Very much enjoyed Keisuke Kinoshita’s TWENTY-FOUR EYES, which resolves some unique dramatic issues inherited from a source novel in some very interesting ways.
It’s about a schoolteacher and her first class, twelve kids. That’s already too many characters to keep straight. Then there are the schoolteachers’ family, various parents, other school staff. And the story covers decades so all the initial kids get swapped out by new actors. The film is quite long, but that’s a crazy number of people to keep straight.
It’s also a film with a lot of tragedy in it. The story starts before the war and the boys are the right age to enlist when WWII starts. There’s also illness, financial problems, death in childbirth. So there is a lot of crying, no way to avoid it even if you invoked a bit of Hawksian staunchness. “Tragedy is when the audience cries, not when the actors cry,” but sometimes, quite a lot in this case, there is no way realistically to avoid tears.
Kinoshita likes distant framing, and this has a couple of very positive effects, quite apart from the scenic values it brings in. The kids are often seen as a group, and I never felt pressured to remember particularly who was who. I had more of a general sense, but they definitely all had personalities and developed in different ways through their distinctive subplots. As a teacher — an aging one — I often feel pressured to remember lots of names in reality, so I don’t want that in my movies. But here it was fine.
And the wide shots added a certain discretion to the treatment of emotion. No up-close blubbering, though I don’t mean to imply we’re in a Roy Andersson film without closeups. It’s just that Kinoshita often goes wide when you might expect the opposite. The considerable space around the actors enhances aspects of the emotion but stops it being overwhelming in a bad way. Space = Time in an odd way, so that there’s an “emotion recollected in tranquility” sense to it. Welles talked about how, though the old line about how “comedy is long shot, tragedy is closeup” is broadly accurate, the TRUE long shot, the small figure in the vast landscape, takes us right back to tragedy again.
Kinoshita uses a lot of Western tunes, often quite emotionally loaded ones like Ford’s favourite hymn “What a Friend we have in Jesus,” and one would bet that he’s a Ford fan (like Kurosawa) but his wide shots are subtly different in effect/affect, there’s a little more, hmm, neutrality?
But I watched it with friends and we all cried buckets.
More Harry Piel from Pordenone’s festival of silent film. RIVALEN or RIVALS.
Piel, as stated before, was a maker of sensational adventures, based around stunts, daring escapes, massive explosions and the occasional robot. As cinema’s leading demolitionist he’s a sort of Nazi Fred Dibnah.
The titles preceding the Piel films praise him as a forgotten master of cinema and note that many of his films were lost/destroyed in WWII. They don’t mention his enthusiastic Nazism. If you’re going to have lost films — and I’d rather we didn’t — it’s at least satisfying that they were made by someone who got really into Nazism, and that they were destroyed by Allied bombing. The fact that the filmmaker specialised in explosions is just the ironic icing on the cake — an unnecessary flourish from the hand of fate, but one we can appreciate for its dark humour.
(It seems to have take Piel six years to get de-Nazified, as he made no films between 1945 and ’51. That tells you a lot. Same sort of gap as Veit Harlan who made JEW SUSS. The next stage up from that is Riefenstahl, who never made another film in Germany, and then the next stage up from that is they hang you.)
Like so many of Piel’s films — including the last one I viewed, the Joe Deebs adventure (DAS ROLLENDE HOTEL) — this one deals with inventors and explosives. I finally figured out how to enlarge the tiny subtitles on the Pordenone streamer, so I could follow the plot better. But then more or less chose not to and just enjoyed the pristine images of smartly-dressed men doing elaborate industrial espionage.
We get a mad scientist’s laboratory within the first ten minutes, and the promise of a costume party (“Maskenfest”) to come, so I was immediately at home. And a robot! Piel’s love of robots, before it was popular or fashionable, suggests that Houdini’s THE MASTER MYSTERY was an early influence on him, and given that his given name was Heinrich, the adoption of “Harry” might even be in emulation of the great (Jewish) escapologist and film star.
The big party scene is entered via a Hellmouth, before Moloch’s guest spot in METROPOLIS but after Joe May’s big gob in DIE HERREN DER WELT and of course CABIRIA. So the history of big architectural mouths in silent European cinema just got a bit more involved.
When dancers in spangly devil costumes strut their stuff on a big turntable in the middle of the party, Piel does not think to put the camera on the platform with them. But he does glide his dolly across the dance floor later… and then, ahah! when our protags get on the turntable he spins them with the camera — I was wrong to doubt his visual flair.
Stunts! Harry leaps from one balcony to another, but balcony no.2 collapses, tips him into balcony no.3, which he falls off of, and thence to the ground. Performed in three shots, but each one involves a real stunt and a substantial drop. Fairbanks is doubtless also a formative influence on the young Harry.
The action, by the way, is laid in England, German anglophilia being another irony of fate.
