End

No doubt it’s the dread of having to look at A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG again that’s making me drag my feet about finishing A KING IN A NEW YORK. And yet, it’s not as if anybody’s forcing me to do either.

There are two bits that seem worth talking about. First, on his way to testify before a redbaiting congressional committee, Chaplin’s King Shadhov gets his finger stuck in a fire hose. This is silly but potentially quite promising. As often with Chaplin, he’s wrestling with something stupid while something serious hangs over him as a threat — farce is the true medium of terror, after all.

The sequence doesn’t develop as wonderfully as prime Chaplin routines do, and while I hate to blame Bob Arden, and ultimately you can’t blame anyone but Chaplin, I’m going to slightly blame Bob Arden. Yes, that guy — leading man in Welles’ MR ARKADIN/CONFIDENTIAL REPORT, that one ambulance guy who stinks up a scene in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. That guy.

(A friend offered a convincing argument that Welles INTENDED Arden to be a loathsome lunk in ARKADIN, and it sort of convinced me but I still can’t feel it. I feel more like he was meant to be a slightly loveable rogue and missed by a mile. If he’s not meant to be even remotely appealing it’d be a good example of Wellesian perversity, though.)

The thing is, if KING were being shot in America, we can be sure Chaplin would have selected someone like Chester Conklin as co-clown for this key bit. Instead we have Arden, whose main selling point was always that he was a Yank in the UK. But a convincing accent is the least important attribute this bit needs. Chaplin could surely have engaged a physical comedian like Mr. Pastry (Buster’s “pet” comic) who was great at physical entanglement business.

Two slapstick specialists who are in sync with a bit of business will give you so much value in terms of little interactions. Even with Chaplin presumably telling Arden exactly what to do and when, that is missing.

The slightly contrived logic which causes the fire hose to eventually get plugged in and spray the committee is acceptable. A bit more excess would be good — skilled stuntmen falling over, individual gags about toupees coming off or whatever, furniture collapsing. We get none of that, just splash and a fadeout.

Of course it’s absurd that an actual monarch should be accused of being a commie, so the whole thing fizzles out. But young Michael Chaplin isn’t so lucky — in a genuinely heartrending and deeply depressing outcome, he’s gotten his parents out of prison by naming names himself.

Shadhov tries to comfort him and it is outstandingly ineffectual.

He says he’s going to pay him a visit sometime and we do not believe it.

He says that this will all pass one day and he’s right but it’s not a very comforting thing to tell a child, for whom the future is always far off and the present always interminable.

Strangely grandiose music plays as Shadhov and his secretary fly off in a jet, reading the papers. Chaplin has a great gift for musical counterpoint, but what exactly is this music doing here? Brainwashing the viewer into thinking this isn’t an incredibly bleak ending? Or just celebrating the miracle of flight and skyscrapers and so on?

Chaplin now being a European filmmaker ends with FINIS, which seems a bit much.

OK, that’s over. Very glad I saw it, of course.

Pa.

LA RICOTTA, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s tragicomic episode of ROGOPAG, is a substantial piece of work. It’s good enough to place at the start or finish of the film, but perhaps its downbeat conclusion argued against renaming the film either PAGOROG or GROGOPA,

During the filming of the crucifixion, a lowly extra or bit-part player, Mario Cipriani, troubled with hiccups, struggles to get something to eat on location after giving his lunch to his starving family. Orson Welles plays the film’s director. Although we’re on location in familiar-looking extra-Roman scenery (maybe on the road to Ostia, where PPP placed Fellini’s CABIRIA, and where he would meet his own death twelve years later), the scenes from the film within the film are shot on a stage at Cinecitta in ravishing colour.

Here’s a funny thing: did PPP have a bigger budget than his fellows? Rossellini is unable to afford foreign locations; Godard shoots on the streets, has no production design save a newspaper. Pasolini has colour, period costumes, a large supporting cast, Laura Betti, and Orson Welles as the film’s director. A clue may come from an exchange reported when JLG interviewed RR: “Is it necessary to spend the whole budget on the film?” asked Godard. “You spend what you have to,” replied Rossellini, “the rest is for you and your family.”

Pasolini, a decent actor and striking presence, should really be playing the director himself, who quotes Pasolini, but I guess casting Welles allows him to satirise Hollywood, even of OW is hardly a typical embodiment of that town/attitude. Also, Welles is funnier than Pasolini could have been. The repeated shot of a morose Welles alone in his chair is extremely amusing. And I haven’t generally been a fan of PPP’s comic stylings. I’ll never forget the ghastly Chaplin pastiche in THE CANTERBURY TALES, an example of a totally mismatched talent failing to grasp the aesthetic he’s aiming at. (Ken Russell, who one would have thought equally distant from CC, manages slightly better in LISZTOMANIA.)

We do get undercranked footage with shrill fast-forward music, but it’s used really as interstitial material and is not actively unfunny. And applying the comic touch a tad heavily works, I think, since this is all headed for tragedy, so you get more of a tonal clash this way. I feel, in a way, that Pasolini’s sensibility and whole outlook is anti-comic: the joking in this film is mostly cruel sport made of the bit-player, mockery by the rest of the cast and crew, and the film only joins in this comedy as a distancing device, not because it finds him funny.

