Hynkel, Hynkel, Little Tsar

Skipping lightly over the meet-cute with Paulette and the second run-in with stormtroopers, where the barber is saved by the timely arrival of Schultz (who, of all people, ought to notice the barber’s curious resemblance to der fooey)m we return gratefully to the activities of the OTHER Chaplin.

The real Hitler’s life was governed by lassitude — he did, essentially, nothing, outside of his crap painting and his military service, even when faced with poverty. As leader of Germany, he likewise did as little as possible. So Chaplin’s dynamic, manic, busybusybusy Hynkel is more like a parody of a Hollywood studio boss — I wonder which? Long hours, ceaseless frenetic activity (all of it ego-boosting), different tasks chopped up into bite-sized portions, everyone waiting on his convenience. It’s definitely a Hollywood thing. Objectified flunkies (like DeMille’s chair-carrier), and making snap judgements on other people’s work, molesting his secretary. And the huge office. Harry Cohn had a giant office modelled on Mussolini’s. He spoke about visiting Mussolini (and his top director, Capra, kept a framed photo of Il Duce), with wonderment at the electric gizmo that allowed him to open the door from his desk when a visitor was leaving. “That son of a bitch!” Cohn told a visitor. And then opened the door with his own duplicate gizmo.

I love this sequence. The crazy outsized sets — one grand palatial lobby with stairway exists just so that Chaplin can trip while crossing it. It may appear elsewhere in the movie, but its sheer excessiveness in this sequence is a marvel — comparable to the moment in PLAYTIME where Hulot opens a door and startles a whole boardroom at a fancy table in a grand shiny set — which is never glimpsed again.

The spot gags are lovely — the bulletproof jumpsuit and the parachute hat (modelled by Sig Arno, Toto from THE PALM BEACH STORY and one of the few Germans in the film). The speed is impressive. The brutal blackness of the comedy very modern. With the operettafilm lavishness, the constant movement in and out of doors, the parodic grandeur, the sequence has hints of Lubitsch: the great Ernst touched base with Chaplin before via A WOMAN OF PARIS/THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE, and would make his own, quite different anti-Nazi film a few years from now.

Fiona finds a relationship between the violent, fatal jokes here, and The Goon Show — a radio series which had its origins in shellshocked veteran Spike Milligan’s WWII experiences, and in the English tradition of absurdity. Chaplin’s music hall origins are no doubt an influence on his combining slapstick with sparse dialogue.

The sequence ends with some non-comic exposition — Garbitsch’s plan to borrow money from the banker Epstein. Hynkel’s “Let’s be big” is the only humour attempted. But Hynkel’s posing by the mirror, and the large bronze bust of him, result in a “doubling” effect perhaps intended to reflect upon the unremarked existence of a certain barber…

Sidenote: Henry Daniell, who plays Garbitsch, was a popular villain actor. Rarely anything else. But his first movie role was a lead, in the first, silent version of THE AWFUL TRUTH. He played the Cary Grant role.

City Sounds

It’s my contention that CITY LIGHTS and MODERN TIMES should not be considered silent films. Both have soundtracks. MODERN TIMES even has spoken dialogue, some of it (not much) synchronised to lip movements, but “part-talkie” doesn’t seem the correct term either. Chaplin has a crack at defining what he’s up to: “A COMEDY ROMANCE IN PANTOMIME” reads the first title after the main one (Chaplin gets his name on both). My point is that Chaplin, quite apart from his magnificent score (his first) uses sound in nearly every scene, apart from those where he uses the absence of it. We’re accustomed to talking about films without words as silent films, so that Tati’s movies get called “quasi-silent” when in fact they have an audiophonic richness much greater than typical movies of their time. Compare CITY LIGHTS to practically any other film of 1931 and you’d find it had more music, more sound effects, more creative use of those sound effects (if such a thing can be objectively measured), more everything except talk. So in rejecting the term “silent” I’m not just being pedantic (though I’m always happy to admit to that), I’m insisting on important qualities in the film being acknowledged.

(I see Carl Davis has managed to get his name into the credits, under “Restored for live performance.” I’m happy to see him credited at a live performance, but I don’t see what he’s doing on my DVD. I’d like to see the original titles as they appeared in 1931, thank you. From the credits we do have, more generous than usual, we learn that Chaplin actors Harry Crocker, Henry Berman and Albert Austin are ADs, Rollie Totheroh is joined on camera by Gordon Pollock, the great Charles D. Hall is on set design, and Arthur Johnson is responsible for musical arrangement.

