The Sunday Intertitle: Truce Dance

THE CUB, continued. I wish I knew who photographed it. Maybe the information is in Christine Leteux’s Maurice Tourneur book? I wish someone would publish it in English.

Cub reporter Steve (Johnny Hines) also learns that his potential girlfriend the schoolteacher (Martha Hedman) has a knife, and she demonstrates the swift upward gutting motion with which she can defend herself. He then rights a note to his editor requesting that his insurance be kept up to date.

More shots of prowling feuders follow, including one mounted on a boat. The motion is incredible smooth, making me wonder if the boat is attached to a raft on which the camera and M. Tourneur perch. Or maybe it’s just the stillness of the water that accounts for our CELINE ET JULIE gliding movement.

An ambush is duly sprung, accompanied by those gunshots that obliterate most of the frame with their smoke, a standard effect of the period. How was this done? Is that what gunshots were really like, or is it the best approximation they could achieve with blanks, or is it a deliberately exaggerated effect? It would be very strange to see a gun erupt like that in a modern film, even one set in this period.

A wide shot, tinted pale blue to approximate night, shows giant blooms of smoke the size of treetops.

The juxtaposition of high (melo)drama and comedy continues, as we cut to Steve abed, a tiny kitten playing with what I take to be his sock suspenders,

Dream sequence! Although Steve acts awake, an image fades up in the top left corner, showing his vision of his funeral. Either a dream or a fantasy.

Very nice effect, anyway.

Meanwhile, outside the mayhem continues, the gunshots obviously influencing Steve’s nocturnal visions. It seems questionable whether any Renlows or Whites will remain unperforated to strut their stuff at the Truce Dance. Yet, an abrupt intertitle informs us, the Dance takes place as scheduled two days later. I picture an empty no-man’s land of a dance floor, or else one across which bandaged wraiths stagger on crutches in an agonized parody of a hoedown.

But no:

“BOYS” “GIRLS”

“10 IF YOU DANCE 20 IF YOU DONT”

“DON’T SHOOT THE PIANER PLAYER HE DOS THE BEST HE CAN”

This is a pretty fine film for signage. I should have made this one of my “Things I Read Off the Screen in…” posts.

Steve, of course, turns up in his top hat, white tie and tails, to general hilarity. He then surprises the locals by chucking in twenty bucks instead of twenty cents, and preferring the bucket marked “GIRLS” to the one for boys. Is it punch, moonshine, or some unholy combination of the two?

Despite his oddity, the Renlows declare Steve part of (all of?) the Floor Committe, presenting him with a ribband and a revolver. He’s expected to enforce the rules… and the Whites are coming.

Don’t shoot until you see the Whites, Steve!

TO BE CONTINUED

The Sunday Intertitle: Cub Energy

THE CUB continues. Arriving in the back-hills town, Johnny Hines, ace boy reporter, is chased by a hostile dog. I’m reminded of Fredric March arriving in Warsaw, Vermont (36.5 miles to Rutland, 20 miles to Bennington) in NOTHING SACRED and being bitten by a small child. Ben Hecht seems to be playing with the same tropes. It’s easy to imagine he might have known CUB screenwriter Thompson Buchanan, surely another old newspaperman himself…

Comedy and tragedy collide when Johnny finally finds the rival clans. An attempt to produce his credentials nearly gets him shot. His business card is amusing:

My assumption is that he’s added “War Correspondent” himself, a little self-promotion.

Superficially arrogant yet easily dismayed, supremely fatuous, Hines seems to be inventing Bob Hope’s movie persona about thirty years early. He’s also a simpering creep around the fair sex, so they have that in common too. Sidling up to leading lady Martha Hedman (whose sole credit this is), he ogles her at close range through his binocs.

Interesting suspense idea: Johnny hangs his hat on his donkey’s ear and we spend the rest of the scene waiting for the beast to give an auricular flick and cast off the chapeau. The patient creature bears its burden without shirking.

