Isadoras

Watching the young, talented and beautiful Vanessa Redgrave doing her best in CAMELOT made Fiona want to see her in ISADORA, whose ending shocked her as a child. It’s still a well-staged grisly finale. “Is Vanessa the first actress to win an Oscar for something where she gets her tits out?” she asked. Could be, But Karel Reisz’s film didn’t quite satisfy, so we then watched Ken Russell’s TV version of the life, Isadora Duncan, The Biggest Dancer in the World, already written about here.

ISADORA kind of vanished for a long time after its release, though clearly it showed up on telly where young Fiona caught it at a tender age. We could see why it had slipped out of view — Ken’s film manages to pack more cinematic punch, more insight, more lurid details, and, perhaps surprisingly, more character sympathy, into 65 minutes (feels more like 45) than Reisz’s can achieve in two hours and change. Weirdly, the pieces were made just two years apart, based in part on the same source (friend Sewell Stoke’s bio), and Reisz used Melvyn Bragg as scenarist — who also worked on Ken’s THE BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN and THE MUSIC LOVERS.

Russell’s film has Stokes himself narrating with queenly elegance, and his sympathetic tones help make Isadora, seemingly a narcissistic megalomaniac, come across appealingly, as at least a dedicated artist who was willing to put up with hardships. Reisz’s takes the coward’s way out by having Isadora narrate her past TO a fictional biographer, “Roger,” played by John Fraser in long-suffering gay best friend mode. This is not my favourite device: it’s awful in CHAPLIN and it’s pretty bad here, but at least they move about as they exposit.

ISADORA feels like Ken Russell Lite — it lacks the insane energy and tonal peculiarity (Russell depicts the death of the Duncan-Singer children with a single, static shot that looks like a Buster Keaton composition). When Vanessa first started talking, I said “This is going to take some getting used to,” but five minutes later I was accustomed to her American twang — she commits to it and it’s totally consistent. The nudity is both surprisingly full-on and very tasteful.

Jason Robards Jr had failed as a prospective movie star by the time he’d learned to be a commanding screen presence, so here he’s consigned to a supporting role as a husband, along with James Fox and one Zvonimir Crnko in a Boris Johnson fright wig.

“I don’t know why I should care,” I complained, midway. Sometimes, with movies, you know why you should care, but just don’t, can’t. This movie was so devoted to cataloging its heroine’s awfulnesses that it never found a reason for her to get interested. You CAN be attracted to characters who are not conventionally sympathetic, clearly, but Isadora’s various artistic quests never became things I could invest in, maybe because her terrible personality was standing in the way, maybe because the dances didn’t convince me I was in the presence of greatness. The classical music helped. The Maurice Jarre didn’t. Reisz shoots the dancing a little uncertainly, unable to decide between a Ken Russell handheld savagery or a Fred Astaire elegant wide. Admittedly, it’s a difficult job, there’s hardly any footage of ID dancing, and what exists is brief and uninspiring.

It’s a GREAT ending, except that a car crash as ending always seems arbitrary, however impressively horrific. Bragg and Reisz try to get out of that by folding it into a mystic vision of doom, which kind of works, whereas Ken incorporates his own version of Russian montage to bring all the life together in one fatal moment. Both good approaches, actually.

Preston Sturges’ mom, Mary d’Este, is a supporting character, so that’s good. Her bio might be better material — you’d get to have Aleister Crowley squaring off against young Preston, a kind of Dennis the Menace figure (US version).

ISADORA stars Guinevere; Lord Alfred Douglas; Chas; Howard Hughes; Billy Forner; Mrs. Wallis Simpson; Babe ODay; Officer on Carpathia (uncredited); Right Door Knocker(voice); Merlin; Burpelson AFB Defense Team Member; Poole’s Father; Second Officer of Shona; and Man with Flowers in Hospital (uncredited)

Isadora, The Biggest Dancer in the World stars Mrs Chasen; Brian Pern’s Father; Rev. Samuel Runt; Imre Toth; Olive Rudge; Sister Judith; Nosher; Gory the Gorilla; and Rex Ingram.

Play Acting

I think NIGHT MUST FALL (1937) may be some kind of aberrational masterpiece. It’s kind of perfect, but peculiar. It shouldn’t really work. My guess as to what’s happened to make it the way it is, is this: MGM bought Emlyn Williams play, a very un-MGM tale about a psychopath, his unhealthy influence on a young woman, and what he’s got in his hatbox. They then tried to replicate a theatrical production — presumably the New York run. They imported Dame May Whitty from the stage show, and cast Robert Montgomery as Danny the psycho. Montgomery evidently studied Williams’ performance, because although his Danny claims to be Irish, he sounds Welsh (well, kinda). A bad Irish accent is easier to do (more familiar to the American ear) than a bad Welsh accent, so there’s really no other likely explanation.

Director Robert Thorpe — NOT a brilliant cineaste — Esther Williams remembered him mainly as grouchy — delivers a brilliant film. Montgomery’s accent isn’t a problem (we can imagine that Danny is lying about his origins, as he is about everything else), and the play’s suspense sequences transfer to the screen with tension and terror. Which either should or shouldn’t be the case, because Thorpe is shooting it as if he had the play in front of him. Hitchcock defined one of his better theatrical adaptations as “a play — photographed from the inside.” Meaning you don’t have an imaginary fourth wall, you have a real one, and the editing and camera movement allow us to see it. Cinema in the round.

