Horse Operetta

Chris Schneider’s back! With sort-of late Allan Dwan — Dwan’s career was so very long, he arguably has at least a decade of late work… DC

“Can’t you hear what the balalaikas are telling you?”
~ Ilona Massey in NORTHWEST OUTPOST.

“I didn’t think it polite to listen.”
~ voice from the audience

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Operetta is difficult. Notably when, like the Allan Dwan-directed NORTHWEST OUTPOST (1947), it’s of the “Meet me by the stockade” variety.

NORTHWEST OUTPOST isn’t, y’see, the sort of Lubitsch-ian operetta concerned with mythical kingdoms and the lovelife of satirized monarchs (THE LOVE PARADE, THE MERRY WIDOW). Nor is it a Mamoulian-style tale (see. LOVE ME TONIGHT) of country-house assignations. No, it tells of a Russian settlement in 1830s California, a sheriff-like rep of the US government (Nelson Eddy as Capt. Jim Lawrence), and the arrival of a glamorous-yet-suspect Russian general’s daughter (Ilona Massey as Natalya Alanova) for reasons undeclared and suspicious.

In place of a ladies’ tailor we see forced laborers … and one can only raise an eyebrow at the implied *schadenfreude* of a romance precipitated by the sight of a convict being whipped. Or one where the first kiss comes after badinage about whether or not a plum has worms in it. “I deserved that” responds Massey, a tad fatalistically.

Perhaps this gamy, semi-rural atmosphere can be attributed to co-scenarist Richard Sale, author of the novel that became Borzage’s STRANGE CARGO. The prime mover, though, is probably the film’s composer, Rudolph Friml, whose ROSE MARIE had been a monster hit for MacDonald & Eddy some ten years earlier.

“I make a habit of scaring ladies’ horses” says Eddy at one point — though the line might apply to either OUTPOST or ROSE MARIE, what with the baritone-on-horse action.

What does director Dwan do with the singing objects that are Eddy and Massey — though Massey, to her credit, shows signs of dramatic involvement? Well, Dwan surrounds them with first-rate supporting players like, f’rinstance, Elsa Lanchester, who does heroic work as the governor’s wife both conveying plot points and getting her laughs while maintaining a Russian accent. Hugo Haas is no slouch, either, as her none-too-faithful husband. Or Joseph Schildkraut, who glowers as the prisoner Massey was forced to marry in order to save her father (blah blah blah). There’s even an appearance by Jay Silverheels, who is audibly referred to as “Silverheels.” A Brechtian alienation-effect? Not likely.

Dwan-the-director is felt mostly in an extended Orthodox Easter celebration, with tracking-shots, where Eddy is cantor. Also in a dialogue scene, with Lanchester and Eddy, where Lanchester is embroidering and it’s shot, Sternberg-style, through a huge lace screen.

The lyricist is Edward Heyman, who wrote “Blame It On My Youth” and “When I Fall In Love.” (The charitable will overlook THE KISSING BANDIT.) The number that comes off best is an extended duet called “Nearer, Dearer.” There’s also an over-the-top waltz called “Love Is The Time” which is reprised, at the end, by men on horseback who simultaneously guide their horses and balance a female singer on one knee.

One’s eye often rolls. When, that is, one is not cheering Elsa Lanchester.

The good end happily, the bad unhappily, and Yakima Canutt shoots the chase scenes. That is what Republic Pictures operetta means.

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The players, as David Cairns might say, include: Sergeant Bruce; Elsa Frankenstein; Louise Patterson; Monsieur Walter; Judas Iscariot; Olympe the Courtesan; and Tonto.

The Easter Sunday Intertitle: Moving in a Mysterious Way

Cecil B DeMille’s THE KING OF KINGS is a barking mad, surreally vulgar wondershow — the cavalier rewriting of gospel alone is hilarious and delightful, especially in a film so bent on being sincere and respectful and religious. The more DeMille falls over himself to be respectful, the more he smears his idol in kitsch und klatsch. He just can’t help himself.

Since the Bible doesn’t paint in too many memorable, specific or convincing characters, at least as modern dramaturgy would see it, DeMille and his scenarist Jeanie Macpherson depict the disciples with broad strokes, like Disney dwarfs. Young Mark is a wee boy (cured of lameness, he slings away his crutch and biffs an adjacent pharisee), and Peter is portrayed as a giant and strongman, the Porthos of the Apostles.

