FEMALE (Michael Curtiz, 1933).
Ruth Chatterton plays an automobile tycoon, smart and ruthless, who
has a habit of inviting her male employees (the attractive ones) to
her house to help with some work, and then seducing them. But if this
gives them the idea that they can take liberties at work, they soon
find out otherwise. Along comes a genius inventor (George Brent, Chatterton's
real-life husband at the time), whom she hires to design a new car.
She likes him, but when she invites him over, he refuses to be seduced.
Made near the end of the pre-Code era, the film presents a fantasy
of female power, while at the same time coming down squarely in favor
of traditional male privelege. The underrated Chatterton is breezy and
fun and quite outrageous, barking orders at her underlings, and inhabiting
one of the most ridiculously nouveau riche homes ever seen on screen
- there's even a pipe organ built into one of the walls, so high up
that it's unclear how anyone can play it.
Then the script teaches her a lesson about how she needs to give up
her business so she can marry and have babies. This conflict between
the new working woman and the old idea of the happy housewife seems
to have been a neurotic obsession among Hollywood screenwriters. It's
pernicious nonsense, and not believable for a second, but the film is
too much of a bauble to get angry about.
Apparently, William Wellman shot most of the film, but Curtiz was given
credit because Jack Warner got into an argument with Wellman over his
contract. Wellman's vigorous style of movement is in evidence - combine
that with Chatterton's performance, and the picture is never boring.
Warner Brothers churned out movies like sausages in those days, but
it's worth noting that even a minor film like this, with its dumb sexual
politics, has an undeniable flair.
1860 (Alessandro Blasetti, 1933).
A Sicilian partisan fighter (Giuseppe Gulino) makes a perilous journey
to Genoa to enlist the help of the great Garibaldi in the fight against
the troops of the Bourbon king of Naples.
During the silent era, Italian cinema became famous for its lavish
historical epics. But the coming of sound presented new challenges.
Blasetti was in the vanguard of a new film movement that was more interested
in realism than in spectacle. In this film, he used non-professional
actors (speaking their local Sicilian dialect), shot on location (often
in the very spots where the historical events had taken place), and
employed a dynamic editing style that put all other Italian films of
the time to shame. The climax is the Battle of Caltafini, a sequence
that, by abstaining from the massive crowd effects that were common
in war movies, achieves a striking sense of power and immediacy.
To understand some of the details of the story, it helps to know at
least a little bit about the struggle for Italian unification and independence
in the 19th century. Italian audiences in 1933 knew perfectly well who
Garibaldi, Mazzini, and Victor Immanuel were, so the film's political
talk would be familiar to them. In any case, Blasetti's focus is on
the common people and their desire for freedom - the peasant fighters,
and the main character's fiercely loyal wife (Aida Bellia). We're never
even shown Garibaldi. Although the style is intimate, and the underplaying
of the actors gives the picture an authentic feeling, Blasetti's patriotic
concerns tend to turn the characters into social/historical types rather
than three-dimensional persons. Fortunately, the rhetoric is kept to
a minimum, and overall the film is graceful and admirably compact.
THE CHESS PLAYERS (Satyajt Ray, 1977).
In a kingdom of northern India in 1856, the British plot to dethrone
the ruler, whom they consider effete, and turn the land over to be ruled
by the East India Company. Meanwhile, two feckless Indian nobles, indifferent
both to the political crisis and their own personal responsibilities,
are addicted to playing chess.
This was Ray's first film to be shot in a language other than Bengali
(the dialogue is in Urdu, with the British characters speaking English),
and represents an attempt to reach a wider audience in India. It was
by far his most expensive film as well. Unfortunately it failed to get
decent distribution - the Bombay studios resented Ray's intrusion on
their turf - and didn't recoup its costs.
The dual narrative strategy (story and screenplay by novelist Munshi
Premchand) succeeds in blending tragedy and comedy without diluting
either strand. Sanjeev Kumar and Saaed Jeffrey are excellent in the
title roles - genial, oblivious fools whose obsession with the royal
game masks their deep insecurities. At one point, one of the men's wives,
jealous of his pastime, steals all the chess pieces, and the two embark
on an odyssey to find another set, with increasingly farcical consequences.