Equating comedy with bullying is reductive, but there is some element of truth to the accusation. Bullies always try to use humour, though the resulting laughter is tinged with fear — people laugh along because they don’t want to be the next victim.

I like the idea of directors nodding to one another in their own work: Gregoretti will include a Pasolini gibe in his concluding chapter here, but PPP’s tribute to Fellini is more ambivalent. “He dances,” says Welles, thoughtfully, when asked his opinion by an annoying reporter. A questioning look. “yes. He dances,” repeats the scowling Buddha.

PPP starts the piece with an onscreen text and narration by himself in which he affirms the significance of the Bible and the passion of Christ, lest anyone think he’s mocking it. Which would be an easy conclusion to jump to — (really fun) Italian pop music playing while extras dance, the accident of a real fatality interrupting the Calvary tableau, the grumpiness of actors and crew undercutting the solemnity of the scene being shot, Christ’s deposition being interrupted when the body is dropped — this is all aimed at the faux-seriousness of religiose movie-making, I guess, but it has blasphemous side-effects. Surprisingly, this movie proceeds THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST MATTHEW in release, but PPP must already have been at least planning his own big Jesus picture.

Pasolini wasn’t above mistreating extras himself, according to my spy on the set of CANTERBURY TALES, whose veracity I cannot confirm. Reportedly, when the money ran out and the background artists could not be paid, the director insisted “You do it for the art,” provoking derisive laughter. When my spy heard that PPP was leaving his AD to shoot the movie while he filmed hardcore porn in a nearby castle, the spy volunteered for what is known as a meaty role, but was unable to, er, perform, and, in fleeing an enraged Pasolini, tumbled down the castle stairs and broke his arm. I think this story SHOULD be true, but I can’t vouch for it.

I’m always sensitive to the uses Welles is put to in films, but I didn’t find anything to get upset about here. PPP makes him a villain, the representative of capitalism, but also a sensitive artist (the film he’s making looks nice!). You could imagine him getting on well with Lang’s character from LE MEPRIS, and he gets the film’s summative line, the moral lesson. Films shouldn’t have moral lessons delivered in summative lines, but the Welles character’s complicated, compromised position in the movie undercuts his sympathy for our deceased hero, which (mostly) takes the curse off it.

Put a lamp on the floor

When I was a student we worked something out, before we had any great understanding of lighting. If you put a lamp on the floor, it would look interesting. But when you mucked about with fill lighting and three-point lighting and realistic lighting and you didn’t know what you were doing, you just spoiled it. So the cry went out, “Just put a lamp on the floor!” It was quick and easy and it looked great, even if it didn’t make any sense.

On Sunday we had a double bill of THE BAT WHISPERS (1930) and the following year’s THE BLACK CAMEL, the which I understood to be the first surviving Charlie Chan movie with Warner Oland. (Run-down of earlier entries — Paul Leni’s THE CHINESE PARROT with Sôjin Kamiyama as Chan is currently lost, alas; so is the serial THE HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY featuring George Kuwa; BEHIND THAT CURTAIN, the earliest surviving Chan, has a bewildered-looking E.L. Park in a tiny cameo as Chan, looking as if he just wandered onto the set by mistake, an interesting approach to the role. You can enjoy his strange performance here at 1.18:51. That’s the last time an Asian actor is trusted with the role, and the Swedish Warner Oland debuts in CHARLIE CHAN CARRIES ON in 1931, which is also lost — but I’ve just learned that the Spanish-language version, ERAN TRECE, survives, with Manuel Arbó as a Latin Chan).

Anyway, THE BLACK CAMEL is basically junk, but you can see director Hamilton MacFadden trying to get with the programme — he knows the camera should move on occasion, he’s just not sure why, and he continually struggles to set up a shot with three people who aren’t all facing away from the lens.

However, when Oland’s Chan SAYS THE TITLE, he puts a lamp on the floor and it’s very effective.

I would have given him more credit if we hadn’t just watched THE BAT WHISPERS in which Roland West shoots Chester Morris with a floor-lamp TWICE:

THE BAT WHISPERS is the only film in which Chester Morris is actually interesting, and it should be admitted that it’s not all due to the interesting lighting. His whole approach is different: when he gets his appeal to the audience not to give away the twist ending, he does it with a Wellesian twinkle absent from all his later performances. Maybe what he needed, like Welles, was to have the other actors removed so he could perform for us alone (Welles went so far as to have the jurors close their eyes when he did his big summing-up in COMPULSION). By a cruel twist of fate Morris found himself confined to B-movies so cheap there was no time to remove the supporting cast.

Roland West, something of a visionary, had very little interest in performance despite marrying an actress, but he certainly had an eye for a striking visual. In this case, it looks like his eye had landed on Paul Leni’s THE LAST WARNING which has one of the best lamps on the floor shots in all cinema, and conceivably the first:

Shots like this make the loss of THE CHINESE PARROT even more tragic.

One more example — James Whale was a great admirer of THE LAST WARNING, but doesn’t provide as much floorlamping in FRANKENSTEIN as he would in its first sequel, which features maybe the best example of the bunch, combing low-level light with a high-level camera to give us this beauty:

Best of all, it’s MOTIVATED by all that Kenneth Strickfaden lab equipment. Chester Morris is apparently generating his lamplight by star wattage alone.