It’s been a while since we looked at Bosko, the Harman & Ising Warners cartoon character of ambiguous species described on copyright forms as “a little negro boy”. That particular N word provokes a cringe today but at the time it was probably the most sensitive way to describe a character of colour. But Bosko is still hugely problematic, from his voice, a white actor’s idea of a stereotyped southern Black person, to his design, a sort of blackface makeup. The very fact that he’s apparently meant to be human seems problematic — all the other cartoon heroes are anthropomorphic animals (even Betty Boop started out as a poodle) apart from I guess the Fleischers’ Koko. The discomfort doesn’t go away whichever way you look at it: if Bosko is human, like Koko, maybe his face is indeed a makeup, like Kojo’s clown pancake. And are we meant to consider “a little negro boy” as being somehow equivalent to either a clown, or the various mice and dogs and rabbits being animated elsewhere?
But discomfort is kind of what I look for in creepy old cartoons, so I’ll still look at the Bosko oeuvre from time to time. And what better way to experience gnawing anxiety and teeth-grinding malaise than by watching a funny toon about WWI?
By this point in his screen career, Bosko no longer has the gravelly PUTNEY SWOPE tones (Swope was Robert Downey Sr., a white guy [and prince] revoicing a Black actor [Arnold Johnson] whose perf he was dissatisfied with), which is one bit of relief. He now sounds exactly like the Mickey Mouse knockoff he is. Lest we relax, though, the movie begins with jaunty jazz music playing as a holocaust of bullets, explosions, shrapnel and rubble fly across the flashing screen. Then Bosko aims his weapon right at us, in the best GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY tradition, filling the lens with lead and muzzle flash as he shines a radiant grin in our direction, breaking the fourth wall while shooting holes in it. Then we get gags about toons being straight-up killed and injured. This is somewhat in keeping with the general Warners idea, seen in so many of their pre-codes, of the world as a cruel vaudevillian torture garden. It’s usually expressed with more… charm, however.
The gags about Bosko’s dinner and sweetheart portrait (an oddly limbless image of Honey, the standard romantic disinterest) being destroyed by gunfire, come a little closer to expressing sympathy for the plight of the WWI infantryman. Although, unappealing to the end, Bosko eats with his mouth open.
To cheer Bosko up, a cartoon horse performs a harmonica solo, and the two merry fellows dance on the boards of their trench as if they were giant piano keys. This is essentially the way cartoon gags should work, except for the grim setting. Hey, maybe they could find some decomposing bodies in no-toon’s-land and use their protruding ribs to make beautiful music?
More 12fps unease as a huge flea chows down on the ass of a sleeping dog-doughboy (doughdog?). The dog is grey. Its ass, revealed by lifting a patch on its pants, is seemingly chalk-white. And it has loose, stretchy skin with distends like chewing gum in the flea’s teeth. Teeth. The flea’s teeth. Rrrright.
When Bosko’s comrade-in-arms has his middle blasted away by machine-gun fire, the film reaches its grisly nadir. It’s OK, though, once his top third schlumps onto his lower third, it magically grafts together and he becomes a sort of torsoless dwarf running away into the distance. So that’s fine.
And sure, end with an explosion inking Bosko black, so he can launch into a Jolson imitation (“Mammy!”). From the studio that brought you THE JAZZ SINGER. Synergy!
It’s not WOODEN CROSSES or WESTFRONT 1918 or ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT but it does have a hippo being unzipped so a cannonball he swallowed can be removed, which none of those admired feature films can claim.
Blood, Sweat and Chrome is a terrific read — an oral history of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, its long gestation, its making, and its near unmaking. No mention of the 3D version or the black & chrome version, oddly enough — though we do get a brief history of the abortive attempts by Kennedy-Miller to create their own 3D camera that could survive the heat and dust of desert filming, something that doubtless added a few bucks to the eventual cost (reckoned at “over $250 million” here, described as “$500 million!!!” by industry scuttlebutt that came to my ears).
