THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE (Ernst Lubitsch, 1924).
Lubitsch's second American film tells the story of two couples in Vienna
one of them happy, the other not. The vain and flighty Mizzi (Marie
Prevost) bickers with her cold, suave husband Josef (Adolphe Menjou)
who puts a detective on her trail in order to find grounds for divorce.
Mizzi visits her friend Charlotte (Florence Vidor) who is blissfully
in love with her new husband Franz (Monte Blue). The lonely Mizzi then
feigns sickness so that Franz, who is a doctor, will visit. She then
attempts to seduce him. Franz resists, but appearances make him look
guilty to Charlotte, and meanwhile Franz's friend Gustav (Creighton
Hale) tries to lure Charlotte into his arms.
Although the movies had excelled in comedy, taking the forms of slapstick
and farce, true wit was a rare thing in film before Lubitsch. The first
thing you notice in The Marriage Circle is that none of the acting
is exaggerated. Lubitsch knew that you could portray emotion most effectively
with subtle expressions and underplaying, aided by the use of close-ups.
The film doesn't rely on title cards very much; the dialogue is there
to push things forward a bit when necessary, but otherwise everything
is achieved by editing and gesture. One scene conveys seductiveness
just by showing two pairs of hands preparing and drinking coffee. And
although the plot involves numerous misunderstandings, deceptions, and
mistaken identities, Lubitsch keeps everything clear and precise, maximizing
the audience's enjoyment in following the story's convoluted path. The
pacing is perfect -- there's none of that long, drawn-out feeling one
sometimes gets watching silent films.
The performers are uniformly good, with Menjou a standout as the amusingly
diffident husband looking for a divorce. The only slightly dissonant
note is from Monte Blue, playing a man so soft and spineless that you
wonder what either woman sees in him. He's not a particularly appealing
actor, but under Lubitsch's direction he is restrained and credible
within the premises of the story, which was based on a play by Lothar
Schmidt.
The Marriage Circle was clearly influenced by Chaplin's A
Woman of Paris, and although that groundbreaking film had more
of a sense of gravity, Lubitsch understands the milieu, and how to present
it, better than Chaplin. Here we can see the beginnings of a sophisticated
trend in film that would come to fruition in the early sound era. The
director's style came to be known as "the Lubitsch touch," a visual
poetry of lightness and gentle wit. This film is perhaps the best introduction
to the Lubitsch touch, because it displays the style in its most elementary
form. You chuckle at the way the people in this film carry themselves,
and their illusions about one another, and the film doesn't go out of
its way to make you laugh, content to just display the action and let
you find the humor yourself. We are not burdened with the ponderous
moralism that has plagued American films with themes of romance and
infidelity. It is taken for granted that married people have problems,
and that sometimes people cheat on their spouses. In short, we are treated
like adults, while the film breezes by in a whirl of pleasure.
MAN OF ARAN (Robert J. Flaherty, 1934).
Flaherty, the great American pioneer of documentary film, started to
make movies in Great Britain after experiencing disappointment with
his last three American projects. A chance conversation with a young
Irishman got him interested in making a movie about life on the rugged
Aran Islands, off Ireland's west coast. Michael Balcon agreed to fund
the picture (at a bargain basement price) and the result was this stirring,
beautifully shot, and somewhat controversial film.
The picture opens with a boy and his mother going to the shore of their
rocky island to help the father and his workmates bring their boat in.
When the net gets caught in the tide, the family struggles to bring
it in without being swept away by the powerful surf. Later we see the
mother bringing seaweed up to a flat area where the father is breaking
rock. All the soil has to be dug up from small crevices and mixed with
the seaweed in order for the inhabitants to grow potatoes or other food.
The father fixes a hole in the boat with tar. The boy, in one of the
film's most charming scenes, catches fish off a high cliff with a line
that he swings with expert facility. In the film's central sequence,
the men hunt a huge basking shark with harpoons, a process that takes
two days. They finally drag the dead shark up to a boiling pot where
its oil is extracted for use in their lanterns and heating. Finally,
a great storm threatens the life of the father and his mates at sea,
with waves crashing against the cliffs in spectacular fashion. The mother
and son rush to help them in, and the men finally make it to shore,
but the boat is destroyed.