Well, Thorpe doesn’t do that. His one concession to cinema is to glide from room to room (still viewing them as if from the stalls, but as if one had a wheelchair) and to cut in closer shots. He does edge around a bit when shooting singles, so everything isn’t absolutely flat on. But we only ever see one side of the set.

There are a few Hollywood England exteriors, including a gorgeous sweeping movement across miniature countryside. But the play is the play. A showcase for Montgomery-as-Williams, Rosalind Russell as the strange girl, and Whitty. The drama comes almost entirely from Williams’ stagecraft (he directed as well as writing and starring in the play), minimally from any cinematic devices except basic decoupage. And it’s really terrifically effective.

THIS lovely angle gains power by being just about the only one of its kind. Note the hatbox.

The Karel Reisz remake is worth seeing, but I think they made the mistake of tossing out the play for that one — what they come up with is persistently interesting, but falls apart at the end. I reckon they dismissed the original as a warhorse and thought they could come up with something better. But Williams’ plot is perfectly serviceable, a solid framework, and there’s nothing dated about his observation of psychopathy, which is quite uncannily accurate.

And speaking of uncanny… Montgomery was never so good. His image did not permit him to play many bad guys. He’s electrifying. An actor who always favours stillness, sparseness, simplicity, here he pares away all unnecessary movement. He moves with the elegance of a robot. His face, often with a cigarette drooping from it or with the mouth hanging slack, suggests idiocy, then animal cunning. His eyes, limpid but not especially large or gleaming, come to SEEM enormous.

I think the approach — big elaborate sets and a do-the-play philosophy — is symptomatic of the MGM aesthetic — the more expensive something is, and the more it resembles theatre, the classier it must be. But the play they’ve chosen to lavish all this attention on deals with the seductive power of evil, and makes us feel it. So the classy and respectable veneer fails to conceal something dark and subversive. It’s also self-consciously a play about performance — Danny is, he admits, always acting. Until the very end, when he addresses us not-quite-directly, using a mirror —

What’s a good remedy for a chilled spine?

Pg. Seventeen IV: The Return of Michael Myers

Porter rummaged through the stock of Edison’s old films, searching for suitable scenes around which to build a story. He found quantities of pictures of fire department activities. Since fire departments had such a strong popular appeal, with their colour and action, Porter chose them as his subject. But he still needed some central idea or incident by which to organise the scenes of the fire department in action . . . Porter therefore concocted a scheme that was as startling as it was different : a mother and child were to be caught in a burning building and rescued at the last moment by the fire department.

Loading the camera is a simple operation, fully described in any instruction book.

When all this was arranged and we had heard mass, we commended ourselves to God and his blessed Mother, and began our voyage.

Here is a conversation with a child of four who was, in my view, on the way to literacy. He did not know letter shapes but he had a vocabulary big enough for him to understand verbal jokes, rare in four-year-olds. Television gave us a talking point.

His character moved me by its intensely dramatic quality, which I found far more convincing than those personalities which are revealed in the gradual process of human development, through situations of conflict and clashes of principle.

As against the dramatic actor, who has his character established from the first and simply exposes it to the inclemencies of the world and the tragedy, the epic actor lets his character grow before the spectator’s eyes out of the way in which he behaves . . . The actor Chaplin . . . would in many ways come closer to the epic than the dramatic theatre’s requirements. (Brecht, 1964a, p.56)

At first glance this aspect of our discussion may seem a far cry from the role of the camera as voyeur, the image with which I started and which seems to me so important in the evolution of the film medium. Motion pictures brought to the still photograph the only element, the reproduction of motion, that was lacking to simulate life itself. No matter how complicated an art (indeed, a fine art) the film may become, the elementary charm of witnessing life as it happened or may still be happening outstrips in closeness to reality, t life ‘as it is’, any other medium containing representations of the natural world. The visual image is more immediate in communicative terms than the word, either printed or spoken — and anyway, for some time now the film has also possessed the spoken word, absorbed it. As for the visual imagery of the stage, it exists within a literally confined space of which the spectator is always tacitly aware, no matter how many mobility devices are used to create a sense of spatial expansion. The stage cannot hope to achieve what the film achieves without effort: the illusion of being a window opened on the world itself. And not only does the world move; the window also moves in the world.

Seven passages from seven page seventeens from six books abandoned in my office at work and one found at home. I should note that the description of Edwin S. Porter’s methodology seems to me to be probably not quite accurate.

RIP Gavin Millar.

The Rise of the American Film by Lewis Jacobs, quoted in The Technique of Film Editing by Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar; How to Film: A Focal Cinebook by G. Wain; The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz; The Box in the Corner: Television and the Under-Fives by Gwen Dunn; Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky; Bertholdt Brecht, quoted in The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema, essays by Martin Walsh; Underground Film: A Critical History by Parker Tyler.