nest Polglase, Welles was faced with the difficulty of introducing the concept of the ceiling to a man who, like everyone else in 1940s America, had never seen one. Resistant to yogic disciplines, Polglase finally had to be shoved onto his back and held down by Joseph Cotten, while Welles peeled back the eminent designer’s eyelids and forced him to look. Concerted to the cause, “Poley” later became a great proselytizer for the ceiling, even having a house constructed in Beverly Hills composed entirely of ceilings, top, bottom and sides, inside and out. The famous Polglase House was later purchased by James Mason, who had a notorious phobia of doors*. Living in a home whose rooms could be accessed only by skylights appealed greatly to the Huddersfield-born actor.

In addition to the heavily corniced plaster ceilings displayed in KANE, there were several “trick ceilings” — canvas ceilings through which sound could be recorded, and matte painting ceilings to fill in the top portions of large sets, where a real ceiling would be too costly or frightening. Welles also used his mastery of sleigh-of-hand to suggest ceilings that weren’t actually there, enlisting the audience’s imagination by saying things like “Look at that amazing CEILING!” while subtly pointing upwards, or hanging photographs and etchings of great ceilings from history around the walls of a ceiling-less set. In the New York Inquirer set, Welles experimented with rear projection, stretching a screen across the top of the set walls and projecting outtakes from SON OF KONG onto it, but test audiences found the stop motion pterodactyls distracting, and the notion was abandoned.

When KANE was released, the impact was extraordinary. Columbia boss Harry Cohn immediately called in architects to build a ceiling for his office, which until that point had opened on to the room above, forcing the accounts department to rappel from the ceiling to reach their work stations. Suddenly, it became possible to build structures higher than a couple of storeys, and miracle “skyscrapers” mushroomed up in America’s great cities. (Tall buildings seen in pre-1941 movies were always fantastical special effects.)

While Hollywood legend has it that Welles’s film was a flop, it has been suggested that audiences, alerted to these mysterious planes above their heads, became distracted from the cinema screen and spent the movie’s running time staring upwards past the projector beam. Not for the first time, Welles had been too innovative for his own good.

*In civilian life, Mason was only able to enter a room by the window, or while strapped to a hospital gurney, or sometimes both. Ironically, in the movies, he could “act” walking through a door with ease and even suavity, even picking up awards for his smooth entrances. Whereas Pat Boone, Mason’s co-star in JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH, could enter a room in a graceful, natural manner, but invariably either stumbled, fainted, or soiled himself when called upon to do so for the films.

Does anybody know? #1

 

Does anybody know if Columbia Pictures ever made a good musical?

I was all set to enjoy YOU’LL NEVER GET RICH — I like Robert Benchley*, and I love Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. The film has an amusing credit sequence, there’s a little dance between Fred and Rita which is quite charming, and then it becomes a shapeless unfunny lumbering thing without appealing characters or interesting situations or even much good musical action. I haven’t seen all of it but I probably won’t watch more unless somebody tells me there’s a great dance at 1hr 22 mins or something.

I haven’t watched the other Rita and Fred show, YOU WERE NEVER LOVELIER, but am I wrong in assuming it’s identical in every way?

I got a deja vu feeling and remembered how much I’d disliked DOWN TO EARTH as well — forced and unfunny and kind of DUMB in a way that even really silly Hollywood movies weren’t, usually.

In a flash, I just remembered THE SKY’S THE LIMIT, which has Astaire’s great angry dance to “One for my baby”, but checking it, I find it’s an R.K.O. Radio Picture.

TONIGHT AND EVERY NIGHT kind of bored me too, and it had some really horrid colour schemes, like M.G.M. seen through a hangover, though there was one nice bit where a young artiste tap-dances to a Hitler broadcast: “No, leave it on, I often dance to this fellow.” You don’t see nearly enough of that sort of thing.

It might actually be that I just don’t like Columbia. Their idea of greatness was Capra, who I’m rather iffy about. My favourite Columbia films were made by visiting independents — ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI. I love GILDA, but the director of that one, Charles Vidor, ended up suing studio boss Harry Cohn for psychological injury. This could be one of those studios that I’m just temperamentally unsuited to.

(I love Paramount, especially 20s-30s. Love Warners, esp. 30s-40s. Love R.K.O. — almost everything. Love lots of different things from Universal. Love M.G.M. musicals but almost nothing else from that studio, and even with the musicals I have to leaven them with something drier or I tend to break out, and not in song.)

*I like Benchley for his dreamlike qualities. There’s an essay that starts something like this: “So, on top of all this other work I’ve got to do, they tell me I have to build the Hoover Dam. I said to them I was already very busy and couldn’t they get somebody else, but no, it had to be me.”