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Content by Dave Clayton
Commentateur n° : 6,725
Votes Utiles:
10
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Reviews Written by
Dave Clayton "Wereaardvark" (San Diego, CA USA)
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Reviewer Rank:
6725 |
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La Habanera
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| DVD ~ Detlef Sierck |
| Availability: Currently unavailable |
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Ufa Goes on a Caribbean Cruise, April 18 2004
Up until 1933, German studios retained a preeminent position both in European and in world film production. Pictures such as Josef Von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, Fritz Lang's M, and Leontine Sagan's Maedchen in Uniform were spectacular successes both critically and at the box office. After the rise to power of the Nazis, the story changed drastically. Apart from the possible exception of Leni Refienstahl's Triumph of the Will and Olympiade, it is difficult to come up with significant examples of German film art made during the Nazi period. But no one should imagine that the reconstituted movie industry-basically under the control of Goebbels-simply went over to making propaganda vehicles. As Jan-Christopher Horak explains in his useful liner notes to this excellent Kino Video DVD of Detlef Sierck's 1937 soap opera La Habanera, "Much more successful [than propaganda pieces like SA Mann Brand] were star studded historical epics, spy and adventure films, and comedies that transported Gesinnung (ideology) in the subtext."
Among the popular genres was the kitschy romantic melodrama, which had antecedents in pre-Nazi hits such as The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna (1929) and Dreaming Lips (1932). La Habanera, which has similarities to Pola Negri's intended comeback picture, Tango Notturno (1937), is very much in this vein, telling the story of a Swedish visitor to Puerto Rico, Astree Sternhjelm (Zarah Leander), who runs away from the ship that is supposed to take her home and unwisely marries a local aristocratic landowner, Don Pedro de Avila (Ferdinand Marian). After ten years of unhappy conjugal union, Astree only wants to flee the steamy tropics back to the snowy wastes of her homeland, taking her son along with her. At this point, an old flame of hers conveniently appears, a Swedish doctor who has come to the island to study the mysterious "Puerto Rico fever," a fatal epidemic whose existence local officials as well as Don Pedro want to cover up.
La Habanera may well be indebted to two older American films. The most evident parallel is with John Ford's adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's novel Arrowsmith (1931), whose last third depicts the protagonist's attempt to subdue an outbreak of the plague on a Caribbean isle. However, a less obvious but more tantalizing debt could be owing to Josef Von Sternberg's The Devil Is a Woman, apparent both in details of the mise en scene and in La Habanera's thinly veiled attempt to pass off Zarah Leander as a successor to Marlene Dietrich. Even the vainly proud Don Pedro, a rather improbable denizen of Puerto Rico in 1937, seems cut from the same cloth as Lionel Atwill's Don Pasqual in the earlier movie.
The Devil Is a Woman was based on a novel by Pierre Louys dating back to 1898, and the action of La Habanera-its up to date setting notwithstanding-clearly harks back to the same era. The film's saga of a woman who stakes all in the pursuit of passion as much as the scenes of picturesque natives at play in the fields and of colorful local customs like bullfighting are clichés of etiolated fin de siecle exoticism. Yet was not the current of aestheticism that plays so conspicuous a role in the films of Douglas Sirk-as the director was called after his emigration to the United States-itself a prominent feature of the same era? Moreover, it would not be hard to find evidences of aestheticism in the sense of a fascination with beautiful appearances and of a desire to create a work of purely artistic value in the earlier films of both Lang and F. W. Murnau, not to mention in the work of lesser directors like G.W. Pabst.
This association with the past may explain the virtual allergy to anything tainted with aestheticism on the part of émigré directors like Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger. Indeed, Walter Benjamin, probably thinking of the sinister example of Stefan George, characterized Nazism itself as "the aestheticization of politics." However, Sierck's aestheticism in La Habanera like that of the later Sirk in Written on the Wind represents an anachronistic Schlussakkord and not a plangent Fascist overture. But if Sierck/Sirk's conscientious dedication to aestheticism may have itself immunized him to seductions that figures of the caliber of Gottfried Benn or Emil Nolde found themselves unable to resist, it also marked a limit to his artistic development.
Here the comparison with The Devil Is a Woman, which still possesses some of the efficacy of a gesture of defiance against the hypocrisy and repression of bourgeois society, is revelatory. It, like the director's other collaborations with Dietrich, opens up an essentially tragic perspective. Life is an ongoing disaster for Von Sternberg just as it was for the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but a movie director could not so easily fall back on Joyce's modernist faith in art. Even if the blind rush of life can be momentarily suspended in a moment of artistic vision, what happens when the artist preserves that moment in an intrinsically ephemeral medium? It can hardly have escaped Von Sternberg's attention that he was raising no "monument more lasting than brass" but one made of silver nitrate.
Nothing of Von Sternberg's ironic consciousness penetrates the closed world of La Habanera. At the end of the film, Astree-her Puerto Rican adventure hermetically closed off with the death of Don Pedro-departs the island for Sweden, just as the audience will soon leave the theater, having finished off its own night in the tropics courtesy of Ufa. In many of the scenes-for example, Leander's rendition of the title song-Sierck achieves a polish any director might well envy. Nonetheless, his triumph culminates in perfectly executing this wretched material, not in transcending it. The paradise that becomes a hell for the heroine was no doubt intended to be one of art for the spectator, but it remains a museum recreation of the Golden Age.