Author Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter who puts together a great story. I wish he’d had more of the nerdy camera stuff — before the film appeared, cinematographer John Seale and his second unit man David Burr did a fabulously indiscrete talk which appeared online and hinted at the troubles, the craziness and the extraordinary approach director George Miller took to his material.
Miller’s approach was, appropriately enough, mad. I love the movie — a two-hour anxiety attack — and so, in a sense, one can’t fault his methods. But, in another sense, one can. It was nuts.
Apart from the opening and closing scenes in the Citadel, Miller shot in sequence. This is rarely done even in small movies because it’s not practical. On a big movie, it’s crazy. On a HUGE movie, it’s suicidal. It was basically a way of making the easy bits of a mostly insanely difficult movie become also difficult. Need two shots of a character at the steering wheel, one for scene ten and one for scene twenty? Don’t film them together, film them weeks apart, necessitating two set-ups where one would have done you. Then multiply that by hundreds. Actors like filming in sequence, when they can, because it allows a clearer sense of the emotional throughline. But both Miller’s stars confessed themselves hopelessly confused.
Tom Hardy, confused while wearing a garden fork on his face.
Miller worked from a storyboard, not a script. Everybody says there WAS no script, though I also read interviews where Miller’s collaborators claimed they had to produce a script to satisfy Warner Bros, which seems plausible. But then they never referred to it and apparently didn’t show it to the actors. This was all supposed to HELP. A more detailed, granular plan, which shows exactly what has to be shot. A more useful, visual document for a movie that’s literally almost all action.
Storyboards are great for specifics but a trifle unwieldy — MM:FR’s boards papered a large room — it can be hard to get an overview of the story because of all the detail — Miller or a collaborator would have to talk interested parties through the boards, because storyboards can be hard to interpret if you’re used to scripts. They tend not to be as intuitively clear as comic strips. One of the “writers” claims that reading action scenes is “fucking boring” so storyboards were the only way to go. Read a James Cameron action scene sometime. Or read a book. It’s true that most screenwriters suck at describing things, just as most directors suck at filming them. But the exceptional ones prove it can be done.
Miller’s mania was, at every level of the production, to focus on details, and attempt to make the perfect film by assembling a series of perfect details. Crazily, it kind of worked. You can’t say he wasn’t seeing the big picture, because he obviously very much had a vision. But he didn’t always succeed in conveying its essentials to his actors. (In that talk above, Seale says he didn’t have a clue what the film was going to look like, since digital cinematography is so utterly, dizzyingly flexible.)
Miller also largely eschewed master shots, shooting little tiny pieces, like Hitchcock. The stars would beg him for a bit of run-up, so they weren’t just acting in five-second bursts. “No, I don’t need that,” he would say.
Now, coverage is not in itself a wicked thing. And Miller had final cut, so he had no need to fear it. USUALLY if you’re shooting five seconds of vital material it does no harm to surround it with ten or twenty seconds on either side, which will give you cutting choices. Miller was working on the theory that there’s only ever one correct camera position, while Seale was shooting multicamera because he suspected this was an approach that could easily land one in difficulties. And some of the B and C camera stuff did make it into the movie, so he was right.
We’re told that an assembly of early scenes was created (Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife, is also his editor, and they obviously have a beautiful relationship and understanding) but this, apparently, was not shown to the actors. It would have been INCREDIBLY useful, I would have thought. Hitchcock did this to Sylvia Sidney on SABOTAGE — confused her by shooting piecemeal then wowed her with an assemblage. Psychologically a masterstroke: you disorient your star, make them worried that you don’t know what you’re doing, then dazzle them with your brilliance, and they have no choice but to trust you from then on. I mean, I wouldn’t do it: I’d prefer to keep people onside throughout. But, in the wild, cult-like atmosphere of Miller’s film, this seems like a workable scheme.
Miller also believed in fine-tuning every sequence in the cut before moving on to the next one. Which is also batshit. I always tell my students to assemble the outline of the film quickly — you don’t make shonky cuts you know aren’t acceptable, but you work fast and aim to get, as quickly as possible, an overview, all the scenes in order. That way, you learn as quickly as possible how much trouble you’re in. You get to the most depressing part as quick as possible, and then everything after that is about making it better.
