Five Came Back, Three Came Home, Two still Unaccounted For

So, we watched that film about the people whose plane crashes in the Andes and are forced to take extreme measures to survive. Yes, we watched FIVE CAME BACK.

(We also watched SOCIETY OF THE SNOW. It’s very very good.)

We didn’t actually watch THREE CAME HOME.

FIVE CAME back deposits such people as Chester Morris, Lucille Ball, John Carradine, Allen Jenkins and C. Aubrey Smith in a headhunter-infested jungle and watches them struggle to survive. Best of all is Joseph Calleia as a murderous anarchist on his way to be executed — for him, this idyll is a new lease of life.

The script is by Dalton Trumbo and Nathaniel West, FFS. (Plus Jerome Cady, Richard Carroll.) Director John Farrow noticed that this was above and beyond the usual B-movie fodder he’d been dealing with, and fought hard for quality, even after budget cuts saw the A-listers replaced with (very capable) lesser stars. He got extra foliage, was the result of his struggle. The RKO jungle backdrops are reminiscent of KING KONG’s, and it would be interesting to see if any of Mario Larrinaga’s scenic art was repurposed here. Or did he only do matte paintings?

(The model shots in this are pretty impressive, considering.)

John Carradine starts this one off underplaying beautifully, but then his hardboiled detective has to get drunk and demented and so of course JC plays it to the back rows of some imaginary theatre. A pity.

Lucy underplays throughout and is excellent. The fact that she’s coded as a sex worker and initially despised by her fellow travellers clues us in that this proto-disaster movie may be indebted to STAGECOACH, though that was released just four months earlier. I know they worked FAST in B-pictures, but is that kind of speedy influence possible? I guess STAGECOACH had a source story Carroll may have read, and that source story had a (sort-of) source story of its own, Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif. What this all means is that maybe STAGECOACH is the model group jeopardy film. Though I guess another influence here is DeMille’s jungle survival yarn FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE, a remake of his earlier MALE AND FEMALE, which would mean that J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton is the ur-text of group jeopardy movies. In a contorted sort of way.

Strong writing and performances elevate this one, and the camerawork is beautiful — the great Nicholas Musuraca shot it and Farrow delivers some of his intricate narrative camerawork, moving from character to character, relay-style, always nicely motivated by someone’s movement.

(Car pulls out and Carradine and Calleia emerge. Move with them until we discover rich elopers Wendy Barrie and Patric Knowles. They move off and lead us to elderly prof Smith and wife Elisabeth Risden. They head off likewise (everyone is embarking) which leads us to Lucy. And her move leftwards brings us all the way back to Carradine and Calleia for a characterful exchange (LB: “I don’t talk to cops.”) with Chester Morris thrown in.

The movie stands as a counter-argument, in a way, to the “genius of the system” theory — here, everything was set up to make a forgettable piece of product, and because the writing was better than it needed to be, a talented cast and crew were able to pick it up and run with it and the result was — well, still minor, but admirable. You could say that yes the system through all these hardy survivors together. But the result is what the individual talents made of it.

Son of Kane

Let’s lay to rest the persistent rumour that CITIZEN KANE re-uses footage from SON OF KONG. (We won’t even bother with Charles Higham’s claim that it re-uses SETS.)

I was hoping to do what I did with Steve the News on the March octopus and locate the actual source for the footage, but after much consideration I’m finally decided that there’s no mystery to solve and the scene in question is all original footage — I’m not 100% sure, but let me talk you through my thinking and we’ll see who agrees.

The topic was first discussed on this site here, with Dan North intrepidly searching for the mythic stock shot after I mentioned it, not at that point questioning its veracity.

The scene, as you may remember, is Kane’s everglades “picnic” for his “singer” wife Susan Alexander. Shot opens on a real singer, who drifts from close-up away into the scene, revealed as an elaborate camp-site in the glades — the first of a brace of dismal swampy picnics in Welles’ work: see LADY FROM SHANGHAI for No. 2 (“It was no more a picnic than he was a man.”)

Flapping creature just above the centre of the frame…

We pick up sinister manservant Paul Stewart as he drifts past through the well-lubricated revelers — several black shapes flit past in the murk of night — we move in on the Kane tent, and dissolve to a blazing row between the Charles Foster Kanes.

As far as I can see, the allegation that this sequence incorporates SON OF KONG footage is entirely down to the black flying things. They’re clearly not real — what they are is cel animation, “on twos” — photographed two frames at a time, which makes them seem rather jerky compared to the live action foreground: like stretching out 12 frames per second to 24. I’m indebted to William Randall William Cook, for the technical analysis throughout this piece. Randy is no stranger to animation… or confusion.

