The Saturday Intertitle: Fight to the Finish

LORNA DOONE, continued.

And it was all going so well. Having saved the royal baby, John Ridd commits the cardinal sin of DANDLING it. Which one simply does not do, however much the sprog enjoys it. The King is appalled. He’s lavished all of fifteen seconds on a… a booby! And not in a good way.

Lovely shot of John skulking off. So it looks from this image as if they definitely came to Britain to shoot this, or else they had huge standing sets. But the climate and scenery also seems British. I should ask his biographer.

Humiliated, John goes back to Devonshire to mope in a manly sort of way. Maurice Tourneur lavishes a beautiful longshot on this activity (top). The mist is descending like soft rain, as if they’d devised some means of spraying moisture into the atmosphere, or as if they were just really lucky and filmed some actual mizzle.

Then, the film continues setting up what I’d feared — John’s jilted ex, Ruth (Norris Johnson), feels slighted that even in her absence, Lorna is occupying all John’s thoughts. When Lorna returns to Devonshire — the life at court means less to her than her strong, silent suitor — Ruth resolves to throw a spanner in the romantic works…

John and Lorna are to be wed — but Ruth rides dramatically over to the Doone stockade and lets the evil Carver know about the impending nuptials. On the wedding day, he positions himself at a window at the back of the church — an impossible shot, with a musket — and shoots Lorna.

Rather surprising he didn’t choose John for a target, but then it was a tricky shot. Lorna dies. She’s definitely dead. No way she’s not dead. That’s made quite clear. Remember that fact. And it’s quite moving.

John gallups over to the Doone place and challenges Carver to man-to-man combat. Carver takes potshots at him from the safety of the stockage. Some great shots here.

This latest outrage rouses the countryside to finally deal with the Doones. Lots of farmers come to John’s aid, and he leads a batch of them round by the waterfall to infiltrate the enemy base. Mayhem ensues.

Tourneur’s sadistic side comes into play when John and Carver fight to the death. Carver has a dagger, and it seems for a moment that John’s reputation as strongest man in Devonshire may be badly overinflated. But then he retrieves the situation by grabbing hold of Carver’s bicep and tearing it loose. Or at least, that’s what the intertitle claims. The dagger is flung into a nearby quicksand and sinks in an improbably but photogenic manner. Carver is then flung in after it and sinks in a more conventional way.

John returns to his farm, where he finds Lorna alive and recovering. This is nice, of course, but completely impossible. If there had been a shadow of doubt that she was dead, John’s friends wouldn’t have let him ride off to attack Carver, and he wouldn’t have wanted to go just yet.

Still, the film is merciful: not only is our heroine spared, Ruth goes unpunished. She’s now apparently happy to tend Lorna’s wounds and help the course of true love. Unless she’s planning to murder the heroine herself. The movie doesn’t give her a closeup to let us read her intentions, but I think we’re meant to think of this as a happy

You can see the film for yourselves here thanks to America’s wacky public domain laws:

The Sunday Intertitle: Doone by Law

Idyll.

Then a posh lady shows up from London to take Lady Doone away. “A lady?” simpers Lorna, forgetting for a moment that she’s supposed to be in love with the strongest man in Devonshire. The s.m.i.D. himself, after a pensive moment, tries to encourage her to go. I’m no lip-reader, but I formed the distinct impression that actor John Bowers says “Are you kidding?” Apparently it’s by order of the King, though I don’t see why he should be so bothered.

If I have a problem at all with Madge Bellamy’s performance it’s in her tendency to play Lorna as a nitwit. Allowing for that, it’s quite a skilled job. Unlike John Bowers, she had stage training and she made it into talking pictures as a supporting player, and you can see her for instance in WHITE ZOMBIE. Per IMDb: “In 1943, she would again appear in the headlines when she shot her lover, millionaire A. Stanford Murphy after he jilted her to marry another woman.”

There seems to have been a plague of millionaires called Stanford getting shot by movie stars, since one Stanford White earlier took a bullet from Evelyn Nesbit, though admittedly her stardom came after, as a result of her success in the role of murderess. Still, it’s a fine tradition and I’d be all in favour of resuscitating it.

Madge’s ability to plug the cad is all the more impressive when you consider she’d have to sneak up on him while maintaining a three-quarter backlight to make her hair radiant.

John sends Lorna on her way with a climax of fervid urging, then lapses into despondency as soon as she’s left frame. Oh well, it’s back to breaking up logjams, I suppose.