After his Gershwin-inspired opening titles theme, Chaplin gives us the main title again, in lights this time (a curious repetition) and then the first audio joke: the parody of bad film recording, as Henry Bergman and others make their pompous speeches in front of the statue of peace and prosperity, currently a mere sheeted mass. Chaplin’s sound is always very carefully worked out — consider the agonizingly accurate indigestion noises in MODERN TIMES — and this buzzing, distorted saxophones perfectly capture and exaggerates the early weaknesses of sound on disc. And by modulating the tone upwards for the dowager’s speech, Chaplin gets a second laugh, sort of one of disbelief that he’s doing this.

(David Robinson notes that Bergman delivers a real speech, which he has lipread: Bergman effusively thanks Mrs. Filbernut, Mrs. Beedell-Bottom, Mrs. Putt, and the artist himself, Mr. Hugo Frothingham-Grimthorpe-Shafe-Shaferkee…)

Then the sheet rises to reveal Charlie, asleep in the lap of Peace, or possibly Prosperity. (Chaplin had considered starting the film with another dream sequence.) What follows is a classic routine in which Charlie tries to oblige the dignitaries by clearing off, but is hampered by the structure of the statuary, getting his pants speared by the upraised sword of Prosperity, or possibly Peace. Then the national anthem plays and he tries, helplessly, to remain erect for it. As with so much else in Chaplin, it’s a callback to childhood: the big important people are yelling at you to do something, and you’re trying, but your small and awkward body isn’t allowing it.

Charlie continually finds himself inadvertently giving offence, thumbing his nose on the upraised hand of Prosperity, or possibly Peace, then sitting on the face of Peace, or Prosperity, or Pete, or whoever the third figure is. An attitude made all the more vulgar by the fact that Charlie’s trouser seat has just been ventilated. (With surprising attention to continuity, the ventilated trousers will still be in play in the film’s last scene.)

So, in our first scene Chaplin has taken advantage of the soundtrack to reduce the concept of film dialogue to the ridiculous, and used the synchronized music in a way that wouldn’t have been reliably possible in a silent film, where you’re dependent on whoever’s accompanying the movie. He’d have had to include a shot of the sheet music if he’d wanted that exact cue.

AFTERNOON.

Charlie has a run in with some unpleasant kids, including future filmmaker Robert Parrish (FIRE DOWN BELOW), who will also return at the end. Great gags with Charlie’s glove, the fingers of which are detachable (soon, everyone will be wearing them). An obnoxious newsie pulls off one digit, and Charlie removes a second just to snap his fingers under the ruffian’s nose.

Then Charlie rounds the corner and studies some art. The set-up, playing with the assumption (which I take to be Chaplin’s sincere belief) that artistic nudes are just an excuse for lecherous ogling, we see Charlie studying an art deco odalisque, taking care to give equal consideration to a small equestrian study. An advantage of doing what I’ve been doing, watching all Chaplin’s film in order, is that I recognise this idea from WORK, made sixteen years and a lifetime before, but it’s now transformed. The nude is incidental to the joke here, which is about the suspense of Charlie nearly falling down an open street elevator.

This gag doesn’t utilise sound, only music. In fact, being unable to hear the elevator is essential for the joke to work. And by placing the camera in the shop window, Chaplin has a ready excuse for US not hearing anything.

Pay-off: Charlie demonstrates with the elevator operator when he realises he’s been on the brink of breaking his neck, but as the elevator rises, the operator’s eyes come level with his, then keep going. It is Tiny Ward, hulking strongman enemy last seen in SHOULDER ARMS.

It is, by this time in film history, quite unnecessary for Chaplin to introduce Charlie, but he does it anyway: in two scenes we have learned that he is a tramp, that he means well but displays a strange mixture of maladroitness and grace which gets him into trouble, that he is one of nature’s aristocrats despite his social stature, that he considers discretion the better part of valour. But these qualities are displayed not because we need to be shown them as characterisation, but because they’re funny. But characterisation is the essence of Chaplin’s comedy, so maybe you could reverse that proposition and it’d still be true.

There we go: a gentle start to this epic…

I see France

I thought I was going to miss THE FRENCH DISPATCH out of sluggishness but had a morning class at the Art College, filling in for someone else, so I dropped in on a matinee at the Cameo, where I hadn’t been since before Covid I guess.

This might not be a very interesting piece — the movie is a mixed bag, like everyone says. The short bits are OK, short enough not to be a problem, though when the movie attempts to do gags I found it unfunny in a way that hurt it — Owen Wilson crashing his moped was never amusing, always mistimed, and too CGI-fake to have slapstick appeal. When the movie is merely quirky it’s funny enough.