Blow-Up: a KANE bird (centre) photographed off the new BluRay in close-up.

Now, SON OF KONG famously relies on stop motion miniatures rather than cel animation, but at the top of this post you can see some black silhouette birds which do appear in it. They appear to be rotoscoped — matte outlines taken from real birds in real footage. Whoever inserted them into the film (I guess optical wiz Linwood Dunn) apparently couldn’t be bothered pasting in the bird footage, and just left the dark shapes — maybe because the effect was more atmospheric. Skull Island, home of the black gulls.

So there’s a stylistic connection between KONG and KANE, but bear in mind these birds are NOT produced by the exact same technique. The KONG birds are “on ones” and they’re rotoscoped off of real gulls, whereas the KANE birds are simply animated, and using half as many images per second.

Also, the glass-painted jungles of both films are by Mario Larrinaga, so a the style is understandably similar. But SON OF KONG contains no nocturnal jungle scenes, and we can’t suppose there were deleted scenes that KANE might have pilfered, because SON OF was a very quickly-produced rip-off sequel. If there was anything left on the cutting room floor, it wouldn’t be expensively produced special effects shots, it’d be Robert Armstrong yackin’.

The low-flying beasties are the only example of cel animation discernible in KANE, so the assumptions have been (1) they’re not specially shot, they must be from elsewhere (2) they’re kind of distracting, they must be something Welles was forced to accept for budgetary reasons (3) they’re pterodactyls from SON OF KONG. I suspect SON gets nominated rather than the better-known KING because it’s easier to imagine some bit of unfamiliar footage existing in that comparatively little-seen film.

Randy is convinced that the animated flappers are storks, or similar exotic birds and therefore an intended addition to the scene. I wondered if the birds had been added in order to transform an African backdrop into a Floridian one. But lets look at — and think about — that background.

Or indeed, those backgrounds. Randy points out that what we’re seeing is specially-shot KANE foreground action (that’s Paul Stewart, after all) in front of TWO rear-projection screens, separated by a big tent. The second screen is really big, probably the one Fay Wray cowered in front of in KING KONG, so the screen may be from the 1933 ape epic even if the images projected on it aren’t.

Now, we can clearly see that the projected images are matte paintings, except for the animated birds and the rippling water. What we can also see is that they contain tents — decorative tents matching the ones in the live-action foreground, and certainly suggestive of a party rather than a jungle expedition. So dismiss any idea that this is material patched in from a TARZAN movie. Wrong studio, anyway.

Randy is certain the paintings are the work of Mario Larrinaga, employed elsewhere on KANE’s numerous mattes, and also responsible for most of Skull Island’s rotting foliage. So the feeling that the backgrounds are reminiscent of KONG is grounded in truth — like most myths.

So, given that the foreground is pure KANE-Welles-Toland footage, and the tents match, and the whole scene strongly suggests a very specific milieu, a rich man’s party in the Everglades, and even the animated birds fit that hypothesis, the only way to incorporate SON OF KONG material into this scene would be to propose that matte paintings of jungle scenes from a KONG picture had been overpainted with tents in order to compliment this sequence. So there’s no possible question of KANE recycling stock footage from KONG, at most we’re talking about the partial re-use of overpainted mattes… and that doesn’t strike me as any more plausible than the suggestion that they’re original mattes, unless somebody can identify the shots in KONG JNR that those trees are in, which so far nobody has.

All this examination seems triggered by the weirdness of the animated birds (the sole remaining mystery: who actually animated them? remember, they’re cel animation and not Willis H. O’Brien’s beloved stop-motion miniatures) and fueled by the suspicion that this scene is somehow too elaborate, that it must contain a shortcut somewhere…

This shot is a cutaway interpolated into the tent argument.

But the following scene with the Kanes in a tent is so simple and cramped, the sprawling exterior footage is quite necessary to make the sequence feel like it’s a real outing (albeit a 1941 studio picture’s version of an outing). And as every magician knows, one way to fool the audience is to put so much work into a trick that the audience dismisses the most obvious explanation (“Well, he can’t have memorized the position of every card in the deck!”). And Welles was a magician.

That’s what it comes down to, all this painstaking rumination and nerdiness — a single critical insight, that Welles was quite capable of staging an elaborate master shot involving a crowd of extras, two rear-projected matte paintings, one incorporating live action water and the other with animated birds — just as scene-setting.