Rene Clair said that AND THEN THERE WERE NONE was a film which meant nothing to him, was completely impersonal. I quite like Rene Clair but I’d make a poor adherent, because ATTWN is one of my favourites of his work — I like LE MILLION and IT HAPPENED TOMORROW and LE SILENCE EST D’OR and LES BELLE DE NUIT and LA BEAUTE DU DIABLE too. The others I’m OK with, but I wouldn’t get too excited about A NOUS LA LIBERTE, personally.
Funny, I just belatedly blogged about IMPACT, which we had in our little watch party (anyone wanna join?), and then last week we ran this, which is also a Harry M. Popkin Production. One thing about Harry, he favours the starry cast — though more like, colourful character actors than big names. This one has a helluva house party, with Louis Hayward, June Duprez, Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Roland Young, Mischa Auer, C. Aubrey Smith, Judith Anderson, Richard Haydn and Queenie Leonard. It’s really a shame to bump them off one by one, but then, it is anyway, whenever that kind of thing happens.
Maybe Clair’s disengaged attitude led him to unusual flippancy, but his camera goes pushing through outsized keyholes, and a flashback is narrated by one character, leading to a moment of post-prod ventriloquism when his VO syncs to the lip-movements of a previously slaughtered guest…
Dudley Nichols’ witty script also has the chain of characters spying or eavesdropping on one another, eventually looping back on itself, a peeping ouroboros — a gag later originated by Blake Edwards. I can imagine “Blackie” really enjoying this fairly outrageous comedy — maybe my favourite Agatha Christie screen adaptation, along with WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION. The rogue’s gallery is fab but so is Louis Hayward, whose arch amusement suggests perhaps he really was responsible for the massacre of natives in East Africa, or was it South Africa (the script is inconsistent on this point)? Not many male leads could have pulled that off in 1945, or would have wished to. Hayward had just gotten back from the war (Pacific theatre), I guess, but shows no trace of the mental scars that would haunt him.
AND THEN THERE WERE NONE stars Simon Templar; Princess; Mr. Gogarty; Mr. Scratch; Mr. Cosmo Topper; Boris Callahan; Enobarbus; Mrs. Danvers; Emperor Franz-Josef; and another Princess.
Litvak hops from country to country, sometimes making the same film in multiple languages. I’m grateful to Shadowplayer Everett Jones for directing me to SLEEPING CAR at the Internet Archive, not least for its historical import, its service to my Litvak completism, and the novelty of seeing Litvak make a British film, for Michael Balcon no less — but also because it’s really pretty damn fine. The best Ivor Novello film I’ve seen that’s not THE LODGER.
When I saw THE GHOST GOES WEST I felt that Rene Clair’s sense of lively movement had been somewhat flattened by his collision with the British way of doing things. No such conditions prevail here — from the first shots, Litvak is sweeping about with his camera in the bold, propulsive and grandiose style we see in his Hollywood features. I particularly liked the way the camera pushes onto the railway platform, tracking along the approaching locomotive in a reverse direction, stopping just as it does, with its title plaque reading Orient Express perfectly framed.
There’s great funny kid and funny dog action, and there’s Madeleine Carroll, though I don’t like her hair in this.
The story is a little disjointed — a plot point about La Carroll having to marry to stay in France comes in at the halfway point, when it seems to me a necessary Act One curtain kind of thing, at the very latest.
But it’s fun, and bee-yoo-tifully made — even the view from Novello’s mistress’s window seems more convincing, dimensional and interesting than is typical in films of the time, from any nation (designer is Alfred Junge, of Powell-Pressburger fame).
COEUR DE LILAS is a major one but I haven’t revisited it lately. It’s major early Gabin (he dominates) and has beautiful location filming. For reasons of celluloid fetishism it showed in Lyons as a dupey, underexposed mess, but can be seen in a gorgeous digital restoration. Phoebe Green delivered a great piece on in for Shadowplay’s Late Show Blogathon a few years back.
I saw L’EQUIPAGE even further back, when researching NATAN, the feature doc I made with Paul Duane. This was the last Pathe-Natan production, 100% French, and a remake of a Maurice Tourneur silent which is now at least partly lost. I suspect they recycled flying sequences from the original film. Why not? Easy to do, and the different frame rate is unlikely to show. You might avoid killing some aviators.
I remember the film was good, and concentrates on a conflict between two French fliers in WWI, competing over Annabella (do you want to tell them, or shall I?) with the war as a dramatic backgrop. But I don’t remember much more, particularly about it’s visual style. I should rewatch it, but I thought it better to catch up on something I’ve never seen, so Fiona and I ran MAYERLING. David Wingrove had described it as an aboslute masterpiece, and Fiona is now speaking of Litvak as a favourite director, so it wasn’t a hard sell.
It’s very, very good — Litvak remade it, at huge expense, for TV in 1957 with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer, which seems to have been a mistake. Then Terrence Young did it in 1968 with Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve and bits of it, I’m told, are shot-for-shot identical except in colour and widescreen and a leading man in whiteface.
Fiona went in not actually knowing the historical storyline — which is disputed, but Litvak goes, understandably, with the most famous and romantic version. Not that the film wholly romanticises suicide — I think a case can be built that the film not only finds it tragic in a Romeo & Juliet way, but rather blames Charles Boyer’s melancholy Archduke for getting Danielle Darrieux’s innocent baroness into the idea.