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The Wax Mausoleum, Dec 9 2003
Wax museums have been used as a setting for thrillers in the movies at least as far back as Paul Leni's remarkable Waxworks in 1924. But the most memorable waxworks movie still remains Mystery of the Wax Museum made by Warner Bros. in 1933, shot in two strip Technicolor, and directed by Michael Curtiz. The studio apparently thought so too, since it remade the movie in 1953 as House of Wax, using the remake as a vehicle to show off the 3D process. Both films follow basically the same plot line, one that tells of a wax sculptor-Ivan Igor in Mystery of the Wax Museum/Professor Henry Jarrod in House of Wax-whose unscrupulous business partner sets fire to the museum they jointly own, leaving the sculptor horribly mutilated. Some years later, the sculptor, seemingly disabled but ambulatory in reality, reappears and opens a new museum. In the meantime, having become thoroughly crazed by the accident, Igor/Jarrod has become a psychopathic killer who uses the bodies of his victims for the wax figures in his museum.
The 1933 movie supplies an unusual, but mainly satisfactory blending of two distinct genres: the big city movie that was a Warner's staple of the era, and the classic thriller with a demented, hideously deformed villain lurking about in the shadows. The older movie, whose action begins in London in the1920s and then jumps forward to 1933, throws in any number of then up-to-date details, such as a bootlegging racket run by the sculptor's ex-partner, the suicide of a party girl, and the drug habit of one of Igor's minions. An array of familiar faces appears in Mystery of the Wax Museum, among them Glenda Farrell, as a wise-cracking forerunner of Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday, Frank McHugh, as her editor, and Fay Wray, once more as a damsel in deep distress. But it is Lionel Atwill, giving a first-class performance as the villainous Igor, who easily steals the show.
Mystery of the Wax Museum was directed by Michael Curtiz, who worked in nearly every kind of movie genre imaginable during his long tenure at Warners' Curtiz is mainly remembered today for Casablanca, a film which owes more to the chemistry of its performances and to a top-notch screenplay by Howard Koch, Julius and Philip Epstein, and Casey Robinson (uncredited) than to any cinematic ingenuity on the part of Curtiz. But this movie like Doctor X, made the year before, suggests, as do The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and Mildred Pierce-everyone's favorite blend of soap opera and film noir-that Curtiz had a knack for translating morbid subjects to the screen.
Usually when a studio remade an older picture, the practice was to update the setting. But when Warners' produced House of Wax, it moved the action back into the1890s-not a very happy move, as far I am concerned. If the studio wanted a period setting, then why not have used that of Mystery of the Wax Museum itself? The remake was directed by André De Toth, a man shamefully neglected today, who first gained recognition with the thriller Dark Waters, before doing some memorable westerns. The cast is quite forgettable, with the exception of one name-the only one buyers of this DVD are likely to pay attention to. When he made House of Wax, Vincent Price was not as grandiloquently hammy as he was to become a few years hence as the star of Roger Corman's adaptations of assorted Poe stories. In his years at Fox in the 1940s, Price had given a credible display of his abilities as an actor in such pictures as Song of Bernadette and Leave Her to Heaven, and he had one outstanding performance to his credit, in Otto Preminger's Laura.
But in House of Wax, Price was tackling the kind of role no one could believe in any longer. A deranged genius like Igor was already anachronistic in 1933, as much so as Count Dracula, a latter day descendent of the dandy. Perhaps that's why the studio substituted the WASP-sounding Professor Henry Jarrod for the exotic Ivan Igor. To his credit, Price resists the temptation to camp up his part-later on, he gave up doing ineffectual imitations of old thespians and specialized in doing overripe imitations of himself-and he certainly gives the best performance in House of Wax, but it's a pale imitation of Atwill's. Otherwise, House of Wax is worth watching mainly for a couple of nocturnal chase scenes well staged by DeToth, and the effective color cinematography by the veterans Bert Glennon and Peverell Marley.
Warner Home Video has had the bright idea of bringing out the two movies together, on opposite sides of a single DVD, with results that I found unequal on first acquaintance. House of Wax looks very good indeed. As the 3D reissues of some years back demonstrated, the original color materials have held up very well. Mystery of the Wax Museum, however, was a real disappointment when I watched it using a conventional DVD player and television. Both the color and the picture definition were miserable in many scenes, which is particularly regrettable since the movie contains some beautiful compositions by Ray Rennahan, where blues and greens seem to jump off the screen. However, since I posted this review last year, I have recently looked at Mystery of the Wax Museum on my laptop with Power DVD, and the picture quality was astounding. As a result, I have revised my comments and given the DVD a higher rating. But anyone without the advantage of a program like Power DVD who plans on viewing the picture on a home entertainment center should be prepared to do a lot of fiddling with the controls.
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Orphic, but not a Trilogy, April 19 2003
Criterion notwithstanding, this collection of three movies directed by Jean Cocteau is no trilogy. Rather the three works represent three quite different views of the Poet-the prototypic artistic creator for Cocteau--at three different moments in his career. The first, Blood of a Poet (1930) released at the same time as L'Age d'Or of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali-both pictures were financed by the wealthy patron of the arts, the Vicomte de Noailles-is the most "Orphic" of three, and like L'Age d'Or very much in the vein of French experimental films of the 1920s, with an abundance of symbolism and rejection of conventional narrative syntax. Less radically innovative than L'Age d'Or, Blood of a Poet is like a brilliant book of sketches, some of which work, some of which don't.
