Intertitle of the Week: Highland Reels

ANNIE LAURIE was the rattiest recording of anything I’ve looked at lately. The movie itself had a big timecode stuck on it, and the disc I was watching had evidently been produced by somebody with a video camera filming a TV screen playing the movie on VHS. At first I was irked, thinking the anonymous pirate ought to have at least used a tripod, even if he couldn’t simply connect the VCR to a DVD recorder. Then I surmised, from the timecode, that the movie was probably the property of some archive, and the intrepid crook had smuggled a handicam into a little screening room to filch the movie’s image. Of this, I heartily approved. Archives are great things, preserving the physical substance of cinema history, but too often it’s difficult for us mortals to access the goodies within, for geographical locations, and the archives make it difficult or impossible for us to get our hands on recordings, for copyright reasons. So larceny is the remaining option for cinephiles with hungry eyes.

Credit to the mysterious source: whenever his arm got tired, resulting in violent jostling of the image, he would rewind the tape in order to get a better version of the ruined sequence. I presume he intended to edit the faulty “takes” out, but never got around to it. A shame there was no soundtrack though — I can imagine a score making deft/cheesy use of not only the title song, but also “The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond” and “Auld Lang Syne”.

Anyhow, the movie posits Lillian Gish in the Scottish Highlands, as the titular Annie, she of the beautiful ballad heard in both Elia Kazan’s A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN and Takeshi Miike’s THE BIRD PEOPLE OF CHINA. So, I was of course thrilled at seeing La Gish impersonate one of my countrywomen. And then I was doubly, triply, quadruply thrilled that this studio Scotland was a dank, papier maché affair highly reminiscent of Orson Welles’ MACBETH. I doubt it was an actual influence — I prefer to think that both films accurately reflect the way denizens of Hollywood imagine my homeland — heaps of muddy canvas draped over boxes, molded pulp mountains, crooked castles of permanently wet clay. Come to think of it, that’s often how *I* think of the place, and I live here.

The story is set at the time of the Campbell-MacDonald feud, leading up to the infamous massacre of Glencoe, when the English-loving Campbells treacherously murdered a batch of sleeping MacDonalds. Lillian plays a Campbell who falls for a MacDonald, leading to kilted Romeo & Juliet antics.

Wouldn’t be surprising to see a trio of witches atop this outcrop.

Gish is more than usually pert and perky and pixieish here. One saucy scene has her serenaded by her effete Campbell beau, while she sits on the castle wall and smiles down at her rough, manly MacDonald suitor, who’s sitting on a rock amid a babbling brook. It’s surprising to see Lillian so fickle.

By the film’s climax, the Campbell’s have pretty much disgraced themselves via treachery, except for maybe Lillian’s Walter-Brennan-like grizzled protector, so she jumps ship and heroically lights a beacon to call rescuing clansmen. The climax is really thrilling, helped by the fact that both history and Gish’s rep as a tragedian really push us to fearing the worst possible outcome. In the end, this follows the MGM model and averts disaster, so we get a lovely two-strip idyll instead of heaps of corpses. Whatevs!

Colour hasn’t aged too well, alas. But by a happy coincidence, the MacDonald tartan uses the same hues as Two-Strip.

Praise to John S Robertson (a Canadian, probably with Scottish roots) for spectacular battle/chase action. We can see his film technique has grown more sophisticated since his (excellent) Barrymore DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE.

Leading men — Norman Kerry (Lon Chaney’s strongman rival in THE UNKNOWN) is a dignified MacDonald, triumphing over a deeply-scooped waistcoat which allows his nipples to peep shyly forth. Creighton Hale (THE CAT AND THE CANARY) is a suitably poncified Campbell. He may be best known today for Kenneth Anger’s completely unfounded allegation that he fucked a goat in a porno movie. All the more reason for joy at the liberation of this charming curio from its dusty canister.

