The (Missing) Sunday Intertitle: Hanky-Panicky

THE SEALED ROOM (1909) comes from that phase of American cinema where nearly every scene opens with a spoiler, and intertitle helpfully explaining what we’re about to see.

This always seemed like a real false step in film history, as movies started aspiring to tell more elaborate stories but didn’t know how. Adaptations of famous books allowed for plottier yarns and could, in theory, rely on the audience being somewhat familiar with the tale, so maybe you didn’t have to explain everything? But critics complained that these movies were getting pretty obscure, and foreign imports were often based on books more familiar in their native lands than to US audiences.

But maybe this admittedly dumb and frustrating development isn’t so much a false path as a necessary stage on the journey out of what Tom Gunning calls “the cinema of attractions” and into the kind of moviemaking where the filmmaker undertakes the telling of a story, using not just performances and title cards but shot choices. It could be argued that it’s a small step from using title cards to signal plot developments to using closeups, POV shots, intercutting, coda-shots (a Griffith nicety Gunning identifies as one of his underrated inventions) for essentially the same purpose.

The cinema of attractions never went away, of course. The individual startling moment is still a key thing in movies, especially the most commercial ones. I think narrative cinema today strikes a balance whereby it’s hard to be sure whether the story is an excuse for the big sensational moments, or the moments are an excuse for the story.

Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett are both in this scene as extras, apparently. Maybe on the right of frame there?

This quasi-horror period pic shows Griffith pushing into the action, cutting his stars off below the shins — to allow subtler performances? But these do not eventuate. There are still people framed full-figure in the background, perhaps to silence the “Show us their feet!” crowd, if such a crowd really existed. So we get to see at least somebody’s feet. A sop to the shrimpers.

Early scenes suffer from film warping (or maybe paper warping, if this is from a paper copy?) so that the supposedly impregnable room feels instead rickety and subject to wobble. Not quite clear WHY this room has been constructed but everybody seems happy about it, so definitely not for walling-up-alive purposes. Some kind of early panic room, I suppose.

Funny bit at 4.25 where a melodramatic messenger rushes in and everybody starts waving their arms in a frenzy. Either an intertitle has gone AWOL or Griffith just decided we didn’t need to be let in on what all the fuss is about.

There’s a lateish instance of the explicatory mime at this point as the troubadour, far right, mouths some enthusiastic realisation — I *think* I can lip-read the words “She’s mine!” This kind of thing would happily be rendered redundant by the interpolated closeup which could emphasise a silent moment of emotion without the need for thespian telegraphy.

As soon as hubby has run off to wherever everybody’s been waving their arms about — perhaps on a crusade, perhaps just seeing to a sick cow, we don’t know — wifey’s waving arms turn from (faked) alarm to joy at being alone with the lusty troubadour.

While wifey is showing trouby her Single-Entrance Room, hubby, a sort of hot Karloff figure, returns unexpectedly having presumably won his crusade in record time or healed his ailing livestock, whatever. Contiguity editing allows him to peep in on and react to the innocuous/incriminating goings-on in the S-ER, and he does a big dramatic cringe. This shot exchange allows Griffith to depart from the one-room-one-shot technique: the S-ER is framed closer than the big room, and when he cuts back to get hubby’s reaction he’s taken the opportunity to punch in closer. The big cringe is ridiculous enough to make us kind of wish he hadn’t, but it’s good film technique in principle.

We now get a huge bit of explicatory pantomime as hubby plots his Terrible Revenge via the medium of hand-wringing. His acting is so big he has to actually draw his sword to put the point across with the force he wants, even though he doesn’t use it. Instead he’s able to get a whole construction team to show up on the spur of the moment (it’s good to be the king) and silently transform his Single-Entrance Room into the titular Sealed Room, with wifey and trouby still inside.

The bowl-cutted bricklayers look like they’re all set to perform some proto-Stooges comic relief slapstick with the mortar, but this is avoided.

Wifey and Trouby’s illicit activity in the now-Sealed Room mainly seems to consist of triumphant laughing and zieg-heiling at how clever they’re being, which kind of makes us eagerly anticipate the moment when they try to pass through the curtain and bash their foreheads on the brick wall noiselessly assembled behind it.

Do construction teams charge extra for working in dead silence? If so, it’s money I’d be happy to pay.

Hubby does some more enormous acting, directed at the curtain and the brick wall behind it and I suppose at the man and woman behind that. Again he picks up his sword, just so he can act even bigglier.