Cocteau made no films for over a decade, and only returned to the cinema during the Occupation with The Eternal Return, for which he wrote the screenplay. Although directed by Jean Delannoy, the film was clearly Cocteau's own creation, and marked both the beginning of a period of fertile cinematic collaboration with Jean Marais and a new phase in Cocteau's contributions to film. The masterpiece of this period is, of course, Orpheus (1949). Cocteau had begun in Blood of a Poet by radically breaking with realism. Now he set about showing how the images of modern life could be invested with a mythic power of their own.
In The Eternal Return, Cocteau had put the story of Tristan and Yseult into a modern setting, but without the least hint of irony. In updating the myth of Orpheus to post-World War II Paris, however, he adopted a very different strategy. The Thracian singer becomes a rich and famous writer (Jean Marais) who supplies exactly what the public looks for in literature. At the beginning of the film, Orpheus boasts to an older retired writer, "The public loves me!" And the latter tartly retorts, "The public is alone. But as a result of the unforeseen adventure he lives through in the film, an adventure in which he confronts and falls in love with his own Death (Maria Casares), Orpheus momentarily becomes the Poet he never has been.
Cocteau had placed the myth of the sacrifice of the Poet at the center of Blood of a Poet, and he explicitly articulates it in Orpheus: "The death of a poet requires a sacrifice to make him immortal." However, the "real" Poet, from this point of view, is not Orpheus-who goes back to happily settle down in bourgeois bliss with his expectant wife-but Cegeste (Edouard Dermithe), who becomes the servant of Death, and unquestioningly transmits the messages from the underworld (read: the unconscious). The Poet has to sacrifice himself in order to be more than a writer-"A writer without being a writer," is how he defines the poetic vocation before the Judges of the Underworld-but Orpheus will never have the courage to make that choice by himself.
Not the least astounding thing about Orpheus is the assurance with which Cocteau handles the machinery of commercial film production. Orpheus is hardly a mainstream production by American standards, but it has no ragged edges, technically speaking. The film was strikingly photographed by Nicolas Hayer and it makes a highly adroit use of special effects shots, whose primitive magic Cocteau understood and employed quite effectively. The musical score is by Georges Auric, a member of Les Six who has to rank with Bernard Herrman as one of the major composers of film music in the history of motion pictures. Last but not least, Orpheus has a formidable cast, including-in addition to Jean Marais-François Perier as Heurtebise, Maria Dea as Eurydice, Juliette Greco as her friend Aglaonice, Roger Blin as the older poet, and the sublime Maria Casares as the most glamorous personification of Death ever to appear on the screen.
Viewers will likely have the most difficulty getting into the third movie, The Testament of Orpheus. Cocteau's adieu to the screen is a work filled with spontaneity and invention, so impulsively unstructured as to make Blood of a Poet look like Racinian tragedy. Cocteau plays a traveler lost in time who goes in search of Pallas Athene, but this is a mere pretext for stringing together a series of adventures, like the narrative premise of a picaresque novel. Testament of Orpheus was a movie ahead of its time when it came out 1959, and it remains so today. Possibly its release in DVD may serve to make it known to a wider audience. Criterion has done itself proud with this set. Anyone inclined to balk might consider that three DVDs of this quality at the price are already a bargain. The picture and sound quality of all three movies, each of which has been digitally remastered, is superb. Blood of a Poet was especially impressive in this respect, and I felt as if I were seeing it for the first time. In addition, The Orphic Trilogy includes a wealth of supplementary material such as essays and pronouncements by Cocteau. The set also contains two other films en marge of a non-fictional variety. One of these is Villa Santo Sospir, a 16mm picture about the home of Cocteau's neighbor on the Riviera, Mme. Alec Weisweiller, which he had extensively decorated. Mainly a record of art works, Villa Santo Sospir is his only extended work in color. The other, far more interesting, is a documentary about Cocteau's life entitled Autobiography of an Unknown by Edoardo Cozarinsky. Unfortunately, the picture quality is often dupey and unsatisfactory, but the film provides a number of invaluable interviews from the later phase of Cocteau's career.
Anyone who enjoys The Orphic Trilogy should definitely consider purchasing the Criterion DVD of Beauty and the Beast, and the videotapes of The Eternal Return, The Storm Within (Les Parents terribles), and The Strange Ones (Les Enfants terribles), all available from Amazon.com.
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Early American Romance, April 19 2003
Often ranked as "the first significant American novelist"-this is how Norman Grabo characterizes him in the Introduction to this volume-Charles Brockden Brown was an ambitious and inventive teller of tales, although an awkward literary craftsman. Brown was only in his twenties when he published this novel in 1799, but it was already his fourth book. Edgar Huntly, which takes place in rural Pennsylvania in 1787 recounts the strange adventures of a young man who sets out to discover the person responsible for killing his best friend, Waldegrave, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. His investigations put him on the track of Clithero, an Irish servant employed in his uncle's household, but one thing leads to another and Edgar finds himself having to fight Indians and face the perils of the wilderness in order to make his way back home. Most of the story is told by Edgar himself in a long letter-some twenty-seven chapters long-that he is in the process of writing to his intended, Waldegrave's sister, Mary.
