Alonso and Michel’s Lowlife Reunion

The last day of Hippfest began, for us anyway, with a Laurel & Hardy triple bill — restorations of DUCK SOUP, TWO TARS and LIBERTY, all of which brought the house down, or would’ve if the Hippodrome had been less solidly constructed 110 years ago.

This was followed by A STRING OF PEARLS (YICHUAN ZHENZHU, 1926), one of the few surviving Chinese silents, a loose adaptation of Maupassant’s The Necklace, complete with happy ending. Though the whole point of the story, if it has one, would seem to be the utterly miserable ending Maupassant provided, the plot’s reworking was done with some skill and logic, and might have succeeded had not the screenplay, by Hou Yao, resorted to every possible means to pad the story from the original few pages to feature length. This became tiresome, but then hilarious, especially when we discover that one character, a wealthy businessman who looks oddly like a twelve-year-old girl in drag, is being blackmailed.

Little girl man looks thoughtfully at the blackmail note which demands a thousand pounds, “or I will reveal your secret.” Flashback: little girl man receives his first-ever blackmail note, demanding a mere one hundred pounds. Carefully he removes the money from his safe. Goes to meet the blackmailer. Pays him. We come out of this flashback. Little girl man wistfully remembers his second blackmail note. We see him receive it. It is identically worded, but demands two hundred pounds, “or I will reveal your secret.” He takes the money…

John Sweeney on piano accompanied this insane, ritualistic repetition with a straight face, somehow bringing out the comedy without spoofing. It was cheering to learn that the screenwriter published a book on the art of writing for films.

The intertitles were also a joy: decorative and bilingual, the English parts obviously penned by someone just as skilled at bluffing as Hou Yao. Maybe Hou did it himself. When little girl man (back in the present tense at last) refuses to pay the thousand pounds, the blackmailer sets about him with a dagger. Mrs. Little Girl Man visits her injured husband in hospital and asks, “Tell me. What’s the trouble between you and your murderer.”

The titles also featured some nifty animation (including pearls rearranging themselves into the Chinese character for “misfortune” and some random drawings of camels. This was probably the worst Chinese silent yet (I don’t even like the classic, THE GODDESS, that much — too much propaganda) and my favourite.

Then we had two films for which I wrote the notes — THE UNKNOWN and L’HOMME DU LARGE. Since the notes for the latter were written back in 2020 the programme has changed, and it was John Sweeney who accompanied that one with Frank Bockius, and very glorious it was. Johnny Best, who threw himself into a rambunctious accompaniment to the L&H trio (with Frank ram-Bockius on percussion), played solo for the Browning-Chaney film, where Alonso the armless knife-thrower finds that the course of tearing one’s rival apart with wild horses never does run smooth. Best, in this case, opted for a restrained, even muted approach, since what was going on up there on the screen was more than demented enough. In the L’Herbier, Charles Boyer somehow gets top-billing for a fairly tiny supporting role (well, he’s electrifying to watch even if Nosferatu-gaunt) and L’Herbier’s partner Jaque Catelain plays Michel, the no-good son of a sea-worshipping fisherman. Paul McGann narrated, since it would be a crime to stick subtitles on those beautiful art intertitles. Impossible to believe this film was made in 1920. The music, sonorous voice-over, and conducive setting all worked their magic…

The full array of Hippodrome programme notes is available here. I seem to have written quite a few over the years.

Rearended

I guess this has turned into LEO MCCAREY WEEK. Best make it official.

If ME AND MY PAL is Laurel & Hardy’s version of THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL avant la lettre, and it is, then the silent TWO TARS (1928) is their pre-empting of Godard’s WEEKEND.

The second half of it, anyway. In the first half, the boys, playing sailors on shore leave, pick up a couple of flappers (Thelma Hill & Ruby Blaine) and go on a spree. There’s a brief tit-for-tat with Charlie Hall, future antagonist of THEM THAR HILLS and TIT FOR TAT, then they get embroiled in an endless traffic jam. This sequence is probably slightly longer than Godard’s famous two-tracking shot vision of hell, but it’s also much funnier, without in any way lessening the sense of the human race as a hopelessly warlike, intransigent, malicious and brainless blight on the globe.

The boys get into rows with Edgar Kennedy and other motorists, which escalate into an orgy of windscreen-smashing, headlamp-removing, and bodywork disfiguration, while the girls whoop with anarchic delight at each atrocity. I’ve always had a horror of the kind of female who sits on the sidelines and encourages male-on-male violence, but this pair seem oddly innocent in their childlike glee. It’s all just moving shapes to them, and moving shapes are lovely and funny. Their hilarity is infectious — Laurel & Hardy’s films are among the very few that can make laughter itself funny.

The boys did make a very large number of these things — pants ripping (PUTTING PANTS ON PHILIP), hat busting (in the now-lost HATS OFF), pie throwing (THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY). This is a very good one. Story & supervision: Leo McCarey.