The discovery of the immurement is where a wider range of camera angles could really help a filmmaker. To make his actors’ responses visible and central, Griffith has them walk to the centre of the shot and perform their horror outwardly at us. But the dramatic shape of the scene would seem to demand that they stay for a bit at the new wall, trying to comprehend it, comprehending it, trying to scrape at the mortar, failing, trying to comfort one another, all that. The need to capture performance while confronted with a blocked doorway is what led Kubrick to shoot Jack Nicholson from below in THE SHINING, a moment William Friedkin thought was horribly gimmicky — surely it’s a very practical solution to an unusual dramatic situation — a man talking to a door.

The troubadour is the first one to go into a mad panic — these fancypants loverboys talk a big game but one spot of immurement and they crumble like chaff. Montresor or whatever his name is gets a case of the galloping cabin fever. He is Henry B. Walthall, an important early Griffith star, and his frantic pounding on the walls, extreme though it is, forms an effective background for Marion Leonard’s stillness.

Recriminations! The lovers blame one another for their entombment. Might be just as well blaming the bloke that bricked them up.

I guess people got asphyxiated faster in the good old days, because soon Walthall and Leonard are gasping for air, while the Count (apparently he’s a count, not a king, per IMDb, played by Arthur V. Johnson, not such an important early Griffith player) crows triumphantly without.

Walthall is evidently one of those actors who likes his props — it’d take a heart of stone not to laugh as the suffocating minstrel attempts to fan himself and his lover with his mandolin. Waft those last particles of oxygen down your windpipe! I shouldn’t laugh, I might do the same in his position.

I was waiting for hubby to have a change of heart, as the film still seemed to have a minute to run, but it stops right there, the lovers die, and the last bit is taken up with a restoration demonstration in which the AFTER image seems to have more dirt on it than the BEFORE. Like, “we digitally added dust motes to the picture to make it look like a proper 1909 film.” There’s an app for that.

One thing I should admit: the intertitle-as-autospoiler arguably has its own dramatic value, one of building anticipation. It’s one thing to see a man escape or a baby get rescued from an eagle’s nest, but if you’re forewarned that it’s going to happen, you can enjoy suspenseful anticipation. This happens in books all the time, when the author inserts a line hinting at more dramatic goings-in to come — be patient, gentle reader, things are calm now but later you’ll get to hear all about “that madman business.”

Orgy Orgy

Frederic Raphael’s Eyes Wide Open, his memoir of writing (you guessed it) EYES WIDE SHUT for Kubrick is a pretty enjoyable read, even if FR is a bit of a stuffed chemise. On meeting Kubrick he finds it hard to judge how intelligent the man is. This reminded me that John Fowles says the same thing about meeting William Wyler for the film THE COLLECTOR. Literary brains struggling to make sense of guys who think in pictures.

Anyway, at one point, as Freddie is struggling to believably update Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle orgy for the early twenty-first century (still the twentieth, I guess, as they wrote it), Kubrick suggests figuring out exactly who the people are attending this thing.

FR sends SK a document he’s written, purporting to be “an extract from a highly classified FBI report on an association which had begun among certain admirers of the late President Kennedy. These people were said mostly to be rich and hostile to the line taken by the Democratic Party once it had been captured by ‘hicks.’ The fraternity admired JFK’s impudent defiance of public morality, while appearing to conform to it, and adhered to a group whose habits were outwardly conformist and who, at the same time, practiced among themselves a completely hedonistic way of life.”

The document posits sumptuous orgies and diabolical methods of enforcing secrecy by this society, known as “The Free.” None of it’s very convincing, to me, anyway, but it does tie in with the world’s dark imaginings about Jeffrey Epstein and co.

Kubrick called Raphael immediately upon receipt of the document.

SK: Where’d you get this stuff?

FR: About The Free? Where do you think?

SK: This is Classified Material, how’d you get hold of it? I need you to tell me.

FR: You’re kidding.

SK: I don’t think so. Where’d you find this stuff? Did you hack into some FBI computer by chance or what?

FR: Hack in? Are you crazy? I can’t hack into my own work without help. You asked me to give you some background on Ziegler and company. I gave it.

SK: Freddie, I need you to tell me totally honestly where you got this stuff. This is potentially…

FR: Stanley, totally honestly I got it where I get everything: out of my head.

SK: You telling me you made this up? […] How did you do that?

FR: Making things up’s what I do for a living.

As Raphael tells Kubrick elsewhere in the book, “You’re so paranoid you make me feel perfectly normal.”

I like this idea of a paranoid Kubrick, however accurate or otherwise FR’s recollection of their conversations is. Makes me imagine Kubrick awakening one morning and asking himself, “Did I fake the moon landings?” Makes me think he might have enjoyed ROOM 237, even though his brother-in-law Jan Harlan thought it was all a load of rubbish.