The three main chunks are: Benicio Del Toro as a criminally insane artist, in which Del Toro is droll, Lea Seydoux has the same daunting self-assurance I sensed when I met her at Telluride, and Adrien Brody is very, very good. Bonus Bob Balaban and Henry Winkler, Tilda Swinton (well-observed caricature, easier to take than her SNOWPIERCER grotesque); student riots with Timothee Chalomet and Frances McDormand, the long pointless episode everyone complains about; Jeffrey Wright as Wesworld’s answer to James Baldwin, profiling gourmand detective Mathieu Amalric and his chef, Steve Park — prime Wes Anderson, if you like Wes Anderson.

Anderson, asked about political content in his films, has said it might be nice to do politics the way DUNE does politics — imaginary politics. His films are hermetically sealed miniatures but increasingly detailed exercises in worldbuilding, so this makes a kind of sense — allowing the worlds to expand into the political sphere, but not letting in the oxygen of reality, which he perhaps would fade everything away like the fresh air corroding the unsealed frescos of Fellini’s ROMA. The problem with this is that DUNE has no real politics, it’s just a choice of dictators, benign or malign. Factions, not politics. The first stab at this in Anderson’s oeuvre, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, actually worked and was even moving, because the substitution of a Chaplinesque equivalent for Nazism was quite fitting — REAL fascism WOULD corrode a Wes joint, would be too toxic and acid, the paper-thin pretence of the ZZ initial instead of swastikas allows just enough distance from pain and tragedy for the comic-opera tone to take root.

But in THE FRENCH DISPATCH the denatured student riots are rendered silly, trivial and meaningless, and so is the episode. And, frankly, the behaviour of the French police has been fascistic enough during the historical period covered, that they might need a fictional alibi too. They work better in the third episode, where what holds it together is the amusing crime story, the really excellent perfs, the genuine emotion. Wright proves a transfiguring addition to the Wesverse — he doesn’t do a straight impersonation of Baldwin, which might be rather insulting, but works with a different timbre altogether, maybe a touch of Orson Welles? Just really pleasurable to watch. But Baldwin, as I understand his work, was concerned with the world, and making him a food critic in a dollhouse world is definitely robbing him of a lot. Maybe the experiment is to see how much that’s powerful is left when you do that. The “disputed passage” which Wright’s character cuts from his piece and Bill Murray’s editor reinstates, a beautiful scene played with Park (and it’s very encouraging to see that both actors are to return in Anderson’s next film), becomes, as Murray says, “the reason for writing it.” That kind of reason has sometimes seemed absent in W.A.’s precious productions. He’s wary of emotion (the French Dispatch’s office bears a No Crying sign), commitment, commentary — which makes the subject of journalism maybe an oddball, unpromising choice for him.

While the nested narratives of BUDAPEST worked well for his style, the discrete boxes of DISPATCH seem to overemphasise the airlessness and anxiety about meaning. And Anderson is perhaps not quite a brilliant enough writer to pastiche the varied literary styles he’s looking at: the narrators mostly sound the same. His nods to Tati and Tardi don’t quite get there either — Hulot’s house from MON ONCLE is reconstructed practically brick by brick, and just feels like plagiarism, and the animated section is fun but the artists can’t ink with Tardi’s wondrous fluidity — everything is clenched. (Just read that the actual inspiration was Tintin and Blake & Mortimer — the latter explains the stiffness.)

But the good bits are great. And, while Anderson repeats himself — he did better Tati pastiche in his little ad films — we get another cutaway diagram of a vessel, as in THE LIFE AQUATIC — he’s still adding to his toybox. I counted the following new elements: the varied aspect ratios of BUDAPEST are enhanced by b&w sections; tableaux vivants (which the classic Anderson shot is always verging towards anyway); theatrical lighting changes; the aforementioned animation insert, supposed to evoke a bandes dessinées version of the true events; more non-white faces than previous Andersons.

If I sound picky, it’s because Anderson’s work is very irresistible, except when it’s irresistible (as in, for me, for instance, MOONRISE KINGDOM, ISLE OF DOGS). This one didn’t wholly overcome my defences.

THE FRENCH DISPATCH stars Dr. Gonzo; Wladyslaw Szpilman; The Ancient One; Sabine Moreau; Marge Gunderson; Paul Atreides; Constance Bonacieux; Felix Leiter; Serge X.; Peter Venkman; Coy Harlingen; Orr; Principal Arthur Himbry; Partita Dupea; Zero; Dr. Astrov; Dr. King Schultz; Chéri; Cotton Weary; Max Schreck; Sheldon Mopes / Smoochy the Rhino; Lady Bird McPherson; Kitty Tyler / Dahlia; Gag Halfrunt (uncredited); Rock Bork; Jack Goodman; and the voice of Morticia Addams.