There are some directors who possess a genius for making any subject
come alive. Flaherty's feeling for the human figure against a rugged
landscape, and his sense for just the right composition of elements
within the frame, is practically unerring. He knows that hard work takes
time, yet he manages to convey the time it takes to cart seaweed up
a cliff without our interest flagging for a moment. These are not the
kind of pretty pictures of nature you get in travelogues. Flaherty captures
the raw, bracing power of being out in the open, with the wind and the
water, and the desolate landscape of the island, with breathtaking skill.
What little dialogue there is in the film was obviously recorded later
(and I could barely comprehend what was said through the thick Irish
accents), but this doesn't matter a bit, and in fact contributes to
the film's rough-hewn quality. Different segments are introduced by
brief title cards, a wise strategy in keeping with Flaherty's background
in silent film, since a voice-over narration would have spoiled the
effect.
Although there is a narrative of sorts, the sheer beauty of nature
as captured by the camera is, in the final analysis, the film's reason
for being. The storm at sea is so awesome and immense that it becomes
a sort of hypnotic symbol of the incalculable force confronting the
Aran Islanders (and, by extension, us) in their struggle to survive.
But the visual poetry of Man of Aran transcends what the film
is ostensibly about, because Flaherty's interest is in the basic texture
of our experience, rather than what we might make of it intellectually.
This becomes problematic when we consider the film in terms of the
"documentary" tradition. First of all, the family depicted is not a
real family. Father, mother, and son were actual Aran Islanders, but
from different families, chosen by Flaherty for their photogenic and
expressive qualities. His intent was to represent an ideal rather than
record a mere fact. The shark hunt, however, is a different matter.
No one on the Islands had hunted sharks for over sixty years, but when
Flaherty saw one of the creatures he decided he had to film a shark
hunt, and that was that. This doesn't invalidate the sequence in terms
of its power as cinema, but it does highlight the difference between
Flaherty's ideas about nonfiction film, and the almost universal notions
held concerning the documentary form. We learn almost nothing about
the social life of the people, outside of their battle with the elements
-- no glimpse of the common life of the village, or any sense of their
economic dependence on absentee landlords. So the English critics, who
had a socialist point of view about documentary filmmaking, attacked
the film. Man of Aran was a financial success, but Flaherty caught
quite a bit of flak in the press for his unconventional methods. Seventy
years later, we can simply appreciate the film on its own terms, as
one of the most beautiful pictures of human survival in nature ever
made.
IL POSTO (Ermanno Olmi, 1961).
Domenico (Sandro Panzeri), a young man from a rural village outside
Milan, goes to the city to take an exam so that he can be hired by a
big company. He becomes infatuated with Antoinetta (Loredana Detto),
a young woman who is also taking the test. They both pass, but are assigned
to different departments in the company.
The picture, Olmi's second feature after an apprenticeship making industrial
documentaries, was produced for a ridiculously low sum, but you would
never guess that from watching it. From the first shot, with Domenico
furtively opening his eyes while pretending to still be asleep as his
mother comes into his bedroom, you feel that you're in the hands of
an utterly confident master. The camera placement and movement, the
expressive visual touches such as Domenico sitting way below the boss's
desk in his initial interview, and the performances by a cast of non-professional
actors, are all first rate. Olmi's intent is to create the feeling of
being at your first job, in a forbidding environment, and always looking
at others for clues as to how to behave. If you've ever experienced
something like that, the movie is immediately recognizable, moving,
and quietly funny.
The gawky Panseri, slender with a big head of hair, is wonderful as
the shy protagonist, conveying everything with his big expressive eyes.
The sequence when he and the beautiful Detto (who ended up marrying
the director) stroll about the city in between sessions of the test,
going to a coffee bar together, is very touching, with the unfeigned
quality of truth. Olmi shot everything on location, but there's nothing
rough about the style. This is how it must feel, I thought, to be in
Milan with a pretty girl on this particular day.
Behind the slice-of-life portrait of youth is a rather penetrating
satire on corporate life in postwar Italy, with the huge office building
composed of impersonal hallways and offices, and populated by lonely
eccentrics. At one point, the film breaks from Domenico's point of view
to show brief scenes from the private lives of the office workers introduced
in a previous scene. It's a bold narrative leap, and it works because
it expands our awareness of the hero's plight to include a possible
future in which he could find himself trapped.
The picture is most eloquent in the long sequence of a New Year's dance
put on by the company, in which Domenico experiences disappointment
mixed with a new sense of community. The film is committed not to what
"should be," but "what is," and so there's never a conflict between
sadness and acceptance, or love and a person's essential aloneness.
