The Germinal Man

I found Jack Conway’s A TALE OF TWO CITIES more coherent and engaging than George Cukor’s DAVID COPPERFIELD, which probably says more about the filmic potential of the respective source stories than it does about the directors. Conway has never been thought a major filmmaker, unlike Cukor, he’s just a journeyman who struck it lucky with a few things like RED-HEADED WOMAN. I guess David O. Selznick can really be considered the film’s auteur.

It’s kind of hilarious how both this and DAVID C get positioned as Christmas movies via musical choices, as if every Dickens flick has to be about Christmas.

ATOTC begins with a coach mired in mud amid claw-like trees, and generally has a grittier feel than the other big Dickens film of 1935, though both were shot by Oliver T. Marsh and have several actors in common. Basil Rathbone, all beauty spots and face powder, plays the worst man in France, a depraved aristo with all the considerable hauteur at his command. Ronald Colman, who served alongside Baz in WWI (along with Claude Rains, Herbert Marshall, and Herbert Marshall’s leg), is Sydney Carton (odd name for a protag), a fetching combination of cynical and soulful. Elizabeth Allan, David Copperfield’s mum, is his romantic interest, very beautiful but with a tendency to raise one eyebrow, Roger Moore fashion, in moments of high drama. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Donald Woods is a boring rival: the character is kind of a lump of wood, but you need someone more unusual than Woods to play it. Lots and lots of impressive supporting players: Lucille La Verne tries out her witchy laugh, made more famous a couple of years later in Disney’s SNOW WHITE.

Robert Z, Leonard directed unspecified bits — good luck identifying which. But we know that the revolution/storming of the Bastille was handled by Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur. It’s magnificent, but distinguished more by sheer gigantism than style, though it partakes of silent cinema technique in an arresting fashion. Looks to have cost more than either man’s entire subsequent career: the producer and director seem to have bonded over their contempt for this kind of excess.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES stars Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond; Mrs. Copperfield; Hildegard Withers; Sherlock Holmes; Sherlock Holmes; the Abbess; The Little Colonel; Perry Mason; Quartermaster Bates; Mercutio; Jesus Christ; Herod, Tetrarch of Judea; Col. Jeremiah Milford Dyer; Uncle Arn; Emmy Slattery; Queen/Witch (voice, uncredited); Gersternkorn; Mrs. Scatcherd (uncredited); Burgomaster; Burgomaster; Jimmy Valentine; Dr. Sonderborg; Tal Chotali; Ptomaine Pete; Shazam; Lord Mortimer; Barkilphedro; Mr. Clink – Purser; and Clay King.

DAVID COPPERFIELD stars King Peter II; Chairman J. Bruce Ismay; Hildegard Withers; Lucie Manette; Mrs. Hermisillo Brunch; Elijah Quimby; Sir Guy of Gisbourne; Much; Bess; Mr Potter; Lady Capulet – Wife to Capulet; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley / The Monster’s Mate; Frau Mozart; Egbert Sousé; Lord Loam; Cosmo Topper; Nayland Smith; Frank Shelley – Observer Navigator in B for Bertie; Jane; Burgomaster; Burgomaster; and Jeeves.

For Mary

Ian Wolfe invents cinema

A strange moment in BEDLAM — the Val Lewton-Mark Robson joint. Ian Wolfe, an asylum inmate, demonstrates his flick-book:

“If I could shine a light through them, I could cast them on a wall!” he asserts. The same problem that defeated (so far as we know) Louis LePrince.

There is no narrative reason for this aside, which doesn’t even relate to Wolfe’s character’s other delusions, which are themselves incidental. Lewton (as screenwriter — I think he has more to do with it than the IMDb’s other nominees, Robson and deceased cartoonist William Hogarth) seems to be entertaining himself. After making roughly two horror movies a year for the past five years, without claiming any enthusiasm for the genre, he probably needed to. Hence also all the 18th century witticisms he’s shoehorned into the story…

What’s impressive now is that the film doesn’t demonize the mentally ill, or only a little. The one really bad thing the “loonies” do seems completely justified when it happens…

The Fearful Vampire Hunters

I’ve been writing limericks for the run-up to Halloween — you can read them here.

Despite, or maybe in part because of, the outrageous lifts from PSYCHO, part two of Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot TV adaptation satisfied and startled. Fiona screamed several times. It’s fashionable to disparage jump scares, and with the modern soundtrack’s capacity they might seem too easy, somehow, but I think they still have a place in the horror film. I can respect a movie that’s too clever and disquieting to need them, for sure, but for the kind of thing SL is, they absolutely belong.

Stephen King has said that horror comes in three basic shapes — (1) is the subtlest and noblest, the suspense/dread kind, (2) is shock, the jump-scare or startle effect introduced by Tourneur (usually associated with dread and suspense but he liked to mix things up) and (3) is the gross-out. King states that he aims for (1) for preference, but resorts to (2) when necessary, and then to (3) when he has to. The trouble always seemed to me that (2) and (3) can push out (1). But I note that Hitchcock pushed graphic violence in PSYCHO and it HELPED with the dread and suspense, and that the Lewton-Tourneur school purveyed not only subtle psychological tension, but shocks AND had more blood than other ’40s horrors.

The acting in Salem’s Lot helps hugely. Reggie Nalder, as noted by David Ehrenstein, is a formidable living special effect who didn’t even need all the makeup he’s given to be alarming. When you’ve hired Reggie, youdon’t have to paint him blue. As Simon Kane notes, they’ve taken away all his dialogue and that makes him scarier, less human. James Mason’s Mr. Straker is basically playing Renfield, but a Renfield hugely empowered and elevated, suave and cunning and not loony at all, whereas Nalder’s Mr. Barlow is a Dracula degenerated, pure animal will, a semi-sentient walking plague.

Small-parts supporting vampires add to the general mood of abjection: Mason’s real-life wife, Clarissa Kaye-Mason (whom he met while casting for a Miranda to his Prospero in Michael Powell’s never-made THE TEMPEST) gets probably her best onscreen moment; Geoffrey Lewis is fantastically creepy, the screen’s best blue-collar neck-biter; the two kids, Ronnie Scribner and his recruit, Brad Savage are legit terrifying.

Credit also to David Soul, who plays a hero who can actually be terrified. The way you or I would be. I don’t know why this obvious bit of realism isn’t used more often in horror films, other than that you need good actors and you need to spend time showing their reactions. Leading man vanity may also be a factor. But David Soul, rarely discussed as an acting talent, wets himself with real conviction.

Who keeps a drawer full of rats and eyeballs?

The show is peppered with instances where Hooper clearly just didn’t have time for a second take or reshoot, but it succeeds where it counts. It’s impressive that he was able to make the haunted house a memorable, beautifully-designed set that lives up to the two-hour build-up: production designer Mort Rabinowitz does a grand job. The place seems alive with mould. And Barlow’s lair is, magnificently, reached by descending an absent staircase and passing through a tiny, scary door. These bits of architectural surrealism enhance the terror in hard-to-analyse ways. They do make us feel like we’re leaving the domain of the human.

Fiona was much taken with the way Barlow’s recruits are just lying around in the dirt around his coffin. Only he gets a box. Stephen King probably deserves some credit for the way the film makes vampirism seem really grubby and nasty and degraded, a new development in the genre. True, both the Murnau and Herzog NOSFERATUs (from which Nalder’s makeup is derived) associate their head vamp with vermin, and he doesn’t look as sexy as Chris Lee. But at least he has a nice coat. Barlow’s black robe makes him a shapeless mass with a little blue head and hands grafted on, a shred of midnight torn loose and apt to pop into frame from odd angles, and he’s maybe the first screen vampire you gotta assume must smell really bad.