It’s very Ophulsian indeed — Vienna, a tragic romance ending in death, dueling officers, sumptuous sets — Ophuls, graduating from being Litvak’s AD, had already used all these elements in LIEBELEI, but there’s reason to suspect he may have looked at this one and felt a little envy — he later made DE MAYERLING A SARAJEVO, a quasi-sequel about that other unfortunate Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, which may be Ophuls’ least interesting or successful film. Certainly the dive into WWII propaganda at the end doesn’t help it, though one appreciates the desire to do one’s bit (Ophuls anti-Nazi radio broadcasts marked him for execution and he had to flee to Switzerland, smuggled out by Louis Jouvet, when France fell).
It’s useless to speculate on why Ophuls is revered by critics who despise Litvak — and it’s always tempting to invent preposterous reasons to denigrate such opinions. (I’ll grant that Ophuls best films are better than Litvak’s — but I would deny that Ophuls’ genius makes Litvak look like trash.) My best example of such a reason would be that Ophuls made “womens’ pictures” — usually despised, but in rare cases such as Ophuls and Sirk, embraced by the Cahiers critics. But Litvak, like Wyler, made guy films too, and that seems to be harder to swallow. The idea of a filmmaker making all kinds of pictures, unless there’s some kind of very clear superimposed personality as with Hawks, seems to be troubling to some. But as I say, I’m kind of imputing reasons where reasons are not exactly clear: I’ve never seen a Litvak takedown that seemed to me to relate to the qualities of the films he actually made.
Oh yes, MAYERLING. Well, Litvak enjoys hell out of his huge budget, as he always did. The lovers-to-be meet for the second time at the ballet and Litvak keeps pushing in one them, evoking their magnetic attraction with his camera. It’s epic.
Arguably Litvak enjoys the scenes of debauchery a bit too much, they become frantic musical numbers. Even with a glimpse of bosom as the Archduke runs amok on rum and rips a floozy’s dress open. But everything in this film is an aesthetic feast, feeding Litvak’s voracious eye. It’s why it can’t help but glamorize the lovers’ pact a bit. But the grim little scene after Boyer shoots Darrieux in her sleep — because she’s said she doesn’t want to know when it’s going to happen — where he explains away the gunshot to his faithful servant, before going back into the bedroom to kill himself, isn’t a necessary scene if you’re intent on making an exotic spectacle of suicide-murder. It complicates our feelings and adds greater disquiet to the drama.
The build-up to the fatal night — well, that’s what the whole film is. And it’s sort of accurate to the psychology of suicide. Someone is under competing pressures that can’t be reconciled and which keep intensifying. Eventually a Gordian-knot style solution suddenly offers complete relief. Those around the tortured individual, by trying to push in one direction or another for the individual’s perceived own good, are just adding to the strain pushing them towards the exit. Kids commit suicide over exams because the pressure is unrelenting and its made to seem the most important thing in the world by well-meaning people.
It’s really hard to make a good story about suicide — you can’t, I think, use suicide as a solution to a plot. But that’s not what this is. Everything is driving the protagonists to this ending, including all the glamour and majesty of an empire in decline.
Uncomfortable side-note: Boyer, who is fantastic here and who would reconnect and collaborate with Litvak again in Hollywood (including on another masterpiece, TOVARICH), committed suicide himself at age 78, two days after his wife’s death from cancer. I don’t admire suicide, I think it’s always damaging to those left behind, but it’s hard to hold it against him under the circumstances.
Music is by Arthur Honegger (LES MISERABLES) and it’s hauntingly beautiful, as is the film.
BACHELOR’S AFFAIRS, a 1932 Fox comedy, woke us up on Monday morning at the aptly-named Cinema Jolly (where the air conditioning now WORKS, making consciousness a joy rather than a distant possibility). It stars Adolph Menjou, Joan Marsh. Minna Gombell, and Alan Dinehart, even funnier and more Matthauesque than he was in THE BRAT. A very witty script and a glamorous deco look — ocean liners and masqued balls, a theme of the festival established in DAINAH LA METISSE, present and correct.
The New Year’s Eve party motif introduced in this one was picked up in the next entry, John Stahl’s silent melo THE WOMAN UNDER OATH, which dressed May McAvoy as a Columbine, a look also on show in CAROSELLO NAPOLETANO. The plot was ludicrous, the performances enjoyably theatrical, the lighting and framing at times extremely striking. Pamela Hutchinson introduced it with aplomb, setting the context admirably.
Getting up at this point seemed all too ambitious, so we experienced the ecstasy of Erik Charell’s CARAVAN again. Our second Charles Boyer film of the fest (he’s an aging roué in LUCKY TO BE A WOMAN, dubbed in Italian, those luscious lips moving much more slowly than the dialogue assigned him). Phillips Holmes is so good they named him twice. Loretta Young received today’s spanking, on horseback no less. Will there be a daily spanking? It’s shaping up that way.
Doing our laundry took longer than expected, but apparently Rene Clair’s LE SILENCE EST D’OR was packed out — Chevalier! — so we’d never have made it. Lovely film, but I have seen it, so I guess it’s less of a heartbreaker than some of the stuff I’ll be missing today…
Luciano Emmer’s LA RAGAZZA IN VETRINA was astonishing, and deserves a big long installment of The Forgotten all to itself — next week, I suspect. Star Marina Vlady, still stunning and charismatic, introduced it in person. Emmer is being retrospected all week, and now we know we must check out as many of the others as possible.
And then we finished with another John Stahl, IMMORTAL SERGEANT, which felt like the ur-text of HOW I WON THE WAR, a British army WWII tale with an unlikely assortment of accents. Featuring Tom Joad, Uncle Billy, Esmeralda, Hilary Aimes, the High Sheriff of Nottingham and a very young Heironymous Merkin.
We were back at the hotel before midnight, for once, and yet again failed to sleep soundly — I never do when traveling, and Fiona has a complicated releationship with sleep at the best of the time. So we’ll be out again today, two happy zombies, caffeinated and confused…