Second act trouble: the villainous Carver Doone spots Lorna saying her farewells — we worry about what he might now do. Well, sure, he could stick up her carriage and rekidnap her. A slight problem may be exposed here: there are relatively few plot elements in play, and a kidnapping and inevitable rescue would be rather repetitive, since that’s chiefly what the first half of the film has consisted of.

London! The movie resists the urge to repeat itself, and has John Ridd head for the big smoke, or a painting of same. Actually, though, we get some pretty big street sets. And a glass painting of the inside of Westminster Abbey as well as the outside. Fortunately, the people in shot are live action, so John can approach Lorna and rekindle their friendship. Although some bloke keeps sticking a halberd between them. It’s always the way.

The occasion is the christening of James II’s son — not sure which one, he had LOTS, but few of them lived long. I have no patience with religious services or pageantry, so this scene wasn’t looking too thrilling, but then John overhears some antiroyalist plotters, plotting in plain view in the public gallery, which is pretty stupid of them, and of the movie. I would be on their side if they weren’t so bloody indiscreet. They all have terrific villainous faces, which is a feature of this movie. As one rapscallion draws a musket and prepares to assassinate the baby with the bathwater, or possibly the King, John pounces, and shows that he’s not JUST the strongest man in Devonshire. His muscle travels.

It could easily have happened that John’s intervention might end up with him getting the blame for the assassination attempt — “I’m just a patsy!” — but the movie (and presumably the book) don’t opt for anything so complex. John is hailed as a hero, and his path to marrying Lorna is seemingly smoothed.

But there is still nearly half an hour of troubles ahead.

TO BE CONCLUDED

The Sunday Intertitle: The face in the ceiling

During their little tryst, John Ridd and Lorna Doone make an arrangement — she can signal to him from a nearby promontory (pictured) and he’ll come running to the rescue. This proves to be a shrewd idea.

Amazing how quickly their relationship has blossomed: one meeting as kids and another ten years later and they’re sweethearts. This causes John to neglect the girl who fancies him back home, but I don’t imagine she’s going to be TOO important to the plot. But she must have some reason for being there.

Two particularly lovely frames result from this, one of which showcases Tourneur’s lifelong love of shadows and silhouettes, a tendency famously inherited by son Jacques.

Anyhow, the signal idea proves useful almost immediately. Sir Ensor is dying, and this causes the wilder young Doone men to run amuck. Lorna’s nasty suitor, Carver son of Counsellor, resumes his wooing, if you can call it that. Cousellor and Carver are both played by actors named McDonald, but whether they’re actually father and son, the IMDb does not say.

Sir E. is played by Frank Keenan, of whom the IMDb remarks, “Frank was considered a “furniture actor” on stage. While on stage he was so often drunk that he had to lean on or hold onto furniture to keep from falling down.” He’s well cast here, since Sir E. spends most of the time dying, either sedentary or propped against the wall.

Fortunately, Lorna has shown kindness to one of the Doone wives, “courted by violence” and is able to send her to signal John from the rocky outcrop. Some random male chum is sent to London with proof of her inheritance.

Carver gets the best line so far, as he plans a swift and nonconsensual wedding:

John to the rescue! And a pretty good rescue it is. Flinging himself off a waterfall in best Tarzan manner, he briskly arrives at the Doone stockade, bone dry (all that running). He tries bending the bars on her window, and is making fine progress when she’s removed from her cell. So then he rips his way through the thatched ceiling of the big house and snatches her bodily from the armed mob, laying a few men out with musket or fists.

Sir Ensor, who had seemed dead, then appears in the doorway, paralysing the Doones by sheer force of personality, enabling our young lovers to escape. E remains standing there for some time after he has actually died, a rigid sentinel — the most effective performance by a dead man until EL CID (or WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S).

All really exciting stuff. John Bowers, walloping his supporting cast, has to pull his punches a bit, since the use of camera angles to “sell” a fake punch had not been invented yet — I’ve heard, incredible as it seems, that it was John Wayne who adapted over-the-shoulder framing to the uses of action cinema, exploiting the camera’s inability to judge distance (it has only one eye, unless the movie is 3D). Actually, faked punches like this even work with human observers, of the two-eyed kind. The only reason they weren’t developed and exploited onstage is that the theatre audience is too spread out for the illusion to work consistently. You need a single viewpoint. Plus, of course, Duke Wayne never trod the boards.

But allowing for that, the fight is gripping, and the implausible victory is sold as convincing enough for dramatic purposes. A happy ending would seem to have been accomplished — but the film is only half over. What next?

TBC