Edgar Huntly belongs to the genre of romance, the much older but somewhat less respectable sibling of the novel of social realism that had come into vogue in the eighteenth century. The romance frequently has an exotic setting, and features incidents that stretch the limits of artistic plausibility, where it does not take a plunge into fantasy, as it does in Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk or Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. Nevertheless, the genre enjoyed great popularity here down to the time of the Civil War, and Brown shows himself well acquainted with its conventions. He not only throws in a whole series of hair-raising encounters that pit the inexperienced Edgar with natural hazards, predatory wild animals, and marauding Delawares, but supplies a convoluted plot line that he further complicates with stories-within-the main story told by subordinate characters. Even for a romance, Edgar Huntly has an unusually tangled narrative web. It's hardly surprising the neophyte author himself sometimes has difficulty keeping track of the strands.
The reader making the acquaintance of Brown for the first time will not get any help from the note on the back cover supplied by Penguin, according to which "Edgar Huntly is the story of a young man who sleepwalks each night, a threat to himself and others, unable to control his baser passions....One of America's first Gothic novels...." I wonder whether the person responsible for these inane comments ever bothered to open the book. In the first place, Edgar Huntly is no Gothic novel. As E.F. Bleiler pointed out, it takes a castle to make a Gothic novel. But Brown explicitly distances himself from the suspicion of Gothicism in the remarkable address "To the Public" prefaced to the book, in which he prides himself on having found his materials in his native country and rejoices in not having fallen back on "Gothic castles and chimeras" in composing his work. But the statement about Edgar is not just inaccurate-it is blatantly incorrect. Edgar has at the most two sleepwalking episodes, one of which serves to initiate the most remarkable series of events in the novel, when he awakes to find himself mysteriously transported to a cave in the middle of the night. And nothing Edgar relates suggests he has a history of somnambulism in his past-nor that he is "unable to control his baser passions." In fact, the first sleepwalker to show up is the far more uncontrolled Clithero, who almost seems to have infected Edgar with his affliction.
Brown was clearly a pioneer of psychological analysis in the history of the novel. Like Edgar Allan Poe later, he probed the souls of his characters by plunging them into violent, imminently lethal situations. As a student of extreme states of the human psyche, he was not only a predecessor of Poe, but of Hawthorne and Melville as well. Yet Brown lacked the ability to apply his talent to the creation of highly individualized characters, one of the strengths of great nineteenth century novelists such as Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. All of the characters in Edgar Huntly, the protagonist included, remain little more than phantoms inhabiting a largely crepuscular world throughout the course of the action. However, like other trailblazing figures in the early history of American fiction-James Fenimore Cooper is a perfect example-Brown had an estimable ability to create atmosphere. It is not intended as a sarcasm to say that the reader may feel he or she is turning into a sleepwalker while reading Edgar Huntly.
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Dr. Mirakle's Monkey, April 18 2003
In comparison to such Universal Poe "adaptations" as The Black Cat or The Raven, Murders in the Rue Morgue is almost faithful to the original-almost! Poe used the story as a showcase to introduce C. Auguste Dupin, the first literary detective, to the public. A financially independent recluse and spiritual kinsman of Roderick Usher, Dupin, who solves crimes for his own disinterested ratiocinative pleasure, is called in by the Parisian police whenever it runs up against a brick wall in its investigations. In this case, a woman and her daughter have been brutally murdered under suspicious circumstances, and Dupin is able to show-to the consternation of the authorities-that the culprit was a runaway orangutan belonging to a sailor, and not a human agent.
The studio eliminated Dupin as a character altogether, but retained the Parisian setting, placing the story in the 1840s, as well as the idea of a woman who has been mysteriously killed by an unknown assailant. However, into the straightforward framework of the Poe story, Universal inserted the proverbial 500lb. gorilla in more than one sense of the word, since what the movie boils down to is a woman copulating with a great ape, if anyone stopped to think about it-as I am sure some audience members did, even back then.
The simian in question now belongs to Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi), a mountebank and mad scientist evidently patterned after Dr. Caligari, although the name Mirakle has even deeper roots in the German past, reaching back to the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, as fans of Jacques Offenbach's great opera The Tales of Hoffmann will quickly realize. Mirakle's mad scheme is to prove a primitive evolutionary theory by "mating" Erik, his pet primate, with a human female. What would Peter Singer have said? Unfortunately, all of his attempts hitherto have been made with ladies of the street, and have failed when his subjects turned out to be sexually infected. But a light dawns after Mirakle encounters the beautiful, young, and presumably virginal Camille L'Espanaye (Sidney Fox) when she visits his sideshow at a carnival. Doesn't Erik seem attracted to her? Hmmmm...
Most of the great horror films of the early sound period had a latent sexual content all too evident today. But while the Universal productions were for the most part relatively straightlaced for the pre-Code days, Murders in the Rue Morgue is almost improbably scabrous. Not only does it feature interspecies coitus combined with side glances at prostitution and venereal disease, but it includes a scene in which Mirakle tortures a woman bound to a rack that could have come straight out of Sade. (If I am correct, the same prop rack reappears in The Black Cat.)
Here the movie ventures into the netherworld of exploitation subsequently populated by hacks like Dwayne Esper, although it may have been primarily influenced by Allan Dwan's stylishly lurid Paris after Midnight, produced by Fox the year before, which had encountered problems of its own with the Hays Office. In The Monster Show, David J. Skal even goes off on a tangent trying to make Dr. Mirakle into an avatar of the Nazi butcher Dr. Josef Mengele. But the principal resources of Murders in the Rue Morgue are the sadism and racism that already figure explicitly in the Poe story, the staple ingredients of many a production in those years, not crypto-fascism.
This louche little opus was the work of Robert Florey, a rather enigmatic figure in the history of American movies. French born, Florey had a career that extended over several decades in Hollywood, co-directing the Marx brothers' first movie, The Cocoanuts (1929), and assisting Charlie Chaplin in the shooting of Monsieur Verdoux, among other chores. Florey had originally been scheduled to direct Frankenstein with Bela Lugosi as the monster, and had even shot some tests, before Universal prudently handed over the picture to James Whale and Boris Karloff, giving Florey and Lugosi this assignment instead. But one of Florey's brainstorms made its way into the final version of Frankenstein: the windmill in which the monster burns to death.
Certainly Florey provides a very atmospheric recreation of Paris in the era of Louis Phillipe. With the photography of Karl Freund and the stylized décor of Charles D. Hall, the film almost seems a homage to Ufa at moments, especially in the fairground scenes whose indebtedness to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari movie buffs will easily recognize. Yet Murders in the Rue Morgue, in spite of a chase over the roofs of Paris in the last reel, is curiously low on suspense, as comparison with The Mummy, directed by Freund in the same year for the same studio, reveals. Nothing in the Florey even remotely approaches the electric excitement of the scene in the latter movie in which a young archaeologist inadvertently revives the mummy by translating the Scroll of Thoth. An even more interesting comparison would be with Edgar G. Ulmer's later Bluebeard (available on DVD), also with a nineteenth century Parisian setting, made on a much tighter budget than the Florey, but which gets far more imaginative mileage for its money.
Bela Lugosi is good as Dr. Mirakle, but the role does not afford him the opportunity to display his idiosyncratic talents to the extent that his parts in Dracula, White Zombie, or The Black Cat did. Otherwise, the cast is disappointingly bland for such a wildly overwrought subject. But the credits do contain one surprise: the name of John Huston, who shares credit with Tom Reed and Dale Van Every for writing the screenplay of this least Hustonian of movies. Talk about strange bedfellows!
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Merry-Go-Round
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| DVD ~ Rupert Julian |
| Price: CDN$ 35.99 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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Von Stroheim Goes for a Spin, April 17 2003
Film historians generally--and in my opinion, rightly--consider Erich von Stroheim to have been among the greatest directors in movie history. But none of Stroheim's major works, starting with Foolish Wives, survives today in the form he intended. Of his mutilated masterpieces, The Wedding March probably comes closest to realizing his intentions. The picture was edited by another "von," Josef von Sternberg, who probably understood as well as any outsider could have what its creator had set out to do, and who gave the movie a compulsively vibrant intensity, as if Maurice Ravel's La Valse had been transferred to celluloid. But Stroheim never forgave him this act of lese majesty.
Merry-Go-Round was commenced after Stroheim had finished Foolish Wives at Universal, but Irving Thalberg, appalled by the director's contempt for budgets and refusal to knuckle under to the studio's demands, fired him and handed over the picture to Rupert Julian, who got sole credit for the direction. Nevertheless, the first half of Merry-Go-Round clearly reveals the influence of Stroheim, and the notes for the DVD credit him with having directed at least a quarter of the picture. Thalberg may have wanted to show Stroheim who was boss, but he by no means had a low opinion of the latter's abilities and would hardly have scrapped the footage that had already been shot out of spite.
Anyone familiar with The Wedding March will have no difficulty in recognizing in Merry-Go-Round a preliminary sketch for the later film. In Vienna just before the outbreak of World War I, an aristocratic roué, Franz Maxmillian von Hohenegg (Norman Kerry) meets a poor girl, Agnes Urban (Mary Philbin) who works at a concession in the Prater and falls in love with her, although he is pledged to another woman. The girl herself is being hotly pursued by the brutal Schani (George Siegmann), owner of the concession, but is also the object of affection of the hunchback Bartholomew Gruber (George Hackathorne), whose pet orangutan eventually metes out Schani's just deserts.
Kerry and Philbin were stars of the period probably best remembered for playing opposite Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera. They give adequate performances, but pale in comparison to the trio of von Stroheim himself, Zasu Pitts, and Fay Wray in The Wedding March. Cognoscenti will also be able to easily spot such Stroheim regulars as Dale Fuller, who plays Schani's wife, and Cesare Gravina as the father of Agnes, performers whom Stroheim cast in similar roles in The Wedding March. Nor would they be likely to overlook the appearance of a truly legendary name among the technical credits: that of the great cinematographer William Daniels, the co-photographer of Merry-Go-Round, who went on to shoot Greed and The Merry Widow.
Von Stroheim's early works like Foolish Wives and this film were lurid melodramas that hovered between Griffith at his most sensationalistic and what might have resulted had someone let loose R. Crumb amid the ruins of the Hapsburg empire. It may come as a surprise to younger movie buffs to find out that Stroheim was esteemed in his heyday as a "realist." Certainly from a present day perspective Stroheim's great films seem the product of a highly idiosyncratic imagination--and about as realistic as a gargoyle on a Gothic cathedral. Yet starting with his next production, Greed, Stroheim's pictures not only became more technically audacious--especially in his use of tightly intercut close-ups--but also moved away from caricature into far more probing analyses of human psychology.
