Sunrise in Rain

Saturday saw me trudging through dark and rain-slicked streets to Stockbridge Parish Church, to see SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS with a glass of wine and musical accompaniment by the Jane Gardner Quartet. I’d only seen them in their trio form, I think — adding a cello made their always excellent music even richer.

What to say about this film? It had been some years since I’d seen it, and it held up brilliantly. By any rational standard, Janet Gaynor’s character is a bit of a drip in a bad wig, and George O’Brien is an irredeemable lout. But if we take it as a fable — or a song — that doesn’t matter. Both stars are luminous and have some of the best closeups of the silent era — shots in which lighting, performance, physiognomy and the mysterious quality known as photogenie combine to form animate icons.

Oh, I can declare that I finally made sense of the plot. Various persons over the decades have asked why O’Brien even thinks he needs to murder his wife. And why does the girl from the city require it of him?

I’d never paid much attention to the stuff where the villagers gossip about O’Brien selling off his livestock to moneylenders — one shouldn’t pay attention to village gossip — presumably to buy gifts for the city girl. So, let’s assume that this vamp’s intentions are not to settle down in the suburbs with her hunky farmer, but to strip him of assets and move on. She’s already begun this. There must be compelling reasons why O’Brien is unable to sell off the farm entire. It may be in his wife’s name, or partially so. We might also imagine that he’d have to pay alimony (and child support, but he seems to have wholly forgotten his infant child). To make this completely clear, we’d only need an additional intertitle, but in the process of adapting Hermann Sudermann’s theme into Carl Mayer’s scenario and explicating that via Katherine Hilliker and H.H. Caldwell titles, the explanation evidently got dropped.

It doesn’t much matter, because again, this is a fable (or song) and normal people watching it don’t wonder about that stuff.

What else? I’d forgotten that Arthur Housman, comedy drunk from several Laurel & Hardy films, is in this, as an “obtrusive gentleman,” i.e. a masher. At least he’s sober this time. Proving that all things connect to Laurel & Hardy if you look hard enough. Also, pre-code mangargoyle hybrid Clarence Wilson in one shot (below right image, left of frame).

There is also a dog. He comes bounding after the protagonists as they set sail on their fateful voyage, attempting a bit of Rin Tin Tin rescue business, driven by some canine sixth sense. And I wondered, is he Zimbo? Zimbo the dog who plays Homo the wolf in the same year and studio‘s THE MAN WHO LAUGHS? Both dogs are Alsatians and both swim. I guess it ought to be possible to compare their markings (though the role of Homo may have required a bit of strategic dyeing as part of the lupine drag) but I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to say Probably Zimbo, and also, can a proper film historian confirm this?

I chatted to Jane beforehand about the movie and its original Fox Movietone score, which we both said we liked, especially the oboe which stands in for O’Brien’s voice as he searches the waters for his missing wife. Jane did not reveal her secret plan.

When the scene appeared in the film, shivers ran up, down and across my spine, as percussionist Hazel Morrison let out a plaintive wail in synch with O’Brien’s onscreen cry. The effect of a man calling for his wife, voiced by a woman (in the magnificent reverberant acoustics of the church) was stunning. Exact enough to make sense, oblique enough to be poetic rather than literal. The very thing all artists are all after, all the time, probably.

An Unamerican Untragedy

Is Chaplin spoofing Dreiser when Verdoux takes Annabella Bonheur out for a lonely row? It seems more likely that the reference is to the Paramount film version of AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1931) than to the source novel — a film directed by Chaplin’s old protege Josef Von Sternberg. The only remaining artifact, then, of their brief collaboration (until A WOMAN OF THE SEA turns up).

Annabella’s innocence is clearly stated at the scene’s outset, after the huge establishing shot which establishes not just the scenery but the tininess and isolation of the boat.

“Not a soul anywhere!”

“Perfect,” agrees Verdoux, with his most sinister smile. Dramatic irony/poignancy! Although I’ve swapped the shots around in the above two-panel set, to make it appear that they’re looking at each other. Blogs are no respecters of the 180 rule.

Chaplin, I think, understood that any strong dramatic situation can also be a strong comedic situation, with just a slight tweak.

More ironic exchanges, and Verdoux’s “anchor” is introduced: a rock with a rope around it and a noose on the loose end. Probably pretty effective if tied tightly, although the wearer would no doubt bob to the surface once the intestinal gases had done their work, and they would look very much as if they’d been murdered.