The most paranoid Kubrick theory might suggest that he was murdered because EYES WIDE SHUT got too close to the truth, thanks to Raphael’s inadvertently accurate erotic imagination. Although I have also posited the notion, unseriously, that Kubrick faked his own death to escape the bad notices. (Only one outsider we know of saw him dead; he’s buried in the grounds of his house. Much easier to finagle than a lunar mission.)

I find EYES WIDE SHUT rather plodding, always a risk of the “closed narrative” where we follow one character about the whole time, and he’s in every scene. But I like that it’s a Christmas movie, and the Epstein case has given it a whole new lease of life. Though that may start to fade as there don’t seem to be many more horrifying revelations to come from the case, unless I’m speaking too soon.

Napoleon Blown Apart

“That hot Corsican blood of yours is always getting us in trouble,” Ollie says to Stan in BACON GRABBERS. The same is true of Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon Bonaparte and France in the new Ridley Scott NAPOLEON, which I finally decided to see on the big screen. I quite enjoyed it, but I couldn’t call it a successful portrayal of this figure. Put it this way, Scott’s old chum Kubrick would have HATED it.

This theatrical release is a cut-down version of something that will eventually play on Apple TV at around four hours, and I expect a lot of the issues with it will be resolved with more time to spend on the history, the characters and their relationships. What that can’t fix is the wanton distortion of history, although if more facts and behaviour are added then the truth-to-bullshit ratio could tilt favourably. Or not.

I didn’t do my homework so I went in not knowing what the film was making up, but I’ve since listened to a few podcasts so I can see how wild this stuff is — Napoleon never met Wellington, he wasn’t sighted by a sniper at Waterloo (rifles with telescopic sights were not a thing at the time), the Survivor’s Ball was not an actual event, not many people fell through the ice at Austerlitz, Napoleon didn’t witness the guillotining of Marie Antoinette, which didn’t happen in a small town square, and the former Emperor did not die saying “France… army… Josephine.”

Also, most of the main men are too old, sometimes decades too old (Phoenix, Rupert Everett, the mighty Ian MacNiece). So then the idea that Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) was older than Napoleon, which is both true and interesting, gets lost and we get something more conventional and what could have been a great role for a more established actor is squandered. Kirby is good, but has little to work with — Josephine, a rounded character, is reduced entirely to her relationship with Boney.

Phoenix does lots of weird, fun, actorly stuff, but never makes Napoleon credibly charismatic or impressive. When he flips the French army with a single speech, there seems no reason for their change of attitude (plus, the army is TINY — all the scenes this movie shares with Bondarchuk’s WATERLOO are inferior to the 1970 epic).

The dependable and magnetic Julian Rhind-Tutt is the most fun player, and is on screen for too short a time — again the long version is likely to be more satisfying. Next best is Everett, who plays Wellington as a rather precise copy of Reginald Owen — an amusing choice — with a splash of Edward Fox. So that’s very jolly, though it doesn’t fit in with what everyone else is doing. The film would be more fun if everyone were on Everett’s page.

The movie looks terrific — the battles are too small, though. Scott’s determination to do stuff for real seems to have hampered him, just as Nolan was straitjacketed by physical effects in DUNKIRK — the sense of the true epic scale is missing, despite the vast sums lavished on this picture.

I also regret the limited insights offered into Napoleon’s strategic brilliance. In the first battle, Toulon, much is made of the construction of mortars, and we see them being carried laboriously into action… and never see them used. Austerlitz feels more strategic, but the details are all wrong, the facts dumped in the trash so that Sir Ridley can reprise the battle on the ice in ALEXANDER NEVSKY, or the climax of Ken Russell’s BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN.

We do get to see stuff historical war movies haven’t been able to show, as when Phoenix’s horse is hit frontally by a cannon-blast. An equine chestburster. Never happened, of course, but I’ll forgive it.

“You think you’re so great because you have boats?” isn’t just a bad line, but it’s badly delivered — “so great” could have been played as “so mighty” but is played by Phoenix as “you’re not all that” — and he says it as if on the verge of tears, hardly the way the master strategian would have presented himself to an enemy… although apparently the British ambassador really did get under his skin. Still, if the film’s task is to make itself convincing even when counterfactual, this scene failed for me.

Scott’s recent interviews deserve their own takedown, because he has a full-throated, fat-headed fatuousness in his proclamations about this movie which shouldn’t be left unridiculed. But I enjoyed his big daft film.

NAPOLEON stars Arthur Fleck; The White Widow; Malik El Djebena; Oscar Wilde; Jock Horsfall; Tay Kolma; Tink; Dr. Macartney; Delia Surridge; John Houseman; Martin Boorman; Baron Vladimir Harkonnen; and Scissors Bentley.