He’s played by Ernest Torrence, the Edinburgh-born actor with the big face — Steamboat Bill Snr in STEAMBOAT BILL JNR. It’s nice to see a Scotsman in biblical times. In THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD, David McCallum plays Judas. I might have known Judas would be Glaswegian. (Joseph Schildkraut, Judas here, turns up as Nicodemus in the later super-film.)

(Incidentally, I can’t work out why the fiddled with Judas’s death in the Stevens film — there’s no scriptural evidence for his self-immolating like that. Different accounts say variously that J.I. hanged himself or that he bought a field, fell over, and his bowels gushed out. Nobody seems eager to stage that last version, but I guess it does show there’s room for uncertainty.)

DeMille’s portrayal of the Magdelene (Jacqueline Logan) as a sultry, high-class courtesan is exactly what one would expect from him — she even has an exotic make-up kit and tray of perfumes, just like Gloria Swanson would if it were one of his modern comedies of manners. She has quite a menagerie too — zebras, swans, a tiger and a monkey. Every bible movie ought to have a character whose social status the audience can aspire to, and she’s it.

If you need a trivia question, I propose, “What movie features both Ayn Rand and Sally Rand?” Hint: it’s this one.

DeMille’s frequent collaborator Lenore Coffee (see here for smutty making-of anecdote on this movie) though HB Warner wrong for the role — Jesus was thirty at the start of the script, and Harry W was fifty. Also Jesus was a carpenter, a craftsman but also a physical labourer. “If Harry Warner picked up a hammer he’d drop it on his toe!” She suggested he-man actor William Boyd (star of DeMille’s THE VOLGA BOATMAN), but she later decided he was a good choice, because he fit the stereotype. There had been so few movie Christs that the public needed someone who obviously fit the bill — maybe later a more challenging portrayal would be possible.

Stock up on the Messiah —

The King of Kings (The Criterion Collection)

King of Kings [Blu-ray]

The Greatest Story Ever Told [Blu-ray]

Hearts of Darkness

So many good versions of THE TELL-TALE HEART — of course, it hasn’t really worked as a feature film (Poe is, in general, tricky to expand to 90 mins or so) — but it would seem ideally suited to short form.

Here’s Vincent Price on TV treating it as a monologue. An absolutely delicious performance, inventive and detailed, giving the lie to the “ham” allegation — there’s nothing broad or clumsy about this, either in terms of behaviour or storytelling (it’s both a reading of the story and a performance piece). It’s funny because it’s witty — hits me like a sugar rush, so many bold and outrageous choices. And it’s not a spoof of Poe, just a relishing of the delirious and absurd elements.

Now here’s Jules Dassin’s short, made at MGM, which kickstarted his career. Best viewed as an exercise in the use of rhythm, deploying performance, sound, music, editing, camera movement and composition to create a poem in visual-narrative form. A very Poe-like approach, since rhythm is central to both the prose and poetry of Poe, and he wrote often about the need for a short story to create a single, unified effect. Say what you like about the auteur theory (and I like to rubbish it occasionally), in film, the director is generally the only person in a position to co-ordinate an approach like this.

And it’s as well he does, because in terms of adaptation, the film has suffered a lot of damaging rationalisation at the hands and minds of MGM — exactly the kind of studio who would balk at Poe’s unmotivated mayhem. Remember, a lot of verbiage is devoted to the important fact, in the story, that the protagonist kills for no good reason, purely because he doesn’t like the Old Man’s “vulture eye”. The MGM rewrite adds logic and motivation and removes interest.

Leading man Joseph Schildkraut had a good career going at MGM until he remarked publicly that he saw Louis B Mayer’s lips move as he signed a contract. Suddenly he wasn’t as in-demand.

Lovely UPA animated version, narrated by James Mason, who has a very different approach from Price but is generally good — it’s more about that amazing, distinctive voice than about detail of performance, although I find no fault there. This is an early UPA (and the first cartoon to get an X Certificate in the UK) and shares with the famous GERALD MCBOING-BOING the quality of ecstatic visual invention, in which design IS storytelling and vice-versa. It’s good and dark, surpassingly beautiful, and doesn’t stint on the maelstrom of angst and confusion that is Poe-try.

“It is the beating of his hideous heart!”