The comedy is, of course, tinged with irony. Through the theme of chess,
the film satirizes the Indian upper class's fatal indifference to the
calamity of British imperialism. While the two men while away their
time in games, the country is subject to a high stakes political game
that will affect thousands of people.
The parallel story portrays the power struggle between a stuffy Scottish
general (Richard Attenborough) and the king he aims to depose (Amjad
Khan). Attenborough does his best, but the scenes of the general talking
to his aide-to-campe, or musing over the difficult political issues
involved, feel awkward - the script is too expository, and it seems
as if the director is out of his element. The sequences at the court
of the king are better - the film shows how this pitiful ruler, powerless
against British might, manages to attain a kind of tragic dignity.
The Chess Players is an intelligent and interesting work, but
its elements don't completely mesh. The shifts between the two storylines
are sometimes too abrupt. The budget may have been large by Ray's standards,
but the color photography and production design aren't of high enough
quality to attain the necessary realism. Consequently, it doesn't have
the power of Ray's best films. But even a medium quality picture from
this great artist is worth seeing. Without simple formulas, or divisions
into heroes and villains, Satyajit Ray used the cinema to ask fundamental
questions about human nature and society.
THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY AND OTHER BIOGRAPH
SHORTS (D.W. Griffith)
Griffith's work with Biograph in the early years of the last century
were crucial in developing a grammar of film language. Although he didn't
invent the elements, such as cross-cutting and the close-up, that he
is famous for, his consistent, inventive use of these techniques for
the creation of interesting narratives advanced the art of film at a
rapid pace, influencing virtually every other filmmaker in the world.
The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) was the first gangster film.
Unusually complex for a one-reeler, the story concerns a poverty-stricken
young couple (Walter Miller and Lillian Gish) living in a New York tenement.
The husband earns some money, but is robbed on his way home by a gangster
(Elmer Booth). Later, the gangster notices the wife at a dance hall,
and gets in an argument over her with another gangster, which leads
to a shoot-out.
The street scenes, shot on location in New York, are rather gritty
for their time, providing a vivid glimpse of the crowded immigrant population.
The swaggering Booth has an intensity that reminded me of Jimmy Cagney.
We can see Griffith experimenting with the use of offscreen space, along
with his skillful handling of suspense. One striking scene has a group
of gangsters, led by Booth, creeping along a wall towards the camera,
until Booth's face peers right at us in a medium close-up. It helps
to have seen the stagey conventions of other films from that time to
appreciate little things like this that Griffith would do to make his
films more interesting.
The Kino video also includes several other Griffith shorts. The
Burglar's Dilemma (1912) features one of those contrived Victorian-style
plots that were constructed in order to point to a moral. A weak-natured
young man (Henry B. Walthall) believes that he has killed his brother
(Lionel Barrymore) in a fight. He decides to blame the crime on a burglar
(Robert Harron) who just happens to break in at the time. The Sunbeam
(1912) tells of a little girl who wanders out of her tenement room
after her mother dies, and helps create a bond between a bachelor (Dell
Henderson) and a spinster (Claire McDowell) who live across the hall
from each other. The mixture of sentimentality, humor, and morbidity
is very curious, but quite characteristic of Griffith. The Painted
Lady (1912) stars Blanche Sweet as a girl who is forbidden to wear
makeup by her repressive father, falls in love with a cad, and winds
up in a tragic predicament. Griffith, here and elsewhere, shows himself
distinctly opposed to the Puritan morality that seeks to stifle the
passionate emotions of young people. One is Business, the Other Crime
(1912) succinctly conveys its message through its title. Two couples
are married on the same day. One is rich, the other poor. The rich husband
(Edwin August) agrees to accept a bribe in return for his political
support of a business-friendly bill. The poor husband (Charles West)
can't find a job, and ends up making a desperate attempt to rob the
rich man's house. However simplistic the plot may be, the point about
crime and how it is perceived differently according to economic status,
is still relevant today. And the film's cross-cutting is among Griffith's
more natural uses of that technique. Death's Marathon (1912)
is a melodrama that covers some daring topics: marital abuse, gambling,
and suicide. Henry B. Walthall and Walter Miller play friends who are
suitors for the hand of Blanche Sweet. She marries Walthall, which turns
out to be a mistake, as he tires of her, becomes abusive, and spends
all their money at the casino, finally embezzling his friend's business
to feed his gambling addiction. The picture ends with one of Griffith's
trademark cross-cutting suspense sequences, with the wife on the phone
with her husband trying to talk him out of killing himself, while the
friend races to his rescue.