The bad guy, with his round glasses and huge travelling hat, puts me in mind of a young John Ford. Over at Silent London, Pamela Hutchinson, who’s seeing the films in person in Pordenone, wonders if the retractable bridge is meant to represent Tower Bridge, or at any rate a cut-price version thereof. I’m thinking “They CAN’T have been that naive” but some verification is provided by the fact that the bridge control lever is marked with the single word LONDON.
Harry, of course, attempts to vault the bridge in his (commandeered) roadster — and crashes! No idea how they did the stunt — if it’s a model it’s a very big one. The movement of the car seems not quite naturalistic, so maybe a huge model with a car on wires? A second camera angle showing the car settling in the river makes it seem definitely full-scale… Impressive, anyway.
The print, by the way, pristine like new. The weird tinting and toning effect is caused by reflections as I take snapshots off my laptop.
John-Ford-as-villain not only has a private mansion, a lab and a robot, he has his own U-boat. Ian Fleming invented nothing.
The heroine is bland, as usual (looks good in a beret though), but there’s a feisty vamp to make things more interesting.
Harry gets suddenly attacked by enemy henchmen disguised as boulders! My new OBLIGATORY SCENE which every movie is the poorer for lacking. “Put him in the bell,” says Herr Ford, and it now transpires that he has an all-glass diving bell for just this purpose. Be prepared, I always say.
Get out of that!
Of course the diving bell has a slow leak so Harry’s life can be imperilled in a suitably suspenseful manner. An error in subtitling causes Herr Ford to say that Harry will be released “as soon as he agrees to marry me,” a plot wrinkle that would enliven many a melodrama. The nasty but flexible Ford has arranged the marriage with “the pastor of Wighton.”
The trouble with these death-trap infernal devices (I mean the diving bell, not marriage) is they usually require the help of a rescuer. Houdini would have contrived his own escape, but Piel, the piker, must be saved by someone else, which is less dramatically satisfying. But then he can proactively save the heroine from wedlock with the German John Ford.
RIVALEN is the ultimate sensation-film, or nearly. I haven’t even mentioned the proto-Thompson twins. But this is only Part One — the story continues in THE FINAL BATTLE. Which is not streaming from Pordenone, and may not even survive…
I bought HOW THE WEST WAS WON from a charity shop for £3, or I thought I did. In fact, what I bought was disc 2 of 2, so all it had on it was the “smilebox” version of the film, which “recreates the Cinerama experience” in roughly the way that squirting acrylic paint in your eyes replicates a trip to the Louvre.
I would have liked to own the Cinerama documentary, but I’ve seen it so I’m good. And I’d never watched anything in smilebox so I did. At first Fiona felt she would be unable to endure staring at the world as if between two jet-black buttocks, but then she got sort-of used to it and actually enjoyed the movie more than I did. Buffalos!
Also — Walter Brennan as Sawney Bean! Patriarch of a bandit family operating out of a cave, a sequence with a lot of backwoods spook atmosphere. No actual cannibalism, but Walter has his teeth in for the role so it’s not technically impossible.
Ford’s section — on the civil war — lacked a plot but had some impressive night-for-night shooting (or maybe dusk-for-night, some of it), even more impressively matched with some fake studio exteriors. Nobody ever did real night stuff in westerns, despite the fact that all the various fake solutions for it looked like shit in colour. But neither Ford nor anyone else has figured out how to shoot and cut in this crazy three-lens format.
Every single shot-reverse-shot moment makes the mind bend — one is either shocked to discover a character all on their own in a cast expanse where we’re certain we should be seeing the foreground figure they’re talking to, or else they’re accompanied by people who ought to be on the other side. The three vanishing points make for some strange space warps, including a Caligariesque conversation in a train which induces mental vertigo.
George Marshall handles the climax, Henry Hathaway does the lion’s share, all the early scenes. There are some spectacular moments, but the all-star cast is slowly whittled away to a latex-covered Debbie Reynolds and George Peppard as her son. Carolyn Jones doesn’t get to do anything fun.
The multipart structure with characters drifting through and aging and turning up in different phases of their lives is sort of interesting, in a miniseries kind of way.
Big choral travelogue at the end shows the West well and truly won, and converted into freeways.
Next time I watch this, if I ever do, I hope it’ll be shaped like this —
I’d go to see it in Cinerama, for sure.
HOW THE WEST WAS WON stars Baby Doll Meighan; Johnny Friendly; Admiral Chester W. Nimitz; Morticia Addams; General Omar N. Bradley; Gen. Douglas MacArthur; John ‘Hannibal’ Smith; Dr, Irving Finegarten; Molly Brown; Ellwood P. Dowd; Silva Vacarro; Col. Davey Crockett; Col. Jim Bowie; Salome; Stumpy; Friar Tuck – A Badger(voice); Jonathan Brewster; Fanny Minafer; Col. Sherman T. Potter; Moe Williams; Sgt. Leva; Tom Thumb; narrated by Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.
shadowplay 