The Sunday Intertitle: America’s Sweetheart

Mary Pickford is another of those massive stars, like Tom Mix, that I knew of but hadn’t really gotten to grips with. So I ran AMARILLY OF CLOTHESLINE ALLEY, directed ably by Marshall Neilan, and written by Frances Marion with an eye to every stereotype of Irish-American life that can be fitted into a film intended for family viewing (and a few that might raise eyebrows today).

Marion was possibly the top writer in Hollywood in the teens and ’20s (and I enjoyed reading about her fictional adventures in Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside) and her work on this romcom had me pondering if there’s a difference between male and female ideas of comedy. Maybe so, but only in general, i.e. rather useless, terms.

What I suspect is that male comedy, if boiled down to its essence, filtering out all subtleties and nuance, would come out all knockabout violence and bodily functions — in somewhat the way that autism is regarded as an exaggerated form of a certain male tendency, pee and poo and thump-on-the-head comedy is the masculine expression of that. There are plenty of men who enjoy this kind of basic apeman stuff, but many prefer it mingled with its counterpart —

Female comedy, boiled down to its essence, discarding all the nuance that is generally there, is concerned with emotions and stuff. Often the laughter comes from situations of social embarrassment. There’s likely to be less conflict, and often less surprise. Modern romantic comedies of the kind I can’t stand seem to hinge more on accepting a shared understanding of what’s supposed to be amusing, rather than actually being hit with anything startlingly funny. The laughter of agreement.

(Although Damon Wayans is male, and Nora Ephron is female, and although male and female audiences flock to these respective genres, I’d like to think that the division is largely a creation of the market. Just as I find stereotypically uber-macho and hyper-girly types boring, I find these films unappealing, but clearly the majority of people of both sexes fall somewhere in between. Psychologically, as far as anyone can tell, we all inhabit a spectrum between Mars and Venus.)

Both these extremes, like the extremes of social realism on one hand and George Lucas fantasy on the other, are pretty sterile on their own. What we seem to find with someone like Chaplin, as Sunnyside suggests, is somebody consciously blending the two, competing with Mary Pickford’s cuteness and emotional appeal, and adding in some kick-in-the-pants vulgarity. (Although there’s obviously a lot more to Chaplin than the novel combining of two stale flavours.)  It takes us out of the deadening zaniness of Keystone, and the deadening precitability of… well, AMARILLY OF CLOTHESLINE ALLEY.

The first half hour of this film, to give you an example of its gentle pace, shows in parallel the lives of Amarilly, a dirt-poor Irish lass in an American slum, and Gordon (Norman Kerry, who was Phoebus in the Chaney HUNCHBACK), a rich and feckless sculptor. A collision is inevitable, but we wait for it quite some time. And no story is unfolding meanwhile to occupy our attention, and it becomes apparent that nothing can happen until the two meet. But still we wait.

A Chaplin moment of pathos from Mary — before she gives a little kick and prances off…

By way of complication, both parties have prospective lovers in their own social class, so once things do get moving there are lovers’ quarrels and some blustering from the rich nobs about their boy carrying on with a cleaning woman. And here we finally arrive at an unpredictable stage, where it seems like the swiftest path to a happy ending would be to reunite Amarilly with her Irish beau, and let Gordon wed the society lass, yet this seems unsatisfactory, as it confirms the rigidity of the class system in a positively unAmerican manner. We’ve seen PRETTY IN PINK, there has to be more to it than this.

But there really isn’t — the film’s solution is to have the working class boy shot by accident, collapsing on Amarilly’s floor as she serves him a brimming plateful of Irish stew (and here I really didn’t know what I was supposed to be feeling, since Pickford plays her failure to understand that the guy’s seriously injured, not just drunk, in the same breezy, pleasantly comedic manner she uses for everything else). He’s nursed back to health, we forget all about the film’s, you know, narrative, and then it’s six years later and they’ve got a couple of kids, The End.

“You can say anything you like about me. Just don’t say I love my work, that makes me sound like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch!” ~ Mabel Normand.

Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley