Coloured Blocks

One of my favourite lines from a bad review is “to criticise it would be like tripping a dwarf” though I guess it’s kind of ableist now that I look at it again, but my greater point is that I can’t remember what film it refers to — maybe George Cukor’s JUSTINE? — nor who wrote it, so I am bad.

The reason I even mention it is that I got on a little Mervyn LeRoy kick and watched RANDOM HARVEST which is SUPERB but also MOMENT TO MOMENT, which is dreadful. And really, writing a bad review of that one, a forgotten thriller which was LeRoy’s last directing credit though he also did some work on THE GREEN BERETS (good choice not taking a credit for that, Merv), is supremely pointless. nobody remembers the film, it’s completely undistinguished, and nothing can be served by going over its inadequacies…

So, anyway, MOMENT TO MOMENT has a couple of interesting credits — Jean Seberg and Honor Blackman star, and the script is by John Lee Mahin, whose career goes back to SCARFACE and had worked for LeRoy on THE WIZARD OF OZ (LeRoy produced that one) and QUO VADIS and THE BAD SEED and the very funny NO TIME FOR SERGEANTS, and Alec Coppel, whose name was familiar to me from VERTIGO.

But Coppel was extensively rewritten on VERTIGO by Samuel A. Taylor. Jimmy Stewart’s reaction to Taylor’s initial reworking was that at last the project had some human beings in it. Now, some of the dialogue in VERTIGO is pretty shonky (“We were engaged once, weren’t we?”) and the characters are rather jerked about by the exigencies of a demented plot, so one wonders how bad the Coppel version must have been. Somehow, though, Coppel retained a prominent credit on the film and, despite its disappointing box office performance, this may have done him some good.

The main reason he got hired for MTM, however, must be that he authored the short story it’s based on. So I blame him for everything. LeRoy’s direction is decent, if old-fashioned, very un-1966, and his camera movement is elegant and insistent — this movie GLIDES. LeRoy did admit that he erred in casting Sean Garrison, an amiable lightweight, saying that he should have gotten someone like Paul Newman. Well, I would imagine that if he could have done so, he would’ve done so.

Garrison is very handsome and seems like he might be gay (and he’s playing a sailor). This slightly undercuts the intended sexual tension with our heroine, Jean Seberg, but actually makes the film more interesting. Seberg is drawn to Garrison because her husband (Arthur Hill) is constantly travelling on business (in Edinburgh, my city, at one point, though we never see this). And the surprising gay subtext rears up here too, as Hill says he has to get off the phone to Seberg because his taxi has arrived: what we SEE is not a taxi but a very chiselled young man. Is this all unintentional? It’s never acknowledged.

Anyway, to the plot: Garrison, an artistically-inclined sailor who doesn’t drink (!) suddenly becomes aggressively romantic at Seberg’s place one night, and then tries to shoot himself. In the struggle, the gun goes off and kills him. In a panic, Seberg calls on her neighbour Honor Blackman, who throws orgies it seems, to help her dispose of the corpse. Obliging in more departments than one, Blackman agrees.

But then detective Grégoire “Coco” Aslan enters the story, intent on solving the case. And there’s a twist, though Garrison was apparently killed by a bullet to the heart, he wasn’t killed dead. But he has amnesia, and Aslan and a tame shrink are trying to help him recover his memory as to who shot him.

The amnesia angle is sort of welcome just because it ties the movie in with RANDOM HARVEST. And the version of retrograde amnesia depicted in this movie is reasonably credible, unlike RH’s fantasy of “Who am I?” identity erasure and a second knock on the head bringing back the initial memory but erasing all the intermediate experience, which is ludicrous but fun from a narrative viewpoint.

But having a more convincing version of amnesia does not automatically make your film better. Coppel’s plot is TERRIBLE — obviously patterned on LES DIABOLIQUES (VERTIGO had brought him into proximity with original authors of both films Boileau & Narcejac), it requires us to feel nerve-biting suspense about whether Garrison’s memory will come back and prove that Seberg DID NOT KILL HIM.

(In LES DIABOLIQUES, Charles Vanel’s rumpled Javert/Columbo is a genuine menace because our protag, Vera Clouzot, has genuinely been involved in a murder plot.)

The worst Seberg might be charged with is concealing a death, but as Garrison wasn’t dead that would seem either academic or moot or some terrifying combination of both. Of course having a sailor attempt sailorcide in her home late one night while her husband was away might jeopardise her marriage, which would be fine dramatic stakes in a romantic melodrama, but this movie opens with a gunshot in a thunderstorm and wants to be seen as a gripping thriller.

Characterisation!

To continue tripping this dwarf would be like continuing to trip a dwarf who was already flat on the pavement. I will just say that the film prominently features a game of balancing geometric shapes, which is striking and strange because the same week I watched it I went to see Miyazaki’s THE BOY AND THE HERON, which contains THE SAME THING. [sinister music]

The Sunday Intertitle: Inhale It

A helpful instruction re the consumption of Chinese food from the start of THE SHOCK, a one-hundred-year-old crime melodrama starring Lon Chaney.

It is October. Proper Autumn, when the leaves of the soul yellow and crinkle. What better way to welcome the springtime of death than with Lon, Sr, doing what he does best — feigning disability and not getting the girl?

Chaney’s is the cinema of novelty, even if he does repeat himself in the fundamentals mentioned above. So we immediately get that rarity, a semaphore intertitle, tapped out by a Chinese-American confrere’s thumbnail —

Lon replied by Chopstick Telegraphy —

The thumb’s owner is played by Japanese actor-director Tôgô Yamamoto. No “yellowface” in this film.

A Chinatown crime queenpin sends Chaney to a small town to await instructions. While there he falls under the influence of the pastoral setting and a Pollyanna-ish local girl whose intertitles consist entirely of CAT POSTER TEXT.

To drive home the point, the first thing we see in this new location is a kitten clawing at Lon’s disabled ankle, and him smiling at it and NOT kicking it into the bushes. So we know he’s Changed.

If you happen to have watched THE SIGNAL POST on Silent Movie Day you’ll recognise Virginia Valli as Lon’s leading lady.

Catching Valli in a clinch with another guy breaks Lon’s heart in a close-up that’s held for twenty seconds to allow him to show the multiple stages of cardiac fracture.

There don’t seem to be many twenty-second close-ups in modern cinema. BIRTH featured a long take focussing on Nicole Kidman’s face, and this received much comment — it was perceived as ballsy, an unspoken undercurrent of meaning being that when your star is basically a hollow outline packed with botox, dedicating long seconds to her physiognomy takes courage. But Kidman is a great actor in the right role, and minimal movements do her very well.

Of course there’s always SON OF SAUL, which stays close to its central face throughout, which is even braver.

Lambert Hillyer isn’t that much of a director — he’s never heard of camera movement and he shoots every scene starting with a wide established, then going into a closeup, then singles. Not much more to it. But I give him a few points for giving Chaney time to emote. I’ll deduct a few for his failure to repeat the trick when Chaney realises he’s blown up the woman he loves with gelignite. We all know Chaney would have aced that reaction shot.

Deus ex machina — the plot having got fankled beyond all retrieval, Chaney prays for a miracle. If you have ever wondered what a Lon Chaney Miracle would look like, THE SHOCK supplies the answer: the San Francisco earthquake arrives to save the day, the seismological cavalry. The surprise is slightly spoiled by the poster, showing a giant Chaney emoting over a landscape of rubble, and by the film showing us a model shot before anything has happened. A kind of miniature foreshadowing, i guess. Every film set in Frisco should climax this way, regardless of when the action takes place. DIRTY HARRY, MRS DOUBTFIRE, MILK. Even VERTIGO would get a welcome fillip, the earth opening to receive the plummeting Novak.

The resulting rumble, in which everything caves in, falls over, explodes, and catches fire, may not be as spectacular as the civic irruptions of IN OLD SAN FRANCISCO or SAN FRANCISCO or SAN ANDREAS but I enjoyed it very much.

“This is fine.”

The real shock of THE SHOCK is what happens afterwards — I shan’t spoil it. All I’ll say is, in preparation for it, Lon suddenly changes his shade of lipstick.

Mental Cruelty

It’s marking time at the University I teach at — cuts into blogging a bit — not only does it eat up my time, but I can’t blog about it. Not directly anyway — the marks are all secret for now and anyway, you lot haven’t seen the films unless you happen to be one of my students.

On Saturday night we ran Bunuel’s EL, which Fiona hadn’t seen. You wouldn’t expect Bunuel to make a feminist film, but this kind of is one: a woman is lured into marriage with a bloke who turns out to be obsessively jealous and controlling — his paranoia gradually becomes full-blown, but she can’t get any help because he’s a rich, respected man — even the church is on his side, even her mother is on his side. Maybe the real target is his respectable bourgeoise power, but the fact that the movie is named after the male pronoun is… suggestive, wouldn’t you say?

If this sounds earnest and social realist, it’s anything but — Bunuel’s surrealistic impulses are more apparent than in, say, LOS OLVIDADOS (which has dream sequences and a certain grotesquerie but could, with only minor deletions, be the sort of subject Ken Loach would like). There’s a lot of fetishistic business with shoes and feet, but when El/Francisco — Arturo de Cordova — quite a risky performance from a big star — finally cracks, the scene becomes a fragmentary, jumpcutting phantasmagoria of overlapping sound — he imagines everyone in church laughing at him, and their laughter continues across cuts which instantly turn the mockers po-faced. It’s a delirious nightmare.

Other scenes are quite Hitchcockian — like a companion to SUSPICION maybe? Francisco rips up a stair rod and bangs it frantically against a banister in the night — and we’re hearing the drums of Calanda which form such a major part of Don Luis’ cinematic soundscape. (Hitchcock to Bunuel when they finally met, and after Hitch had seen TRISTANA: “That leg!” As great director encounters, I like that as much as Ford’s remark to Kurosawa: “You really like rain, don’t you?”)

For a long time the “Mexican melodramas” were hard to see and kind of referred to dismissively. I now think Bunuel’s Mexican period is his richest, even if a few of the films really are just work for hire with only touches of the Bunuelian. Many of them are quite full-on, smashing surrealism together with melodrama is always going to be intense.

And cinema — especially Latin cinema — was dreaming of Hitchcock’s VERTIGO for some years before he actually made it: