Intertitle of the Week: Death of the Intertitle

The silent movie foresees its own end — from A COTTAGE ON DARTMOOR. I watched this again because I wanted to compare the silent Hitchcocks I’ve been screening with a state-of-the-art British silent movie by other hands, to assess Hitchcock’s artistry in comparison with something else.

Anthony Asquith’s film certainly beats all of Hitch’s silents into a (Hitch)cocked hat — but then, it’s possibly the supreme masterpiece of British silent cinema, and better than most films from most places at most times. To enumerate just a few of its virtues will take a while —

It’s simpler in story terms than Hitchcock’s films, but the simplicity pays off. Asquith knows exactly who his main character is, and how to maintain sympathy for him through some fairly disastrous personal choices. The melodrama is beautifully integrated into the story and style of the film. The movie combines naturalistic settings (although the titular cottage appears as a model shot at one point) with expressionistic framing, striking a thrilling balance between artifice and stark conviction.

The German influence is clearly massive — this is Dartmoor as Caspar David Friedrich might have painted it. Perhaps, as Kevin Brownlow has argued, everything valuable in British silent film of the ’20s derived from Germany, but I don’t see this as a cause for shame — we stole from the best. Perhaps if we’d stolen from France, our apparently in-built obsession with realism could have been expressed more, but I’m glad we kept things Teutonic. Actually, when Asquith’s characters do go to the cinema, things get quite French, with an accelerating montage of orchestra (the first film screened is a silent) and audience that builds to a Gance-like frenzy of inter-cutting. (Elsewhere in British cinema, Hitchcock was being influenced by the Russian montage school, which he sought to combine with German expressionist effects.)

The cinema scene is a brilliant, gratuitous set-piece, designed so that Asquith can compare talking and silent films, somewhat to the detriment of the former, without directly showing what the audience is watching — the talkie is evoked purely by the idleness of the band, who start smoking and playing cards. While Asquith allows the talkie to score a few points — some of the punters are held rapt in the flickering half-light, it’s the silent film which produces laughter and elation. Meanwhile, the stalker hero gazes at his love and her beau, and a paroxysm of inter-cutting whips all the flying emotion up into a stroboscopic explosion.

Asquith’s cast is terrific, with Uno Henning, fresh from Pabst’s LOVE OF JEANNE NEY, at times reminiscent of Buster Keaton on his minimalist expressions of despair or awkwardness. Norah Baring, as the object of his affection, is a unique and quirky screen presence, far more appealing in her slightly gawky oddness than some glamourpuss would be. I’m looking forward to seeing Baring in Hitchcock’s MURDER!, made the following year, although I’m a little wary in case her voice disappoints me.

Without getting into the sticky grounds of symbolism, we can say that Asquith packs a lot in to his images — tree branches spread out like black fractures in the sky, sometimes spreading from a dark human smudge, as if this were the source of the damage. And it would be tempting to put some kind of queer interpretation on the unrequited love plot (which sees the hero packed off to prison), given Asquith’s rumoured predilections — my friend Lawrie told me “Puffin” would moonlight in greasty spoon transport cafes to pick up truckers, and persistent rumours identify the director (and prime minister’s son) as the notorious “man in the mask”, attending the sex parties exposed by the Profumoaffair in the ’60s, wandering around shoving his meat ‘n’ two veg into a jar containing an angry wasp. Whatever, I guess — although when masochism reaches such levels, I do wonder, “Wouldn’t you be happier if you didn’t have to do that?”

(Irrelevant movie connection: Profumo, the Tory politician ruined by the scandal, was married to the fragrant Valerie Hobson, of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and GREAT EXPECTATIONS fame. When the story broke, she did what Tory wives do, and stood by her man.)

But most of all, A COTTAGE ON DARTMOOR makes one want to fall guilty to the lowest of critical misdemeanours and simply assert its brilliance. If by doing so I tempt others to watch it, perhaps my crime will have mitigating circumstances.

Shanghai Drama

“You’ve never seen any of the Romy Schneider SISSI films? Oh, you don’t know what agony is.” ~ David Wingrove.

Yes, David was round at our place, translating another movie in his role as Benshi Film Describer. Ironically, while the world goggled, presumably, at the Olympics opening ceremony, we distracted ourselves from the horror that is SPORT with a ripe slice of chinoiserie, G.W. Pabst’s 1938 LE DRAME DE SHANGHAI.

Double it with Ophuls’ DE MAYERLING A SARAJEVO, two romances where the melodrama collides with a propaganda film coming the other way, with dire consequences for both. While Ophuls’ most lacklustre film is effectively scuttled by all the Vive La France material hitting it below the waterline in the final reel, Pabst’s film is stranger and darker, and just about gets away with its support of China against the Japanese invaders, which has at least been a recurrent theme in the film.

But what grabs the attention is the emotional side of the story — but not the mother-daughter stuff. Christl Mardayne, a star of Nazi escapist flicks, plays “Kay Murphy”, a pseudonymous Russian refugee who’s found stardom singing at “the Olympic” (synchronicity!), but yearns to be reunited with her daughter, raised in isolation and innocence at a Hong Kong finishing school. The teenage daughter has no idea that her mother sings in a sleazy dive and is also a spy working for “the Black Dragon”, a nefarious but faintly-sketched criminal organisation, in which estranged husband and father Louis Jouvet is a prominent figure.

“War is the triumph of beast over man. Peace is the triumph of man over beast. But man is more beast than man,” says Jouvet, his knife of a face cutting through the gloom. Once the obscure plot threads start to come together, Pabst’s skill with dramatic composition and his particular flair for the morbid can kick in. The great Henri HOTEL DU NORD Jeanson provides suitably noirish dialogue.

While Jouvet’s appearance, back from the dead with a scar snaking up his brow like a withered tree, is strong, his departure is even better. Discovering his daughter in Mardayne’s flat, he sees a halo of light cast around her face by the chandelier.  Finding a photograph of himself in her hands, he takes it to the mirror to compare the idealistic Russian of fifteen years ago with the corrupt gangster of today. The daughter is shepherded out by an alarmed Mardayne, and Jouvet grimly smiles at the contrast in the two images of himself.

A rather stunning shot-reverse-shot on the same actor!

Then, somehow, a blind is drawn, although no one is there to draw it. The chandelier falls dark, and the halo on the wall which illuminated the daughter’s purity fades, leaving only blank stone.

Jouvet goes to the window and announces his intention to induct his daughter into the Black Dragon organisation. Mardayne shoots him in the back. His dying words are “Why didn’t you do that fifteen years ago?”

Splendid!

No film can altogether survive the loss of a thesp like Jouvet, but this one carries on, offering us assorted sinister orientals, and a couple of noble ones. The Chinese actors are all listed on a separate card from the French, a kind of apartheit of credits. There are some genuine Shanghai crowd scenes. Mardayne and her daughter are freed from prison as the Japanese attack, but a Black Dragon assassin (louche Romanian actor Marcel RIFIFI Lupovici) stabs Mardayne. Her lifeless body is borne along by the crowds, as great chunks of newsreel footage start to invade the movie.

A poor coolie is beckoned to his doom. Cinematography by Eugen Schufftan and Henri Alekan.

A French film set in China with a German director, LA DRAME DE SHANGHAI has been released on DVD by the Italians, so it was great to have David to translate it, using both the French dialogue and Italian subtitles, which collide somewhere in his unique brain and emerge from his mouth as English.

The Divine Max.

Something of a mystery: I’ve been using Edinburgh College of Art library for literally DECADES, and never come across the little B.F.I. book on Max Ophuls I picked up today — yet the book is damn old: the price label says 95p.

It’s a real treasure trove, especially for the erudite and unbelievably poignant interview conducted by Truffaut and Rivette shortly after LOLA MONTES had opened to weak box office. Ophuls is full of plans for the future, discussing the films he’d like to make and the ones he feared he might have to make as a compromise, to prove himself bankable — ‘At this point also, I’m telling producers: “I advise you to make my next film, but not the one after that!” Of course, Ophuls would soon be dead, LOLA MONTES his last work.

Apart from the poignancy of films he would never live to make (and tantalisingly, Ophuls speaks of Balzac’s La Duchesse de Langeais,now filmed by Rivette: “I loved the way he had the people subjected to the pressure of political events,”) there is the poignancy of this description of a film he began but never finished, L’ECOLE DES FEMMES, with actor and theatre manager Louis Jouvet —

‘It was an experiment for me: I had to follow Jouvet and his actors with my camera during a performance, with an audience present and without trying to make a cinematic adaptation of the play. I wanted to show the actor when he leaves the stage and follow him into the wings while the dialogue is still audible. I wanted to profit from the play of light in front of and behind the footlights, but without trying to show the techniques of theatre. I never moved away from the characters, even when they stopped acting, because that didn’t mean they had stopped living. I had scarcely filmed anything except the opening shot: a camera traverses the theatre, over the spectators’ heads, and Jouvet, seated on this camera-platform, puts on makeup, transforms himself, unnoticed by the public in the auditorium, as the lights gradually dim. And as the camera crosses the curtain, it vanishes, and Arnolphe (Jouvet’s character) remains on stage, alone. This first shot was also the last. Three or four days later, I left for America.’

Jouvet had smuggled Ophuls into neutral Switzerland after France fell to the Nazis: Ophuls had been putting out anti-Nazi radio propaganda, full of satire and invective, and would have been arrested if he’d stayed in France. That contribution to art — saving Ophuls’ life — is more than enough to justify Jouvet having a street and a theatre named after him in Paris:

In fact, Jouvet also contributed massively to cinema through his elegant performances for Carnè (HOTEL DU NORD), Clouzot (QUAI DES ORFEVRES), Duvivier (LA FIN DU JOUR), Christian-Jacques (UN REVENANT), Maurice Tourneur, Pabst, Feyder, Allegret, Renoir…

Monsieur Jouvet, I raise a glass in your honour.

Vive La France!

(Not many jokes in this piece, I love these guys too much!)