Put a lamp on the floor

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.

The Sunday Intertitle: Old Scenes

So, in our Dickens double-bill, it turned out that, surprisingly, the director of RED-HEADED WOMAN was a better match for the author than the director of A WOMAN’S FACE, or maybe it’s only that the rambling picaresque of DAVID COPPERFIELD is less readily adapted to cinema than A TALE OF TWO CITIES, which is more of a rollicking thriller.

Both 1935 films resort to montages, title cards, hastily summarised scenes in order to compress their sources into a decent span of celluloid. At times, COPPERFIELD seems like lightning sketches stitched together with glass paintings and Vorkapich effects.

George Cukor abandons any hope of a unified style in his cast’s performances, wisely, I think, since it allows W.C. Fields and Roland Young to do their respective things to the fullest of their mighty talents. Fields is terrific, of course, a cartoon made flesh, even his costume design marking him out as an inhabitant of a different genre from everyone else. Young had a brilliant understated schtick as a light comedy sidekick, but when given anything more to do he always delivered — his Uriah Heap is strikingly oleaginous, viviparous, a cringing Gollum seething with pass-agg resentments. It’s hard to process the idea, though, that Freddie Bartholomew and Frank Lawton inhabit the same world, or film.

Freddie is a weird little phenomenon. Given business to do, he does it skillfully (wiping his hand after Heap has shaken it, with a barely-suppressed shudder). Given dialogue, he often appears extraterrestrial, inhuman. Asked to weep, he becomes a disgusting, bleating animal, repelling sympathy. Halfway through the film, we lose him, as Lawton is airdropped in to take up the role, replacing his younger self. Lawton is puppyish but a little dull. I guess Copperfield in the book is just an innocent set of eyes observing the other characters, but in a film we have to look at him.

Hugh Williams spends much of his small part appearing outwardly honourable, a waste of his oily talents — when the scenario permits him to hint at inner rottenness, he’s terrific.

Una O’Connor and Elsa Lanchester add pep — and make me wish James Whale had gotten to film Dickens. Basil Rathbone, whose non-Holmesian career was spent embodying evil, embodies it in a fresh way here, making of his wicked stepfather an alarmingly genuine sexual sadist who gaslights his wife and delights in beating her child. (The purportedly autobiographical FANNY AND ALEXANDER seems to have drawn its inspiration from this sequence, though in fairness not getting on with one’s stepfather is probably quite a common experience.) Herbert Mundin and Edna May Oliver are good living pen-and-ink caricatures. And the extraordinary Lennox Pawle, as the pixillated Mr. Dick — a kind of creature never previously or since represented on film — single-handedly justifies the whole enterprise.

Unseen Maniac Proves No Hoax

Good sub-hed from James Whale and RC Sherrif’s THE INVISIBLE MAN.

Pretty damn suave housecoats on display also.

Watched this tonight with our friend Ali, who remarked on the wild tonal shifts, It’s not just that the film contains both slapstick knockabout and stark sadistic horror, but, as Ali remarked, it doesn’t waste time building up to the horror or lingering on its consequences — it’s just straight on with the comedy, and the bodies still warm.

Gloria Stuart is pretty terrible but it doesn’t matter. William Harrigan, hovering over her shoulder, is on first sight a pretty repulsive specimen of the genus actor, but proves to be perfectly cast. Entirely charmless as a screen presence, he is thrust into horrible situations where he ought to invite our warmest sympathy, but fails to. So that the invisible and very hostile man remains Our Hero, despite his complete lack of admirable attributes.

Note how Mr. Invis, setting Harrigan off bound hand and foot in a brakeless auto, describes lovingly how the fall will shatter his arms, then his neck. Which is then fullsomely depicted in a spectacular model shot, with the added detail that he bursts into flames also, just for jolly.

THE INVISIBLE MAN stars Captain Louis Renault; Old Rose; ‘Mac’ McKay; Clarence; Matilda Thrawn; Honesty Nuttall; Sir Karell Borotyn; Nurgomaster; Casper Guttman 1st; Giacomo the jester; Mrs. Hudson; and Renfield.