Stagebound

So, the reason Joe May’s been turning up so much here is that we’re at work on a video essay for Masters of Cinema’s forthcoming THE INDIAN TOMB Blu-ray, and it’s a job that benefits from a little research. Perversely, it turns out to be a project with an immense appetite, the more we dig up the more interesting it gets. Trying to stop it from running away and becoming gigantic, like the film itself.

We watched HOUSE OF FEAR — not the Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes adventure, but the earlier remake of Paul Leni’s THE LAST WARNING. Though May filmed on the same main set as his former production designer (who had in turn recycled the Paris Opera stage from the Chaney PHANTOM OF THE OPERA), he did not deign to produce a shot-for-shot remake, which is a pity. I expect budgetary limitations prevented that, so the movie is much flatter and more ordinary to look at — but it does feature a nice APPARITION…

Sadly, the play this is based on isn’t terribly interesting, except for a bravura climax that must have worked really well on the stage. Carl Laemmle (Junior, I think), the Universal studio boss who produced the original, reviewed the remake for Variety and gave it a pan. An act that highlighted how far both Laemmle and May had fallen.

I do give the movie points for attempting to electrocute El Brendel (top), but deduct those points since it failed to finish him off. He seems to be in this purely because he was in an earlier backstage thriller, THE SPIDER, which someone must have remembered, God knows why. Nobody’s bothered to write any Swedish meatball malapropisms for him, so he has no reason to be here, but then he never did in my view.

William Gargan “stars” and there’s a typically fun performance from Robert Coote, anticipating his swan song in THEATRE OF BLOOD.

Out of the Blu

Slow news day today as I’m frantically trying to finish my first ever commentary track. Perhaps foolishly, I’m trying to reinvent the form, because, let’s face it, commentaries are not usually very interesting. I may have found a way to make them dazzling, or else irritating, we’ll see.

But, out of the blue, a care package from Masters of Cinema. Very excited about the Honda films, which I’ve never seen. Nervous about THE PAINTED BIRD (having read the book). And thrilled of course about WAXWORKS. Will try to write more about these next week, when I’ve finished commentarying.

The Sunday Intertitle: Wax, Lyrical

The new restoration of WAXWORKS, out soon from Flicker Alley (US) and Masters of Cinema (UK), was screened in the online Il Cinema Ritrovato and looks amazing. You could step onto Paul Leni’s sets (and get promptly ejected) or stroke Ivan the Terrible’s beard (hard to say how he’d react, but you’d be taking you life in your hands). Fiona plonked herself ten-year-old fashion on the floorboards smack in front of our TV to soak up the expressionism at close range. You’ll ruin your eyes!

As a “Case Study” discussion hosted at the fest made clear, the German negative is lost, the original intertitles along with it, and the censor’s file, which usually contains records of what every title card says, came up empty. Drafts of the script survive, but differ significantly from the movie so don’t serve as a reliable guide. So we’re still dealing with the English-language intertitles in which, for what I suspect are censorship reasons, Jack the Ripper is incorrectly described as Spring-Heeled Jack. The Ripper murders were within living memory, and very unpleasant: SHJ seems not to have done any serious harm, just scared the crap out of people, and although he had been reported active as late as 1904, by 1924 there was probably less belief in him. His MO resembles that of the Men in Black in that it consists of unaccountable behaviour designed mainly, it would seem, to make an impression. He definitely DESERVES a waxwork, but Werner Krauss isn’t it.

We also learned from the discussion about the mysterious fourth figure: Rinaldo Rinaldi (third from the left — the figures are arranged in order of intended appearance). To my amazement he’s apparently played by the film’s leading man, William Dieterle, the Iron Stove himself, who acts as protag in each of the film’s embedded narratives. RR was a celebrated Italian bandit, and his story was to have been about him rescuing a kidnapped girl (hearts of gold, those bandits). But the money could not be raised and the sequence was never shot. A shortage of cash (post-WWI German mega-inflation) may also be the reasons Krauss’s Ripper sequence wound up so short. Though the version screened at the premiere seems to have been a good bit longer, the cuts don’t seem to have come from this section.

But as I say, though the vicissitudes of history prevent this original version from being reconstructed, what we get from the Deutsche Kinemathek and Cineteca di Bologna restoration is a far sharper and shinier vision, layers of accrued muck swept away so the movie greet us with startling immediacy.