LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS
(Mikio Naruse, 1954).
A portrait of three former geishas struggling with the challenges of
middle age in postwar Tokyo, Late Chrysanthemums weaves several
short stories by Fumiko Hayashi into a flawless tapestry of social observation.
We first meet Kin (Haruko Sugimura) as she discusses her rental properties
with a financial advisor, instructing him on the upcoming eviction of
a widow. She's a moneylender as well as a landlady, and her single-minded
obsession with wealth has hardened her against having compassion for
others, or having any kind of an emotional life at all. But she still
bears the scars of one of her love affairs, with a man who attempted
to carry out a double suicide pact with her in Manchuria -- a plan she
rejected, instead sending the man to jail. Now she hears that he is
in the neighborhood looking for her.
We then follow her as she collects her rents, and we meet some of her
tenants who were her friends when they were all geishas during the war,
including Tomi (Yûko Mochizuki), humorous and talkative, who has
become addicted to gambling and resents Kin's superior air even as she
becomes financially indebted to her; and Tamae (Chikako Hosokawa), her
housemate, who makes a meager living as a cleaning woman while she supports
her adult son, who seems unsure of what to do with his life. Meanwhile
Tomi's light-hearted daughter decides to get married without fussing
about elaborate rituals or parental approval.
Tomi and Tamae are both disappointed in their children, whose free-and-easy
attitudes mark the generational sea change in Japan after the war. Meanwhile,
Kin's mercenary tendencies masks a secret need for love, which reveals
itself when she receives a letter from an ex-officer and former lover
who is planning to visit. Each story in this complex film branches off
into other stories, and each character connects in subtle ways to all
the others.
The exterior shots of the narrow bustling streets in the urban neighborhoods
are full of life, contrasting with the gracefully controlled set-ups
of the interior scenes. Naruse's pace is so perfectly attuned to the
story that the shots seem to flow in and out of one another like musical
themes. The final sequences feature a masterful back-and-forth cross-cutting
between two different scenes that creates the film's visual and emotional
climax. There is never anything heavy or overwrought about the picture.
The tone is persistently realistic, intellgent, and often wryly amusing.
I had become accustomed to a certain emphatic acting style in Japanese
films, which I took to be typical of a highly emotional and dramatic
stance towards the struggles of life. But the acting in Late Chrysanthemums
has challenged my assumptions. All the dialogue in the film, and the
behavior, is direct, natural, and understated. The performances are
marvelously convincing and many-hued. Above all, the film is utterly
modern in style and sensibility. The idiosyncracies of the women are
apparent (as in the wonderful, loquacious, cigarette-smoking Tomi) but
the film doesn't try to make too much of this, so we end up identifying
with the characters instead of judging them. Naruse always seems to
find the right shot, the right cut, and the right response from his
performers. Like the greatest artists in any medium, he makes it look
easy. The film is beautiful and absorbing from start to finish.
Late Chrysanthemums is an absolute revelation. Naruse has never
been as famous as Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa -- but judging by this
film at least, he should be.
FOOTLIGHT PARADE (Lloyd Bacon, 1933).
James Cagney plays Chester Kent, a Broadway producer who gets the idea
of making live musical "prologues" for movie houses when the sound film
starts to supplant the musical theater. This becomes a hectic enterprise,
with Kent always having to come up with new ideas, helped by his loyal
secretary (Joan Blondell) who is secretly in love with him.
The plot asks us to believe a lot of unbelievable things, including
that Cagney would fall for a phony intellectual (well played by Claire
Dodd) instead of Blondell, who is obviously perfect for him. But this
pales in comparison to the outlandish musical productions, choreographed
by the great Busby Berkeley. If you can accept an impossibly huge stage
on which cascades a massive waterfall, designed so that an army of bathing
beauties can form themselves into geometric designs (many of them underwater)
in the "By a Waterfall" number, you can accept just about anything.
Any real theatergoer would (and did) find Berkeley's vision of a stage
show to be both crude and ridiculous. If nothing else, the Berkeley
musical demonstrates that popular entertainment could be as weird in
the 1930s as it is today. The seemingly endless variations on the theme
of sexy showgirls forming themselves into lovely visual patterns while
showing plenty of flesh combines a sort of Depression-era cheesecake
mentality with an almost abstract regard for visual spectacle. It's
practically impossible not to laugh at these shows, but at the same
time you can't deny a certain delirious appeal.
In addition to the waterfall number, Footlight Parade features
the "Honeymoon Hotel" production, with its juvenile (and sometimes hilarious)
attitude towards sex, featuring singing (and spitting) house detectives,
couples running through the hallways to their bridal suites, and a precocious
baby (Billy Barty!) leering at the girls.
As a subset to the Cagney-Blondell team we have Dick Powell crooning
at Ruby Keeler, whose simpering little grin I find very hard to take.
Actually Keeler looks great earlier in the film when she plays a repressed
girl wearing glasses. Then Powell has to liberate the woman in her,
and she gets to tapping up a storm in her spastic way.
Frank McHugh is on hand as a whiny stage director, along with an assortment
of Warners stock players such as Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert. But despite
all the energy and tunefulness (songs courtesy of Harry Warren and Al
Dubin), Footlight Parade would just be a poor cousin to 42nd
Street without Cagney, who can do no wrong here. His
exuberance and rapid-fire delivery carry the picture. And then -- wonder
of wonders -- he gets to sing and dance (due to the old trick of the
scheduled singer falling ill) in the show's final number "Shanghai Lil."
Yeah, it's corny, and even a bit racist (every Oriental stereotype gets
pulled out of the hat -- there's even a bit with some luscious blondes
supine in an opium den) but it's also fun. Cagney has a wonderful dancing
style, and his singing voice isn't too bad either, so it's one of the
great mysteries of Hollywood why he didn't do any other musicals besides
this one and Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Blondell is also great -- at one point she tells her rival Dodd that
"as long as there are sidewalks, you'll have a job" before kicking her
out the door. All told, this is one of the best 30s Warner musicals,
even though Berkeley did better work in some of his lesser films. In
one of the overhead shots, the chorus turns into an American flag. They
then flip their signs and we see an image of: FDR. The man had just
been elected! (And you thought Hollywood's liberalism was a recent thing.)
IMITATION OF LIFE (John M. Stahl, 1934).
Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert), carries on her dead husband's maple
syrup business while raising her young daughter Jessie. Her black servant
Delilah (Louise Beavers), is also a widow, with a daughter named Peola.
With Delilah's secret recipe for pancakes, Bea opens a successful restaurant,
and later makes a fortune with the pancake mix (Delilah's name and picture
gracing the box -- the reference to Aunt Jemimah is obvious). Meanwhile,
the light-skinned Peola cannot accept being "colored," and instead chooses
to break away from her mother and try to pass as white.
This film, an adaptation of one of Fannie Hurst's popular novels, has
enough subtext to keep a cultural studies department busy for years.
The fact that the subject of race is discussed at all -- in an era when
Hollywood was generally either silent on the subject or engaged in crude
mockery -- makes the film a remarkable and ambivalent experience. Universal
must have been nervous about the project -- William Hurlbut got credit
for a screenplay that was worked over by at least a half dozen other
writers, and the picture had trouble getting booked in the South. Delilah
is presented as a loving and compassionate human being and devoted mother,
worthy of admiration. But despite good intentions, the depiction of
racial conditions in the film inevitably evokes disturbing feelings,
then and now.
Peola's desire to pass as white is presented without a great deal of
judgment, except insofar as she acts cruelly towards her mother. The
unspoken fact behind the drama, of course, is white supremacy and segregation.
At one point, Delilah says that she doesn't know who's to blame (certainly
not "our Lord") -- the racial system itself could not be blamed out
loud in a Hollywood movie, nor did the culture at large (what we would
call the "mainstream" today) even have such a concept to work from.
The fact that Delilah is apparently not invited to the party celebrating
the success of the company bearing her name and image speaks loud and
clear to us today, but the movie takes such things for granted. In general,
the screenplay works overtime making Delilah into the most pliable and
obedient black woman you could ever imagine: she refuses a percentage
of the profits and a chance to have her own home, choosing instead to
stay with Bea as a servant. The film, therefore maintains the racial
status quo while its unusually humane (for the time) characterizations
somewhat subverts it, since the combination of humane feelings and segregation
by race indicate hypocrisy, however sublty. inherently producing conflicting
emotional impressions.
Race is only one theme of the story, though. Arguably more central
is the idea of the utterly devoted mother. Both the Colbert and Beavers
characters must make sacrifices for their daughters, the latter to the
point of emotional martyrdom. The tribulations of hard working, long-suffering
women was Fannie Hurst's stock and trade, and Imitation of Life
qualifies as a "weepie" of the first rank. In the film's main plot strand,
Bea gets engaged to a gentleman charmer (Warren William), but her teenage
daughter (Rochelle Hudson) falls in love with him too. There is no respite
from pain for these women.
Considering all the corniness, bathos, and embarrassing moments in
the scrieenplay, it's rather amazing that the film is as good as it
is. A great deal of credit goes to Stahl, an expert at directing so-called
"women's pictures." His style is careful and restrained -- he never
pushes too hard for effect, so the drama unfolds with a purpose and
intensity that seems natural. Excellent acting carries us along as well:
Colbert's energy and assurance never flags, and Beavers (billed fourth
in the credits, although her character is clearly the second lead) is
very strong and moving. Ned Sparks brings a much needed dose of humor
to the film in the role of Bea's stubborn, bizarrely eccentric business
manager. Fredi Washington is excellent as Delilah's daughter Peola --
making her struggle sympathetic without getting much help from the script.
There's no denying that Imitation of Life was aimed at a white
audience whose understanding was limited by the cultural assumptions
of the time. A black viewer would find plenty to cringe at, then and
now. The film has a kind of subliminal effect, however, which transcends
its own muddled liberal intentions. Beyond what Stahl and the writers
really meant to say, the very depiction of the friendship between the
two women, white and black, and the drama of "passing" (reflecting the
troubling consequences of a segregated system without directly criticizing
it), evokes thoughts and feelings deep beneath the surface of conventional
melodrama. And that's what makes this flawed work still interesting
today.
SPIRIT OF MY MOTHER (Ali Allie, 1999).
Sonia (Johana Martinez), a young Honduran woman, struggles to get by
working as a hotel maid in Los Angeles, trying to take care of the baby
she had after a brief affair with an American soldier, while putting
up with abuse from a male co-worker. Haunted by dreams of her recently
deceased mother asking for nourishment, she returns to her coastal town
in Honduras to find out what she needs to do to find closure.
This brief (78 minute) first effort by a female Honduran director plays
more like an impressionistic reverie than a straightforward narrative.
Taking the main character's inward point of view, the film flashes back
and forth between Sonia's memories of home, her frustrating experiences
in America, and her attempts to talk to her mother's spirit. The style
is sometimes awkward and unsophisticated, with not enough grounding
in the details of Sonia's everyday life to create a vivid sense of her
character. However, the picture becomes more interesting once she returns
to Honduras and is instructed to perform a ceremony that will appease
her mother's spirit. Here Allie delves, with obvious love and patience,
into the Afro-Caribbean culture of the Garifuna, a Honduran people of
mixed race. The extended depiction of a seaside ritual, with a feast
offered to the soul of the dead woman, and much drumming, singing, and
dancing, draws us in with hypnotic power. This is a slight, but affecting,
look at how a woman's bond with her mother is inextricably tied to her
love for her homeland and its people.
THEY CALL IT SIN (Thornton Freeland, 1932).
This pre-Code morsel from First National stars lovely, 19-year-old
Loretta Young as Marion, a small town church organist and composer who
falls for Jimmy, a traveling businessman (David Manners) who doesn't
bother telling her that he's engaged. After her parents, angry at her
liaison with the outsider, reveal that she is actually the illegitimate
daughter of a showgirl, Marion runs away to New York, only to be crushed
by the discovery that her man is going to be married to someone else.
She ends up auditioning for a variety show, and is hired by the lecherous
producer (Louis Calhern) who tries to seduce her and then takes credit
for her music when he's rebuffed. Meanwhile, she has caught the eye
of Jimmy's friend, a handsome doctor played by George Brent.
The wildly improbable and convoluted story goes down painlessly, due
to the relaxed, nicely paced style of the little-known Freeland, who
had an extensive apprenticeship in silent films, and Young's luminous
presence. She makes a quick transition from innocent churchgoer to wearer
of the most fashionable gowns, and few stars of that time looked as
gorgeous in them. Una Merkel provides some lively comic relief as a
showgirl who befriends Young's character -- there's a funny bit involving
Merkel doing cartwheels as part of a variety number.
Although not blessed with as witty a script as some of the better pre-Code
films, They Call It Sin epitomizes in certain ways the unique
attitudes of that brief period in Hollywood cinema. Rather than idealizing
small-town life and rural values, the film views them as ignorant and
limiting, even mocking it in a veiled way. Women gain happiness through
spunk and initiative, not submission, and strictures on sex and romance
are seen as the province of bigots and other small-minded people. Marion's
dilemma is whether she wants to be a showgirl, a mistress, or a wife
-- as usual, the woman's identity is defined by her relations with men,
but the sense of agency conveyed here is freer than the stuffy moralism
of post-Code films.
There's nothing serious or weighty about any of this. It's a bit of
fluff, centered around a beautiful leading lady and some rather clumsy
plot mechanics. But it's light-hearted fun -- sixty-nine minutes of
guilt-free entertainment. And they call it sin!
©2005 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