To some extent, that may have been impossible for Miller due to his “goddamn jigsaw cutting,” as Selznick referred to Hitch’s approach. But if everything’s following a storyboard and there’s no fat, it’s not that hard to cut off the clapperboards and string the shots in their intended sequence, even if the timing is initially rough. Slightly harder when you have 480 hours of footage, I know…
George Miller is clearly a more successful (and better) filmmaker than I am, as a comparison of LORENZO’S OIL and episode 13 of Intergalactic Kitchen will demonstrate. But I learned about shooting masters, putting things in a clearly formatted script, communicating with my actors and aiming for a rough cut as fast as possible relatively early in my career. It maybe took ten years. Miller turned 70 while making FURY ROAD, and he’s a very smart guy (a doctor!). He clearly handled his crew brilliantly, his supporting cast were happy (working with a dramaturge), and his struggles with the studio all worked out in the film’s favour (the diciest moment was when the head of Warners ordered him not to shoot the opening and closing of the film, a ruinous decision which had to be reversed later, at great expense, when it turned out that a film without an introduction and a climax tended to be rather incoherent).
So it’s a mystery — maybe George never made the early mistakes I struggled with, and so he was able to discover them at an advanced age? Or maybe he’s right and I’m wrong.
We watched CONFESSION (Joe May, 1937) and then discovered MAZURKA (Willi Forst, 1935) on YouTube. With subs!
Fiona had done her research and knew that the Warners picture is pretty well a shot-for-shot remake of the Cine-Allianz Tonfilmproduktions GmbH one. Warners bought the distribution rights and then instead of releasing the film, they remade it. One of the few cases of a Hollywood studio finding a foreign film so perfect they didn’t change everything around. See also Duvivier’s PEPE LE MOKO becoming John Cromwell’s ALGIERS (the musical version, CASBAH, is a slightly different story). Farrow even tried to cast actors who resembled the supporting players in Duvivier’s film. Kind of a good idea, since certain shots might only make sense with certain faces. Somebody pointed out that the very weird low angle shot of Norman Bates peering over at the motel register in PSYCHO makes sense with Anthony Perkins’ long, beaky face, and doesn’t work in at all the same way with Vince Vaughn’s big meatblock of a head.
Still, a comparison of the Duvivier with the Farrow clearly shows that everything Duvivier does works better than Cromwell’s attempts at imitation.
May is better at it — he seems to really understand why everything is the way it is, so his copying is more intelligent, somehow. Both Forst and May were Viennese and may have had a shared sensibility. Forst did make a few films after the Anschluss, always apolitical, usually musical — some give him credit for “subverting pan-Germanic Nazism” with his “ardent Vienna-Austrian topos” (Wikipedia, no source given).
Cheekily, CONFESSION even directly recycles some original footage from MAZUKRA, where no actors are involved.
Joe May’s Hollywood career was a serious come-down after his German success, though one could argue that his heyday was circa 1920 when he had his own studio and exterior lot. But his best films came in the late twenties. As an emigre, having to start over in his fifties, he couldn’t get properly started, his jobs were very intermittent, and he slid towards B pictures.CONFESSION is probably his finest moment in US film, and it’s not really his.
Image 1: a seduction. Image 2: a rape. Both from CONFESSION, but exactly similar versions appear in MAZURKA.
Still, his casting choices are good — Kay Francis isn’t an obvious replacement for Pola Negri, but she’s excellent in the part. Warners gave him access to Basil Rathbone, Donald Crisp and, uh, Ian Hunter. He’s quite well-cast and does no major harm. May copies the cleverest parts — I must see more Forst! — there’s a great motif of light fittings, seen in point-of-view by girls being kissed — there’s a cunning reason for this — and enhances the odd moment with the larger resources available to him. His closing shot is a doozy, more epic and transcendent than Forst’s, though cornier —
CONFESSION is available from Warner Archive so you shouldn’t watch an old fuzzy TCM recording like we did. Even though it’s melodramatic froth, and even though it’s pretty well a clone of someone else’s film, it’s great.
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