How you’d ever get the rope around Annabella’s big yapping head is a question that need not detain us at this point. Chaplin now goes out of his way to make Annabella once again a character in need of murdering, scolding Verdoux for his failure to promptly hand her a fishing rod. “Oh, don’t be a fool – by the time you bait the hook the fish’ll be gone.” Snippy AND irrational, two negative feminine stereotypes in one persona. Martha Raye’s lightning changes between sweet and vicious certainly keep things interesting.

Hooking Verdoux’s hat is a nice gag, timed so well that it survives uncertain framing (boats DRIFT, even when anchored — I suppose bodies do, too). Verdoux, meaning “sweet worm,” is I suppose interchangeable with the bait, which may be why he snags his trousers on the fishhook too. And that leads me to speculate that his “sweet worm” persona is the bait by which he catches his prey. The guppy-mouthed Martha Raye as Annabella is connected to a fish here, when she mistakes her reflection in the lake for a big one — the one that got away, I guess.

Chaplin’s lightning transition from malign, noose-wielding maniac to simpering idiot when Annabella turns is almost cartoon-fast. Somehow it works, despite there being no real way for him to change pose during the turn of a head, and without undercranking too. The simper was memorably seen in another lightning-change sequence back in 1917, in THE CURE:

Chaplin likes the gag, so he repeats it. In my recent conversation with Ian Lavender, he pointed out Chaplin’s tendency to milk a gag, contrasting this with Buster Keaton’s once-and-we’re-done technique. The Keaton approach is more difficult and challenging, requiring more material — and you could argue that Buster wore out his imagination with it (though other factors were at play). But Chaplin’s repetitions WORK, as you can hear for yourself whenever you see the film with an audience. The childish delight in repetition is a powerful force. Something silly happening repeatedly has a chance of getting even funnier with each cycle.

“Are you sea-sick?”

“No.”

“Shame on you, a man who’s live at sea all his life. Oh, captain, really!”

Raye seems to struggle with making the above exchange sound natural, and one can hardly blame her. Billy Wilder complained that Chaplin’s dialogue was infantile, and he’s not entirely wrong — at times, it’s rather clumsy, and it never reaches the elegance of a Sturges or a Mankiewiecz or Wilder & Brackett. You could sometimes accuse him of the same ineptitude as George Lucas. “My dialogue isn’t the best but it gets you from A to B,” claims Lucas, which makes me reach for a Sturges line: “By way of Cincinatti with a side-trip through Detroit.” These guys who aren’t strong with dialogue aren’t elegant enough to be simple, they pad it out with irrelevancies and an oppressive weight of unneeded verbiage.

It also feels like a Winsor McCay speech bubble, with words crammed in willy-nilly to fill space. Oh!

But then Verdoux attempts to use, presumably, chloroform, and Annabella’s sudden movement (she somehow thinks she’s caught a fish with her naked hook) causes him to topple backwards and drop the soporific hanky over his own face. This is the film’s best visual gag sequence, is what I’m saying — almost the only one to serve up regular, effective gags of this kind, and I think it’s made possible by the Dreiser set-up. Good situations make for good gags. A strong dramatic problem forces your character to try outrageous solutions, and then more outrageous things can go wrong…

Chaplin looming — as best a 5’5″ man can loom — over Raye, recalls George O’Brien in SUNRISE — another possible influence. (Carl Mayer’s script surely drew inspiration from Dreiser’s 1925 novel, which might be why the murder scheme in the Murnau film makes no sense, has no real motivation — it’s a stray piece of plot imported from elsewhere).

Verdoux now talks Anabella through the art of lassoing fish — and again, she is the fish, but now the worm has turned. But he’s interrupted by an appalling sound: yodeling. This is the part that cracks Fiona up. Yodeling saving a life, rather than merely immiserating it, is pretty funny. And this particularly goofy overdubbed yodeling: it sounds like it’s being done right into the mic. Maybe a case of Tatiesque elimination of aural perspective for comic effect? Maybe not consciously chosen as such though.

Then, after he’s already given up his homicidal plans, Verdoux is topped into the drink by Annabella. Excellent cartoon reactions from Raye: she goes from one “extreme” to another, holding each pose for mere frames:

Annabella eventually saves her beau, but only after yelling for help to the oblivious yodellers, and then she berates him for standing up in a boat, which she was doing also. Infuriating. But not enough to allow Chaplin to contemplate offing her. She’s kind of the sand in the criminal vaseline.

The Sunday Intertitle: What follows is history

To my delight, MONSIEUR VERDOUX has an intertitle. It’s very near the start, but it’s not at the VERY start, so it is decently INTER one sequence and another.

