The Sunday Intertitle: Whip-crack-away

On the macro level, Tourneur’s THE WHIP seems to survive (on YouTube, anyway) in a slightly mangled and ineffective form. On the micro level, within individual scenes, it certainly has effective stuff.

A Bunuelian moment (avant la letter): Baron Sartoris shaves, looking out the window at the object of his mercenary intentions and her beau. An iris effect singles out his POV — this seems like an intelligent use of vignetting, which is often merely decorative. Using it to tell the audience when we’re watching through a human eye (which is round) as opposed to through a camera (boxy) makes sense, even if movies could ultimately dispense with this shorthand. And having the watcher wield a razor as he spies adds a sinister feeling.

Since the action revolves around a stables, Tourneur throws in a fox hunt. The intertitle saves us any unnecessarily visceral imagery —

And this seems to still relate somehow to the malevolent scheming of Baron Sartoris.

I’ve previously observed that the film seems to be missing explanatory titles. Here comes evidence that it’s missing whole scenes, as Sartoris apologises to hero Brancaster for a loss of temper which we haven’t ever seen.

I begin to wonder if this film isn’t going to cut off dead in mid-climax and leave me panting. Hopefully not.

Sartoris has jiggered Brancaster’s flivver — some business with the brakes — and Tourneur gives us the 1917 version of an action climax. This consists of wide shots of the car on the road intercut with subliminal-quick shots of feet on brakes, hand on hand-brake. But without any close shots of the people in the car it’s not very emotional. One can see why those shots would be hard to achieve in 1917, though I can imagine ways to make them possible without too much engineering. But this kind of sequence is a new challenge for the filmmaker, distinct from the Griffithian chase, and it’s understandable that the required grammar hasn’t been grasped yet. Of course it’s also possible that Tourneur shots a bunch of anxious reaction shots and they’ve gone astray sometime in the last 107 years, along with Sartoris’ rudeness and his introductory title.

The crash at the end is really interesting — the car stops on a dime and rolls over sideways, indefiance of the laws of physics. The movement is both herky and jerky, resulting either from extreme undercranking or stop motion animation. If the former, it’s impressive that they’ve managed to flip the flivver over without visible wirework; if the latter, it’s impressive full stop.

Watching it frame-by-frame, I’m still uncertain but I think the occupants may be dolls. If they’re real humanoids I find it hard to see how Tourneur could avoid mangling them, but then I’m not certain old Maurice wouldn’t regard the mangling of humanoids to be all in a day’s enjoyable work.

A jump cut sets the wreck on fire and suddenly it’s night-for-night. During the drive, it looked like day-for-night for precisely one shot, where Tourneur wisely framed out the sky and turned the headlamps on. The rest of the time he’s depended on blue tinting, I suspect, which hasn’t been passed down to us. But he knows he’ll get a better night effect by shooting the blaze after sundown.

The next morning, Sartoris and his accomplice (who is she?) listen for news of the calamity, and I’ll end on a lovely bit of classic Tourneur shadowplay — we see the eavesdroppers, skulking, and a main rushing with the report of the tragedy, but in that shot we also get the Baron’s profile cast in outline against the wall. Really nice. Tourneur’s mind is far more focussed than any of his contemporaries on the expressive possibilities of the image.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Silent Horse Whisperer

Watching THE WHIP (1917). I got the impression some of its stars, all forgotten personalities today, might be worth looking up. Dion Titheradge (!) plays the part of the jockey, and his IMDb credits are… odd.

He died in 1934. OK. “He is an actor, known for GOSFORD PARK.” Strange. Ah… he’s heard singing on the soundtrack of GF. An earlier recording. But the fact that he has a writing credit on Before the Fringe, a TV series from 1967 is also quite strange. Still, something he wrote pre-mortem could have been included. The plot synopsis says “A series featuring some of the talent who were in vogue before the new broom of Beyond the Fringe swept through comedy.” Joan Sims, Ronnie Barker, Barbara Windsor, Dora Bryan, Stanley Holloway and Beatrice Lillie appeared in what seems to be an early version of what British TV people now call a “clips & c*nts” show.

Titheradge has three other writing credits dated after his demise, but that’s one of the nice things about being a writer… you get to die while your words live on, at least for a bit.

Titheradge made six films in 1917, and then never made another. It’s quite possible that working for Maurice Tourneur here is what caused him to jack it in.

Titheradge was an Aussie, which perhaps accounts for his peculiar name, who found fame in Britain, had this brief Hollywood stint (beats dying in the Great War) and returned to the UK to end his days.

We’re always hearing how it used to be the thing to have the villain enter and kick a dog, so that we’d all know where we stand with him. Tourneur has a man literally do just that (although he misses — a touch of Gallic subtlety). Who is this swine? The film doesn’t tell us, yet. But a strong negative impression has been made.

Another fellow is marked as potentially no good by his trick tickler — suitable for twirling. He’s also been given the task of spying on the racing stables, but since he hasn’t actually attempted to punt a hound, maybe he has a chance of redemption.

Alma Hanlon is our leading lady. Her entire film career happened in the years 1917-1919. She was from New Jersey, then America’s film centre, so presumably she just presented herself at a studio, looking fetching, and started off in leading parts. One of these, in 1917’s PRIDE AND THE DEVIL, was a character called Doris Kenyon, which is also the name of a movie star, already established in pictures, which is kind of weird. (Doris Kenyon was born Doris Kenyon, so she doesn’t seem to have taken the name from a movie or play.)

Quite a few characters have appeared without us being told who they are, other than whether or not they habitually kick pups, so the following intertitle might be baffling were it not for the helpful illo.

So the twirly fellow is Sartoris (great name, though Dion Titheradge still wins the cup), Kelly is the cigar-chomper seen in telephonic conspiracy with him, but He Who Kicks Dogs is still sans handle. Baron Sartoris, per the IMDb, is one Paul McAllister, who would play Noah in the Curtiz NOAH’S ARK. Romantic interest looks set to be supplied by a character called Brancaster, who paints landscapes (I mean he does paintings of landscapes, he doesn’t slather the scenery in gouache like Antonioni). This is Irving Cummings, later a prolific director whose thirty-year career gave us a lot of classy crap at Fox. He looks like the kind of guy who would make THE STORY OF ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL.

I don’t know who the dame is. The cast list is multiplying faster than the titles writer can keep up. Having to sketch bits of horse anatomy into every title may be slowing him down.

The IMDb doesn’t provide any clew as to the dog-kicker’s name, and I’m now wondering if he and the twirly Baron are one and the same. If they are, I think it’s unfair of the film to cut to them in different locations and costumes, then back again. It’s possible that the little twirly bits on his moustache disappear in wide shots, causing him to look like a different man in a different moustache. This and the missing titles make me suspect that at some stage in this movie’s history the print was hacked into bite-sized fragments, spilled on the floor, and reassembled by a blindfolded devotee of the William Burrough fold-in technique gifted with more editing cement than sense. I continue watching mainly to see if a coherent plot emerges or if the whole show is going to devolve into a random series of images of fences and settees filmed from unsurprising angles.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Sunday Intertitle: Horseflesh

I think NEXT year, when I’m screening a film from the 1910s, I’ll do a Maurice Tourneur. Here’s one that’s on YouTube:

Only a few minutes in and this is the biggest horse head I’ve ever seen in an intertitle:

Last time I saw a disembodied horse head that size in was in the bed of a movie producer named Woltz.

If this standard keeps up I’ll be well satisfied…