Most of all, it's a film about work, and the modern gap between what
we do for a living and who we are. It errs neither on the side of despair
nor optimism, but keeps its focus clearly on the human beings finding
their way through the bewildering maze of the urban office environment.
Il Posto is a modest, shimmering little gem, almost perfect in
its balance of empathy and observation. And Olmi is among the very few
directors who has continued to make vital, humanist films about work.
LAW OF DESIRE (Pedro Almodóvar, 1987).
Pablo (Eusebio Pancelo) is a popular and urbane young filmmaker who
feels lost after his lover Juan (Miguel Molina), moves away. Pablo's
transsexual sister Tina (Carmen Maura, who is magnificent) comes to
stay with him, along with the young daughter of her former lover, whom
she has adopted, and both are given parts in his adaptation of a Cocteau
play. Meanwhile, he picks up a hustler named Antonio (Antonio Banderas)
who becomes completely obsessed with Pablo, and jealous of his continued
attachment to Juan. Antonio's desire to possess Pablo ends up causing
pain for everyone.
Almodóvar's plots are never meant to be plausible. Instead,
he throws together certain kinds of characters and motifs into a pastiche
that dramatizes his emotional themes in various ways. Law of Desire
is arguably his most free-wheeling film in this regard. It combines
elements of comedy, erotic fiction, soap opera-style melodrama, and
suspense thriller-murder mystery genres into one big colorful jumble.
Although the story develops in ways that are clearly absurd (even employing
amnesia as a plot device), Almodóvar doesn't do this in order
to wink at us or otherwise make fun of narrative genres, but to depict
passion in its most heightened and extreme forms. Law of Desire
portrays the passion of gay love, and gay eroticism, with its attendant
conflicts and ambivalence, as a drama with its own kind of power and
significance. In this respect, the film represents a kind of breakthrough,
at a time when American films were only just beginning to have the courage
to make films about gays. At the same time, the picture is about the
fluidity of sexual roles, artistic creation, religious faith, family
conflict, and blocked feelings. All of this is treated in an off-hand
way, as stylistic flourishes rather than as formal thought, and this
is both an advantage and a disadvantage.
The film's theatrical quality is an advantage because we are entertained
by a performance that can go anywhere and reach unexpected places in
the process. One of the down sides, however, is that Law of Desire,
like all of Almodóvar's pictures, is so formally loose that it's
hard to be moved by the characters or their actions. The style is as
chaotic as the material. Nevertheless, there's a sense of daring and
freedom here that is liberating. The film is laugh-out-loud funny at
times (I loved the father-and-son police duo), yet it manages to insinuate
itself on a deeper level. Perhaps that's a key to understanding Almodovar
as a filmmaker: his superficiality is only apparent.
MY MAN GODFREY (Gregory La Cava, 1936).
A scatter-brained heiress (Carole Lombard) brings home a bum (William
Powell) as part of a high society scavenger hunt. She then hires him
as a butler for her crazy family (Eugene Pallett, Alice Brady, and Gail
Patrick), and falls in love with him. The butler, however, is not what
he seems.
Wacky, out-of-touch rich people were staples of the screwball comedy
genre, and here the idea is pushed to its glorious limits by La Cava
and co-screenwriters Morrie Ryskind and Eric Hatch. Pallette is the
blustering father, ignored by everyone; Brady a dithering idiot of a
mother. She has a pampered live-in guest played by Mischa Auer, who
in one scene jumps around the living room doing an ape impression. Lombard
is a wide-eyed child without a lick of sense, completely ruled by her
impulses. Although Patrick, as the older sister, plays the family villain,
her character seems like the only one with a grasp of reality.
Powell is thrust into the midst of this madness, and the comic charge
is born from his unflappable charm and dignity. We see this family through
his eyes, and his bemused detachment makes everything funnier. As an
actor, he was never more self-assured -- there's not a false move from
him in the picture. Lombard is so over-the-top that it's hard to imagine
her settling down with any man, but she's a joy to behold.
The film makes a half-hearted stab at social relevance, with Powell
representing an altruistic spirit towards the problem of unemployment,
in contrast to the spoiled selfish rich people. This culminates in an
ending so silly that, strangely enough, it fits in with the manic comedy
of the rest of the picture. La Cava brought in the stars on loan to
low-budget Universal, and it's certainly the best 1930s comedy from
that studio. Powell and Lombard had been married and divorced a few
years earlier. It doesn't seem to have affected their on-screen chemistry.
All in all, My Man Godfrey is one of the most satisfying and
free-spirited comedies ever.
©2004 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