Tourneur then essays an unusual-for-the-period angle change to show Johnny testing the donkey’s patience still further, playing “She loves me, she loves me not” with its tail. I presume a prosethetic donkey tail, perhaps the first of its kind in screen history, is being deployed. Even so, this ass’s tolerance is remarkable. It’s putting up with being a prop, a hat-stand, and a pluckable flower, as well as with Johnny’s performance style.

Now that I realise that Hedman is the romantic interest, that means the bereaved Juliet in the opening star-crossed lovers subplot was Dorothy Farnum, later a considerable screenwriter. Her last credit was Basil Dean’s production of LORNA DOONE in 1934, which is an interesting coincidence since Tourneur had filmed an earlier version…

Held up by heavies, Johnny is asked a meaningless question. I doubt this film is an accurate protrayal of blood feuds, despite opening with an actual Hatfield. But I like this crazy idea — the warring families assume the entire planet must have taken sides. Everyone is defined by their allegiance in this piddling intergenerational squabble. It’s like when I was at school and you were expected to define your status via “What team do you support?” or “What kind of music do you like?” I had zero interest in football or popular music at the time (still hate football) and hadn’t the wit to pretend.

Hines continues to be great with props. Pressganged into this particular group, he’s handed a revolver which he attempts to twirl nonchalantly by the trigger guard, and hurts his finger. (Note: this is a stupid thing to do, especially if you’re unfamiliar with firearms.)

There’s a fun female character who keeps gazing hungrily at Johnny. She’s the cutest gal in the pic, but he’s terrified off her, probably because of her grizzly relations and her unladylike enthusiasm. If, as seems likely, she is Jessie King, then she would become the stepmother of Charles Lederer, another link to Ben Hecht and the newspaper gang.

I also love the mountain kid peering at their own toes through Johnny’s filched spyglasses. This movie is bustling with LIFE!

The Sunday Intertitle: Blood Feud Brothers

Maurice Tourneur’s THE CUB — I was watching that, wasn’t I? Weeks ago, it seems like.

Not all of Tourneur’s experiments work. As leading man/cub reporter Johnny Hines gets the job of writing up the story of the blood feud in the hills, Tourneur intercuts the hero getting ready for his trip with an incipient shoot-out at his destination. As a version of Griffiths’ famed cross-cutting, it doesn’t quite work, because the two actions haven’t a strong enough connection. Hines is clearly not going to arrive in time to prevent one warring family ambushing the other. Without that logical tie, the single suspenseful situation — the ambush — would be better treated as a standalone sequence. Likewise, Hines hurrying to catch his train will be more exciting if it’s not paled into insignificance by continual juxtaposition with a murder.

This seems like the kind of rookie error nobody would make nowadays, and Alexander Mackendrick had an axiom to cover it: “One dramatic problem is likely to be more effective than two,” or words to that effect. But since the whole idea of crosscutting was pretty new, I think the experiment was worth trying. It had literary antecedents — Griffith remarked that Dickens had done it — but I don’t know if anyone in fiction had experimented with quickly alternating scenes dealing with unconnected suspenseful action. If they had, they no doubt abandoned it, as Tourneur would.

Still, he’s not messing about. By the time Hines has arrived at his destination and performed some comic business about engaging a “taxi” — which proves to be some kind of tiny mule or ass — another assassination is being prepared. One fears that both Hatfields and McCoys will have extirpated one another entirely by the time he finds a hotel to unpack in.

NO SHOOTIN ALOUD

The cinematic value of THE CUB thus far has been excellent — but I’m curious as to how it will perform when its hero comes face to face with the issue he’s been sent to investigate. That’s going to require WRITING.

If anyone out there has a tame AI they can ask to develop this plot, I’d be interested in seeing how the results stack up against the 1915 screenwriting chops of Tourneur and Thompson Buchanan.