Clean Slate

In Alan Parker’s entertaining documentary A Turniphead’s Guide to the British Cinema, as AP pontificates from a screen in a deserted cinema, two usherettes gaze blankly at his image. “Alan Parker… weren’t he the tall thin one that married Greer Garson in RANDOM HARVEST?” And that, for many years, was all I knew of RANDOM HARVEST.

The joke is that Alan Parker does not resemble Ronald Colman, and he thinks it’d be amusing to suggest that he does. Colman is described as tall in RH, but he obviously isn’t. Look at his little arms.

I only got around to the film after being bowled over by HOME BEFORE DARK — I love several of his pre-codes and enjoy later films like GYPSY but it was clearly time to see this one.

James Hilton also wrote the source novel for Lost Horizon which became a good Ronald Colman film… and Goodbye, Mr. Chips which might have made a good Colman movie but instead became a good Robert Donat film. And knight Without Armour which became a less good Robert Donat film. He seems to have kept those two actors fairly busy.

The plot of this one is hokum but handled with taste and flair. It’s based on a form of movie amnesia which does not seem to exist in reality — if you were disabled to the point where “Who am I?” became an accurate description of your condition, you’d be so disabled you couldn’t say it. To this folly is added the further idea that a second knock on the head, or shock or trauma, might RESTORE one’s memory — but would erase all the memories you’d built up between shocks. A form of retrograde amnesia which DOES exist. So at least you could say your amnesia was getting progressively more realistic. Is that good? If I had to have serious condition I might possibly prefer to have the least realistic condition imaginable. It’s the romantic in me.

Ronald Colman is effortlessly romantic, and sympathetic, and his face invites emotion — he seems to have a grip on our mirror neurons in a way other actors can only dream of. The words of Borges echo: “certain sunsets, certain landscapes, certain faces, weathered by time, are trying to tell us something, or are about to tell us something, or have told us something we should not have missed…”

Added to this is Greer Garson because the drama is really about “What if you were a woman who loved a man who lost all memory of you?” And GG is really good in this. She’s an actor who seems to have fallen out of fashion for a long time but may be coming back. The MGM quality film, the white elephant art despised by Manny Farber, has a place in my affections. Something can be, at heart, kitsch, yet still move us.

At two hours plus with an obviously costly Hollywood England setting, this is very much elephantine in intent. We get Greer inventing the mini-kilt in a mock Harry Lauder dance number under a backcloth of Edinburgh Castle, industrial unrest, decadent aristos, a sleepy cottage idyll, a stately home, big city streets, a huge cast of characters. But amid the pageant of “quality” might also be lurking Douglas Sirk’s recipe for popular art — he described it as “trash plus craziness.” Plus soulful actors who can make us take it more or less seriously, even against our better judgement.

As people are supposed popularly to get more conservative as they age (no longer really true, it seems), directors like LeRoy went from making the kind pre-code termite art admired by Farber, to big and bloated QUO VADIS stuff. But while zippy energy and modesty is lost — and I do find that a very attractive quality, sometimes, on certain projects, bloat and waddle are mitigated by sweep and scope.

RANDOM HARVEST stars Bulldog Drummond; Mrs. Miniver; Papa (Lars Hanson); Leah St. Aubyn; Clarence; Admiral Boom; Ralph Norton; Dai Bando; Mrs Gummidge; James Forsyte; Mother York; High Sheriff of Nottingham; Alfred Pennyworth; Claire Lennartz; Lady Beekman; Radlik; Monsieur Taffy; Christopher Pepper; Kane’s father; Reverend Cyril Playfair; and PTO.

Elmer Takes the Stage

SPITE MARRIAGE is a transitional Buster Keaton film: he plays a character called Elmer for the first time, his face is starting to show signs of age and dissolution, it’s not always as funny as it should be. All clear markers of the MGM influence which would destroy Keaton’s filmmaking and movie star career as soon as he starts talking.

Elmer is a pitiable dope and a sad sack, qualities that would be forced on Keaton repeatedly in the coming years. On the other hand, Elmer wins out by showing typical Buster fortitude in the name of love, so he’s not the fully warped character of the early thirties.

Next time I watch this movie, (and though it’s not a patch on even THE CAMERAMAN, its immediate predecessor, it’s good enough to reward repeat viewings) I must mute the soundtrack (or get the new restoration). For the first half, crappy sound effects highlight every pratfall or reaction, ruining them. It’s like adding exclamation marks to every sentence in a PG Wodehouse novel. Overemphasis kills.

Buster/Elmer is a stagestruck fan in love with actress Dorothy Sebastian (his real-life mistress for some years). When her beau takes up with hot society dame Leila Hyams, she marries Elmer to spite him. Some stuff happens and there’s a big fight on a boat.

Not much holds this narrative together — Buster was aware that THE CAMERAMAN was in danger of losing its throughline by not concentrating enough on Buster’s mission to succeed as a newsreel photographer (modern observers note the movie as a benign ancestor of NIGHTCRAWLER) — but by echoing the situations in Sebastian’s play (a Civil War melodrama), the climax just about fools us into thinking the film hangs together.

The only situation which strongly relates to the central idea as stated in the title is the drunken honeymoon night sequence, where Buster strives to put a comatose Sebastian to bed — and he had to fight to keep that scene in the picture, which is evidence of the incompetence he was up against. It’s an amazing bit of simple-yet-brilliant physical comedy. I guess you could say it slows the pace down, but it’s also, as Buster would say, “the biggest laughing scene in the picture.” The trouble probably was that once the suits had seen it a few times, they’d stop laughing and they only noticed the slowness. In this business, you have to NOTICE when you laugh and REMEMBER it.

The stuff involving the play is rather weak, though it returns to Buster’s obsession with the antebellum south. The trashing of sentiment here is probably easier to take, though, for those disturbed by THE GENERAL’s taking the wrong side.

When Buster accepts a small role in the play and destroys it, the mild malice involved in travestying its cliches is enjoyable, but it’s hard to laugh when the theatre audience is doing that for us, by way of frequent cutaways. For perhaps the first time in Keaton’s work, there’s an emotional confusion as to what response is being aimed at: are we supposed to guffaw along with the Broadway crowd or feel pity for Buster’s humiliation? Also, Buster is disfigured by the stage whiskers he’s incompetently glued to his face. One doesn’t like to see Buster’s beauty defiled.

Psychologically it’s interesting: in defending his vaudeville upbringing, Keaton would say that he got all the normal beatings a child would receive in those days, only on the stage. As if that made it OK. As if that wouldn’t be humiliating. It would be easy to overstress this. Keaton enjoyed performing and seemed able to ignore pain. But I suspect his relationship to performing, to audiences, to being laughed at, was a touch complicated. I mean, most performers seem to see the audience as a kind of opponent to be conquered. And Keaton’s comedy requires him to be a put-upon underdog. But he never wanted to ASK for sympathy. He wanted to WIN it.

Keaton might be the only slapstick star who’d wind up bloodied onscreen — he does it in THE SAPHEAD and one or two shorts as well as here. Others might don comedy plaster casts, but Keaton allows a touch of realism into the drubbings, although, as with Jackie Chan’s occasional bloody lips or bruises, it’s realism of a limited kind — our hero is still sort of invulnerable.

Lamp Post

Occluding lampshades are a favourite compositional device, and this one, from Curtis Bernhardt’s MGM noir HIGH WALL, is particularly interesting, though perhaps not wholly successful.

Being an MGM noir, it’s full of hedging and excuses, and that’s what stops it being great — it’s gorgeously shot, exciting and well cast — Robert Taylor even has some excellent moments, and the miscasting of Audrey Totter as a kind of Ingrid Bergman shrink complicates things and makes the story more intriguing. There’s a natural edge and intensity to Totter which makes you not quite trust her when she’s required to be sweet…

Anyway, this lamp. Herbert Marshall has to do a lot of WALKING in this film, and he manages it very well for the most part. But you can hear his wooden leg SQUEAK, which I’m amazed wasn’t fixed.

Towards the climax, Marshall and Walker have to engage in a vigorous fight, falling all over the furniture in Marshall’s flat, and this was obviously too challenging for Marshall to perform himself, so Bernhardt has devised a ruse. Yes, this also falls into the genre of “How to conceal Herbert Marshall’s wooden leg,” a trope most famously illustrated in THE LITTLE FOXES where he briefly exits frame on the left, so that his identically-dressed stand-in can stagger up the stairs while our main focus is on Bette Davis:

So, here’s the scene. Marshall has shut the door, thinking himself alone, but then he hears a noise, and a dramatic shadow in snap-brimmed fedora crosses his form — Bernhardt gets to do lots of Germanic lighting in this one, which often LOOKS more Warners than MGM.

SLOWLY he turns… and Bernhardt tracks back, the camera movement synchronized to Herbert’s pivot… and Taylor’s shoulder, side of head and hat brim slide into view.

It’s a terrific effect: it not only reveals the intruder in a dramatic and mysterious way, it makes Marshall shrink as he becomes more vulnerable, with Taylor’s positioning making him seem, in a way, gigantic.

And Bernhardt now maintains this shot for several lines of dialogue, resisting a reverse angle and showing the kind of nerve few directors have these days.

When he finally cuts, it’s to a closer view of Marshall, showing the calculation in his expression and cueing up a POV shot which tells us that he’s looking at his revolver, across the room and behind Taylor…

Having shown us what’s on Marshall’s mind and allowed us to guess what his plan is, Bernhardt now lets us see him execute it. The fact that we can anticipate what he’s up to is obviously good for suspense, as we can ask ourselves if he’ll succeed.

Bernhardt cuts back to the earlier over-the-shoulder framing of the cornered Marshall and pulls back as Marshall advances, Taylor finally coming into clearer view as he turns to follow his opponent’s movement…

But now the shot gets weird. Berndardt’s camera pulls back to what should be a flat two of Marshall and Taylor, but turns into a shot of a lamp and Taylor…

It’s one of those clever-but-stupid ideas. Because there’s no good dramatic reason for us to be observing the action half-hidden by a lampshade.

But the clever bit is, while he’s still talking, and while we can still see a good bit of his body, Marshall does a quick shuffle and steps back out of frame, letting his stand-in replace him. This happens while we can still see part of him.

By the time we get this next composition, Marshall has been replaced by his pod person:

The out-takes must have been hilarious (and swiftly burned), with Marshall colliding with his identically clad stunt-herbert, or the substitution not happening quickly enough, so that we see both Herberts at the same time, awkwardly weaving around one another…

But the trick is done imperceptibly in the movie, the only flaw being our puzzlement about why this lighting fixture suddenly has a featured role.

So now the fake Herbert can grab for the gun, the real Taylor can leap on him, the lamp can go flying (fulfilling, at last, a discernible dramatic function) and the two men can crash to the floor and tussle.

We even get a bold glimpse of the stunt-herbert’s face, with the filmmakers confident that we won’t notice that it’s not our star because there’s too much going on, it’s too quick, and anyway, we clearly saw that it was him at the start of this shot.

The other main fake Herbert bit I remember is in TROUBLE IN PARADISE, where Herbert springs out of frame, dashing for the stairs, and Lubitsch whip-pans IN THE WRONG DIRECTION, rotating almost 360 to catch the fake Herbert leaping up the staircase two steps at a time, convincing us that the star is an athletic biped but that his director is drunk…