Here’s what happens:

TITLES. The movie’s true title would seem to be MONSIEUR VERDOUX A COMEDY OF MURDERS, but according to the convention that SUNRISE is not SUNRISE A SONG OF TWO HUMANS and NOSFERATU is not NOSFERATU A SYMPHONY OF HORROR, except to distinguish it from Herzog’s NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE, which is not NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE except to distinguish it from NOSFERATU A SYMPHONY OF HORROR, the subtitle is generally omitted.

The heavily-lawyered writer’s credit tells us, pedantically, that it’s “an original story written by” Charles Chaplin, but “based on an idea by” Orson Welles. So how original is it, if it’s based off of something else? I seem to recall CC needed some arm-bending to give OW a name-check at all, and he wants to be very clear that all Welles provided was one idea, and he had to come up with the story.

But even if Welles contributed only the one-liner “Chaplin as Bluebeard,” those three words contain most of the story, since the life story of for-profit serial killer Henri Désiré Landru (that “Désiré” is a hilarious bit of black comedy in itself), known popularly as “Bluebeard,” provides most of the story beats here.

On the other hand, Chaplin didn’t NEED to give Martha Raye a credit in advance of the main cast list, but he did it because he really liked her (she seems to have brought out his human side) and was impressed with what she brought to the movie. She’s this film’s Jack Oakie.

The titles proceed in a series of surprising cuts, only settling down to dissolves when we bring in the cast. They’re also unusually BLACK. And simple. Little drawings of floral tributes frame the text. Reminiscent of silent movies, in all three of these features.

We learn that good old Rollie (here the more formal “Roland” Totheroh) is back on solo camera duty, and yet again there’s an added name, Curt (here “Curtis”) Courant, credited with “Artistic Supervision”. So poor RT has another German looking over his shoulder, after Karl Struss on THE GREAT DICTATOR.

One Wallace Chewning is credited as “operative cameraman,” a hilariously fancy way of saying “camera operator.” You can really sense Chaplin’s less attractive qualities in that choice.

Chaplin’s music, this time arranged by Rudolph Schrager, is straight gaslight noir stuff, a surprising flavour from CC. Schrager, another emigre, alternated between film scoring and musical direction, stock music, all that stuff, and seems to have been equally at home in thrillers and musical comedies. And nothing in between, except this one.

Associated Director Wheeler Dryden — Chaplin’s OTHER half-brother; Assistant Director Robert Florey — already an established feature director, Florey was smart enough to take a demotion to learn at Chaplin’s side. It’s possible he was also on hand as an advisor on French customs. Then Chaplin’s Directed By credit. His name appears a mere four times in the titles, although he does credit himself with playing four roles, even though three of them are just aliases and he plays them all the same way.

Then we fade up on Verdoux’s grave and Chaplin’s in-character VO begins, reminding me that, three years before SUNSET BLVD, this movie is narrated by a dead man. Ironic, given Billy Wilder’s dismissive attitude to Chaplin’s talkies — and, given that SB is about silent pictures, the connection is unlikely to be accidental.

The music has warned us that there will be serious stuff, the subtitle has subverted it, and now Chaplin’s VOICE, of all things, defines the tone. “Good evening!” Verdoux will invite our sympathy, admit but sugar-coat his criminality, will be elegant and tasteful when discussing distasteful matters. KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS will adopt a similar approach and make much more of the contrast between spoken VO and depicted action, with an overt tonal clash averted by the avoidance of looking too closely at the grim details.

The tracking shot across the graveyard is very beautiful, in part because of the dark waving shadows produced by the trees. I’m inclined to credit Herr Courant. It’s actually a rather NEW idea — graveyards in horror movies are typically nocturnal studio sets. In other dramas, they might be locations in broad California sunlight. Sun but with strong shadows that don’t keep still is a lovely way of doing it, and might sum up the tone of the coming movie quite nicely.

“Only a person with undaunted optimism would embark on such a venture.”

What Chaplin does with his narration is a direct analog of what he did as a silent tramp: he transforms the conventionally sordid into something that makes an attempt at gentlemanly elegance. The attempt cannot succeed: you can still see the reality through the mask of delicacy, but the attempt matters, is everything. It embodies the spirit of UNDAUNTED OPTIMISM. Only a person animated by such optimism would attempt to convince a 1940s audience that his career of serial uxoricide should be considered purely as a commercial venture.

Intertitle! Behaving exactly like a silent movie one, but also like the program or playscript of a stage play: