Having watched, for research purposes, Asta Nielsen’s 1923 film of Frank Wedekind’s ERDGEIST (directed by Leopold Jessner) as part of our research for our PANDORA’S BOX pieces (Pabst adapted and fused together both plays in Wedekind’s Lulu cycle), I had come to think of Nielsen as a big overcooked hambone, narcissistic and too too much for the screen, but of course with a more careful director, not in love with her every move — like Pabst himself on JOYLESS STREET — she could dial it down and be effective.
DIRNENTRAGODIE (PROSTITUTE TRAGEDY – well, it’s blunt — 1927), directed by Bruno Rahn, also keeps the excessive tendencies in check and is startlingly hardboiled and realistic. The first we see of Nielsen, she’s doing her roots, an unexpected image showing she could set aside vanity when required.
I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising to me, and yet it is, that the technique remains unchanged even if the chemicals have evolved. The destruction of the movie star beauty ideal extends even to using the mirror’s edge to give her a double set of eyeballs.
The movie also delivers a nubile Oscar Homolka as a pimp. I wondered how recognizable the old golem would be — the answer is, VERY recognisable, instantly so.
Rahn made KLEINSTADTSUNDER the same year, with Nielsen again playing a sex worker. Then he died, only 39. Nielsen would retire from movies in 1932 — good on her, great timing — and happily live until the age of 90.
Rahn’s direction is quite effective — this kind of realist drama still depends on constructed sets — how else are you going to do a street night scene in 1927 — and the sets still have a toe in the world of expressionism — buildings lean forwards like intimidating drunks.
The climax calls back to Jack the Ripper, whose crimes seem to have made almost a bigger impression in Germany than in his homeland — and we watch closeups of feet, walking on paths that will surely intersect with destiny. The killer’s feet following the prey is the first serial killer cinematic trope, before the handheld POV shot was thought of. This might be its origin.
In later films, the fancy footwork would be used to conceal the killer’s identity, a very conventional, plot-based motivation. But here, we KNOW who everyone is. The feet reduce them to abstractions, treating a grim and ugly subject with sensitive discretion, and somehow suggesting that the characters are following the dance steps of a higher fate (like Bruno and Guy at the outset of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, another pair of oblivious sets of footwear on the path to an appointment at their own Samarra.
As Asta joins the chase, Rahn lets rip with his own handy-heldy frenzy, with the star breaking up into blurry jolts as she frantically searches, trying to call off the tragedy she’s set in motion. Pretty strong stuff.
Of course, the hand-held camera does not yet have a popular association with documentary realism — documentaries were still trying to resemble the less imaginative films, which meant bolting the tripod down. So Rahn’s shakicam ruckus is a form of expressionism, trying to make the shots SEEM LIKE the emotion of the scene. Then he reverts to even more traditional expressionist means for the murder —
Can’t beat a big old menacing shadow. Even the spatial confusion caused by the victim looking off screen right while the shadow is screen left, works — anyway, it’s perfectly sensible in realist terms, no doubt she’s looking at where Homolka really stood to cast the shadow. For graphic logic, she should really look left. But then the shadow moves, aligning itself with her gaze and swallowing her tiny figure in its voidoid dark…
Quite a piece of cinema!
Also, Wilder had wanted to cast Walter Matthau. Imagine THAT film. Tom Ewell is skilled, but he has a truly sinister smile and is never what you’d call pleasant to look at. Calling him “Tommy” in the Saul Bass titles doesn’t make him any more boyish. There’s a reason why Skelton Knaggs never played lead in a romantic comedy. (Matthau’s shall-we-say unconventional looks never seem to be a problem — except when he takes his shirt off — and he eventually acquired leading man status and became a fixture in Wilder’s films.)
The island of Manhattan, as viewed from a nearby hill.
Preston Sturges said he wanted the fantasies in UNFAITHFULLY YOURS to look as if they were written and directed by the protagonist, who is neither a writer nor a director, Wilder’s treatment of Ewell’s nocturnal thoughts really takes this idea further. Ewell’s job, publishing sensational literature (a milieu already explored by Danny Kaye in THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY), further inflects his lurid imaginings. Wilder frames stagily and Ewell aims his performance at the camera rather than his co-stars (who include the great Carolyn Jones as a passion-crazed nurse) and the effect is as much soap opera as it is pulp magazine. The spoof of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (whose director, Fred Zinnemann, was a friend, fellow Austro-Hungarian, and former collaborator of Wilder’s) got the biggest laugh from Fiona, due to Ewell’s disabled sprint along the shore. It’s not the most sophisticated bit of comedy, but this isn’t exactly Wilder’s most sophisticated film.**
Monroe is so artificial a performer when she’s doing her thing (the carefully arranged grin, lips pulled tight to hide gums), that it’s hard to assess her performance, especially when playing such an obvious fantasy figure. It IS nice to see her playing Chopsticks, though, with a different kind of smile, one we aren’t used to seeing on her, one that seems real. Or at least unfamiliar. It’s the shape her face makes when she smiles, sings “pop-pop-pop” along with Chopsticks, and keeps her gums hidden. It’s a good face. I guess the scene’s other purpose is to make her tits jiggle. Trevilla’s costume designs emphasise the natural squishiness of body fat and avoid bullet-bra rigidity.
There’s also a half-hearted attempt to make something out of The Sonny Tufts Subplot, with Ewell becoming jealous about his wife (obviously a feat of projected guilt) and the aforementioned Tufts, whom he will eventually slug. Since Tufts is blameless in reality, this bit of gratuitous violence seems to stem solely from Wilder’s assessment that Tufts is the kind of guy we would like to see punched, an assessment I cannot honestly fault. There’s a fine German word, Backpfeifengesicht, for Sonny Tufts’ face.
There’s also a very weird, broad, Neanderthal performance from one Robert Strauss, who inexplicably doesn’t get punched. I guess we could say he has the Cliff Osmond role. And a VERY funny perf by Oscar Homolka as Dr, Brubaker, psychologist, who proves himself a fine conduit for the Wilder style. As we’re told Wilder dictated every pause and gesture, I assume he also gave indications of timing/delivery, or maybe it’s just his writing that offers to the sensitive actor a suggestion of what to stress and what to throw away. At any rate, Homolka proves himself the funniest headshrink in Wilder’s long parade of nerve specialists (certainly more amusing than Martin Gabel or Klaus Kinski).
The removal of the act, or even the suggestion of the act, of consummation, does more than turn the movie into merely an exploration of male fantasy (something it would need to employ Dr. Brubaker fulltime in order to get to the bottom of). It sadly turns it into a disconnected bag of bits, blackout sketches without a real final punchline. Some very funny bits, some stylish filmmaking, and a strong sense of the specific weirdness of its time and place. All accidentally elevated to classic status by a scene where a skirt blows up, and the girl enjoys the sensation.***
* See also Fred MacMurray’s moon-mission aspirant offspring in THE APARTMENT. Admirable efficiency of American society: as soon as they got a space program, they started giving birth to would-be astronauts.
shadowplay 