It is always worth keeping in mind that von Stroheim had worked under D.W. Griffith, and evidently absorbed Griffith's visionary approach to film art--not to mention his preference for shooting movies on an epic scale. But in von Stroheim's lens, Griffith's heliotropic apocalypses--Intolerance fittingly bears the subtitle "A Sun Play of the Ages"--turned into cosmic dramas of entropy. However, Stroheim was no cynic. His fascination with depravity sprang from a sense of outrage at the injustice of the universe and a desire to peel back the excrescence of centuries of civilized hypocrisy in order to show the truth of the human condition as he saw it. Stroheim's preferred terrain was Central Europe in its last throes of decadence, whether on the Riviera or in Old Vienna, but when he cast his eye on the New World in Greed and Hello, Sister, it didn't look any more promising, just cruder.
David Shepard has been responsible for a number of valuable restorations of important older films on DVD. Combining--and digitally remastering--two 16mm prints, he has done an impressive job with Merry-Go-Round. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for this excellent DVD. This version preserves the original tinting and also boasts a stereo musical track based upon the score for the silent film. Although only a minor part of the Stroheim corpus, Merry-Go-Round is indispensable viewing for anyone who wants to study the surviving evidence of this astonishing director's career.
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Two Wolves for the Price of One, May 7 2002
Two Wolves for the Price of One
Universal's packaging for this DVD containing Werewolf of London (1935) and She-Wolf of London (1946) calls it a "Wolf Man Double Feature," but any connection between the two movies is purely factitious. Apart from the London setting and the word "wolf" in the title, the two have little in common. Nor does either have anything to do with the saga of Lawrence Talbot, the manic-depressive lycanthrope played by Lon Chaney Jr. whose adventures, commencing with The Wolfman (1940) occupy a modest place next to those of such big league creatures as Count Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, or the Mummy. More than anything else this program unintentionally documents the studio's decline between 1935 and 1946.
Werewolf of London recounts the misadventures of Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull), a British botanist who while traveling in Tibet in search of a rare plant called the moonflower or Marifasa Lupina Lumina is attacked by a werewolf bent upon obtaining the posy, an antidote to what the dialogue calls "this medieval unpleasantness". Upon his return to England, Glendon begins to exhibit the symptoms of werewolfery, but an unforeseen complication ensues when the other werewolf reappears in the shape of Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland), faculty member of the University of Carpathia, in hot pursuit of the plant the scientist is now attempting to cultivate in his private laboratory.
In the absence of a more suitable model for its debut werewolf epic, Universal seems to have taken inspiration from Rouben Mamoulian's extraordinary-and highly successful-adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, released in 1932, starring Fredric March. Not only does the werewolf Glendon strikingly resemble March as Hyde, but Werewolf of London takes over the motif of a man leading a double life which figures more prominently in the Mamoulian film.
Most importantly, both movies tap into the Faust legend, whose lineaments can be discerned beneath the hirsute façade of Werewolf of London quite readily-but with a significant difference. According to most versions of the story, Faust repents too late and suffers damnation, but the studio improves upon tradition. In what must be a unique example of transfiguration in the history of Christian theology, the closing shots represent Glendon's ascending soul as an airplane flying into the sky which then becomes the Universal logo depicting a plane circling the globe.
Directed by the otherwise undistinguished Stuart Walker, Werewolf of London has a screenplay by John Colton, who made Somerset Maugham's short story "Miss Sadie Thompson" into the hit stage play Rain. But even for a horror film, Werewolf of London contains an unusually high proportion of nonsense, including laborious, misguided attempts to reproduce the niceties of British upper class life, equally labored attempts at humor--such as one character's habit of referring to Dr. Yogami as Dr. Yokohama-the miserable Marifasa, and a collection of dotty dowagers drawn from both ends of the social spectrum. Especially forgettable are Zeffie Tilbury and Ethel Griffies (the lady ornithologist in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds) as a pair of tediously inebriated Cockney landladies.
But the movie's greatest liability is its lead. Glendon is supposed to be a saturnine savant, but as played by Henry Hull, he is stiffly sullen, as if he had mistaken a lead sinker for a suppository. Only Warner Oland, mainly known for portraying Dr. Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, manages to inject a needed aura of mystery into the proceedings. Nevertheless, Werewolf of London has its moments, among them Glendon's first encounter with Yogami qua werewolf when the former discovers the moonflower, well-staged and well-photographed by Charles Stumar, as well as the subsequent transformation scenes, the true test of any werewolf flick.
In these sequences, Werewolf of London briefly achieves a sense of magic that far outstrips anything in Paul Verhoeven's effects-laden The Hollow Man. In fact, the unsung heroes of Werewolf of London are certainly the special effects wizard John Fulton and the makeup artist Jack Pierce. The first, who also supervised the trick photography of James Whale's The Invisible Man, did a skillful job of handling Glendon's metamorphosis from man into werewolf, while Pierce, the real creator of the Frankenstein monster, gave Glendon an appropriately savage demeanor in his lupine alter ego.
There is far less to say about She-Wolf of London, a psychological thriller impersonating a werewolf picture that might be described as George Cukor's Gaslight with fangs and claws. A tale about a series of mysterious attacks taking place in a London park located next to a mansion belonging to a family named Allenby, She-Wolf of London drags in some hocus-pocus about a hereditary curse-probably borrowed from John Brahm's superior The Undying Monster--to explain these events. But this idea remains so inadequately developed that it makes the Marifasa look like sound dramatic invention.
Perhaps the best thing anyone could argue in favor of She-Wolf of London is that owing to its tight editing-the running time is only 62 minutes-most people would not be likely to notice such gaping holes in the scenario as the heroine's not knowing that the woman she believes to be her aunt is actually her dead father's housekeeper and former inamorata. The rewards to be gleaned here are marginal indeed. She-Wolf of London is not only burdened with a ludicrous story line but a uniformly mediocre cast, although Sara Haden as the malevolent housekeeper does a plausible job of imitating Judith Anderson's bravura performance as Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca.
Still, the film, photographed by Maury Gertsman, boasts some striking shots of an unknown woman in white fleeing the Allenby manor in the middle of the night, and of the park shrouded in fog, for the delectation of anyone who has the patience to wade through the muck that surrounds them. The DVD is bare-bones without notable extras except trailers, but well-designed and user friendly. As with most of Universal's Classic Monster releases, the picture and sound quality of both movies is excellent.
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Visconti Goes to Hell, May 5 2002
This astonishing if ultimately frustrating production fuses two motifs familiar from earlier Visconti works: the historical spectacular (Senso, The Leopard) and the family saga (La Terra trema, Rocco and His Brothers). But there almost any similarity with the director's early films ceases altogether. The Damned is history as Walpurgisnacht, focusing upon the peripeties of a German family of industrialists-evidently modeled upon the Krupps--whose secret repository of vices gives new meaning to the stock phrase "skeleton in the closet". On the eve of the Reichstag fire, the Von Essenbecks, owners of an important steel factory with close traditional ties to the military, gather to celebrate the birthday of the family patriarch, Joachim (Albrecht Schoenhals).
The heir to the dynasty is the elegant, amoral Martin (Helmut Berger), the only child of Joachim's son who has died in World War I and the beautiful, unscrupulous Baroness Sophie Von Essenbeck (Ingrid Thulin). Sophie is enamored of the ambitious Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde), and plans to use her son as a pawn to promote Friedrich's rise to power as head of the family business. Yet Sophie, in spite of her passionate love for Friedrich, is pathologically attached to Martin, who in turn has a psychopathic attraction to little girls. To guarantee the Nazis' control of the steel works, Friedrich conspires with the diabolical SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem) in the killing of old Joachim, and later in the assassination of Martin's uncle Konstantin (Rene Koldehoff) during a homosexual orgy of SA followers on the Night of the Long Knives. But Friedrich's petty Machiavellian schemes to advance his own personal fortunes are readily outmatched by the superior cunning and ruthlessness of the Mephistophelean Nazis with whom he has sealed his Faustian pact.
It would be an understatement to characterize The Damned as oppressive. One of the standard conventions of older Italian films about fascism had been to pit bestial Nazis against numerically inferior but morally superior adversaries-the prototype is Roberto Rossellini's Open City. However, in this movie the forces of evil seem invincible. The film concludes-after Friedrich and Sophie have been forced to commit suicide following their nuptials-with images of a blast furnace: history being transformed into an inferno by the power of the total state.
Visconti further reinforces the pervasive mood of suffocation, an asphyxia nearly as much physical as moral and political, with a dazzling use of color mise en scène, emphasizing brown, black, and red shades, brilliantly realized by his directors of photography, Pasqualino De Santis and Armando Nannuzzi. Ever since shooting Senso, the director had shown a sensitivity to the expressive possibilities of color, but here he really outdid himself, without ever falling into the pictorialism that mars The Leopard as well as Death in Venice, and even more Ludwig. (Anyone who writes a book on the history of color cinematography one day will have to devote an entire chapter to Visconti.)
In his early films, Visconti seemed as much rooted in the 19th century as D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, or John Ford, a committed leftist who nevertheless owed as much to the humanistic realism of Alessandro Manzoni as to the economic and political doctrines of Karl Marx. But his career underwent a mutation in the1960s, signs of which are more evident in the febrile Sandra (1965), with its incestuous brother-sister relationship, than in the pallid, pious adaptation of Albert Camus' The Stranger (1967). The original, apocalyptically charged title of The Damned is La Caduti degli dei or The Fall of the Gods, an allusion to the final opera in The Ring of the Nibelung, bringing in both Richard Wagner-one of the spiritual godfathers of Nazism-as well as Wagner's vision of a fiery consummation of human history in the conflagration of Valhalla.
Yet Visconti's world ends in The Damned neither with a bang nor a whimper, but a fascist travesty of the heritage of European civilization, from art of ancient times down to the German cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. In this regard, the movie adopts the overtly deconstructive stance of postmodernism towards the past by showing how once viable cultural traditions can be corrupted and thus irretrievably lost. More of an allegory out of Sigmund Freud or Wilhelm Reich than a historical picture, The Damned does not at all pick up where The Leopard stopped, but anticipates in both dramatic strategy and style Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, which in a memorable sequence juxtaposes the choral finale of Beethoven's 9th Symphony-already made grotesque by being performed on a synthesizer-with images of Adolf Hitler strutting before his rapt admirers extracted from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.
In my own opinion, Visconti was one of the great directors in the history of the cinema, but The Damned is an agonistic work rather than an accomplished one, the record of an artist's struggle with his own personal demons. Still, The Damned is far more impressive than any of Bernardo Bertolucci's psychosexual exercises in interpreting history-not to mention a rebuke to such Fellini psychedelic schlock as Julietta of the Spirits or Satyricon--and Visconti got invaluable support from his cast, especially Ingrid Thulin and Dirk Bogarde, although some viewers may have a problem with Helmut Berger as the epicene Martin. Warner Home Video asks quite a stiff price for this tape, which does not seem to me wholly justified. The picture quality is adequate in copies I have seen, but this version is the R rated one, missing some footage deleted to change the original X-the IMDb gives the Italian running time as 155 minutes-- and the aspect ratio is not 1.85 letterbox as it should be, but full screen television.
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Not Baedeker in Hollywood, April 30 2002
I must admit I have not yet had a chance to look at the DVD of this movie. But the last time I was comparably impressed by a new release dates back a couple years now, when I saw Eyes Wide Shut for the first time. The New York Film Critics chose Mulholland Drive as best picture of the year and I certainly don't think they erred in doing so. Two films came out last year that employed unconventional narrative techniques, Memento and this picture, yet who could be in doubt about which work is the more challenging of the two? Memento has an arresting premise, but no one who watches the beginning of the movie closely should miss the premise or experience difficulty in following what comes after. By contrast, in Mulholland Drive David Lynch is constantly throwing the viewer off balance. It would be going a bit far to compare Lynch's new creation with Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, but hardly any movie of equivalent narrative complexity,visual richness, and difficulty has been made in the United States for years.
I have reviewed Mulholland Drive on my Web site (davesothermovielog.com), but I wanted to record some additional comments here. First of all, the movie is not a crossword puzzle to be deciphered by filling in the blank spaces. To his credit, Lynch leaves some of his spaces permanently void--not to be filled in at all, not even by the most ingenious exegete. Second, the film does have a recognizable subject, which is not Hollywood so much as the act of making motion pictures itself. The nearest thing to a narrative Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of Mulholland Drive concerns the planned production of a new movie in Hollywood that even affords Lynch an opportunity to throw in a brilliant production number with 1950s decor that puts to shame anything in Moulin Rouge!
This highly fluid story line allows Lynch to cover a lot of territory, including a devastatingly funny look at present day movie financing as experienced by an arrogant, wannabe auteur. (I have the feeling the director was settling old scores in some of these scenes.) But what Mulholland Drive is "about," is none of the areas the film passes through en route to its conclusion. Several famous movies about the movie industry--among them, not only Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, but also George Cukor's A Star Is Born, and Robert Mulligan's Inside Daisy Clover, based on the novel by Gavin Lambert--have dealt with the way stars become alienated in their screen images. Norma Desmond ends up acting out offscreen the goofy roles she played onscreen at the height of her fame, and at the end of A Star Is Born, the viewer might well want to ask, "Who is the 'real' Mrs. Norman Maine?" Esther Blodgett? Vicky Lester? But Lynch, I think, pushes the dialectic of images and identity considerably farther than any American director has done since Orson Welles made Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai.
Revision is a characteristic mode of postmodernism. But often what starts as a homage--for example, to a traditional genre like the musical--almost involuntarily degenerates into parody, as Moulin Rouge! well illustrates. In the past, Lynch has not, in my opinion, always succeeded in walking this particular tightrope with the greatest of aplomb--the end of Wild at Heart seems to me an absolute disaster in that regard. But the "revision" here is truly "re-vision," seeing over again film genres and Hollywood history, in a very large sense of the word, but most importantly "re-viewing" the ever problematic task of telling a story with images.
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La Dolce Vita, Forty Years After, April 10 2002
Even when I saw La Dolce Vita many years ago, at the time of its first release, I found it hard to take the film's moralizing pretensions very seriously. Pauline Kael sarcastically compared the later Fellini Satyricon to a Cecil B. DeMille epic that simultaneously titillates the audience and inveighs against the wicked pastimes of the rich and famous. Here the reproach seems equally valid. At some moments, Fellini's point of view seems just as naive and shallow as that of the the main character played by Marcello Mastroianni. Worst of all are the sequences devoted to the decline and fall of an "intellectual" played--very ponderously--by Alain Cuny. Those episodes made my flesh crawl at age sixteen, and they still make me wonder if Fellini got his idea of "intellectuals" from watching Italian soap operas on television. Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte--available on quite a good DVD--is far more demanding than La Dolce Vita, but at least the director knows what he's talking about.
Having said made those criticisms, I would have to aver that La Dolce Vita is one of the definitive works of post-World War II European cinema. The movie has visual style to burn, the use of anamorphic composition has rarely been equalled elsewhere, and the idea of offering a panorama of Roman high life through the experiences of a reporter during a few days remains a brilliant inspiration still today. Last but not least, La Dolce Vita is really fun to watch. Even Fellini couldn't take himself seriously too long, and the best thing to do is to forget the sermonizing and dig the fabulous party.
As a final note, I heartily concur with other customers about the inferior quality of the VHS tape put out by Republic. Having seen the film numerous times in a theater, I too look forward to the day it will appear in a good DVD letterbox edition.
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