It's interesting to see how downbeat a lot of Griffith's stories were.
He wasn't afraid to have an unhappy ending sometimes, and apparently
audiences didn't mind either.
The final film in this compilation is one of Griffith's greatest and
most complex works, The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1914). By
this time he was developing longer stories (this one runs at about thirty
minutes), and this western tale anticipates the Griffith feature-length
epics that would soon revolutionize movies. Two young girls (Mae Marsh
plays the older one) arrive at a frontier town to live with their uncle
(Alfred Paget). They have two puppies with them, but the uncle won't
let them keep the puppies in the house, so they are kept outside. This
leads, by a series of events that can only be described as grotesque,
to a misunderstanding with the local Indians that leads to war. The
Indians attack the town, and there's a huge battle in which a mother
(Lillian Gish) becomes separated from her baby, and the final sequence
involves the settlers trapped in the uncle's house, surrounded by Indians,
holding out for the cavalry who are coming to the rescue.
Of course one has to look beyond the ugly stereotypes of the Indians
in order to appreciate the film's importance. This is not to excuse
the racist conventions of the western film, but one must realize that
this sort of thing was typical of the time, and not at all peculiar
to Griffith. Elderbush is remarkable for its multiple characters
and storylines, advanced production values, and the most sophisticated
use of cutting to create suspense that had been seen up until then.
Stories tended to take their time in those days, and were generally
satisfied with presenting one simple plot and one resolution. Here everything
is speeeded up, there are at least three climaxes that top one another,
and the cutting is a masterful demonstration of how to maintain several
narrative threads going at once without confusing the audiences or losing
steam. The only reason the picture might not seem as impressive today
is because later films (many of them by Griffith) improved on the techniques
that were showcased here. What makes motion pictures special is that
they move - this seemingly obvious truth took a long time to be realized.
The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, employing all the skills that
Griffith had built up in his Biograph shorts over the years, is a triumph
of movement, a spectacular acceleration of film art.
Kino recently combined this video with A
Corner in Wheat and Other Biograph Shorts, while including
additional short films from Griffith's early period, on a DVD called
Biograph Shorts. It's an indispensable item for anyone with an
interest in film history.
THE CONNECTION (Shirley Clarke, 1961).
A group of heroin addicts are waiting in a New York apartment for their
dealer to arrive, while a director attempts to make a film about them.
Jack Gelber's play had enjoyed a long off-Broadway run, in a production
by the Living Theater. Clarke, a director of documentaries, chose the
controversial story for her first feature film, using Living Theater
actors, and it caused a minor sensation, getting banned in several states
because it used the word "shit," while winning the Critics' Prize at
Cannes.
Everything takes place in one room, but Clarke's constantly moving
camera (with the regular and handheld cameras sometimes getting in each
other's sightlines) and acute spatial sense keeps the picture from being
static. The narrative device of having a director filming the junkies
pays off in a couple of ways. The tension between reality and the way
people stage their reality in front of a camera becomes one of the film's
themes, reflecting the addicts' alienation from themselves and society.
The junkies talk not only to each other, but to the filmmakers, and
sometimes directly to the camera. This immediacy implicates the audience
in the events (the junkies accuse the world of hypocrisy for condemning
them while essentially using their own kinds of drugs, such as alcohol,
sex, and power, to get off) and allows the actors to present themselves
in a way that combines naturalism with theatricality.
Best among the actors are Warren Finnerty as Leach, a pathetic, sarcastic
hipster who can never seem to get enough (his neurotic performance seems
like a precursor of Steve Buscemi); and Carl Lee as Cowboy, the cool,
contemptuous drug dealer. A few of the guys have their instruments on
hand so they can play jazz (which seems a bit of a stretch) - actually
it's Jackie McLean and his band. When Cowboy arrives, he brings a naive
old lady with him, a Christian street preacher they call Sister Salvation
(Barbara Winchester) and things start to get very weird, with the "director"
(William Redfield) finally agreeing to shoot some dope himself to see
what it's like.
The Connection has stood up well over time. The "beat" lingo
is not overdone, probably because the actors are familiar with it, so
it seems natural. Rather than presenting junkies as freaks to be gawked
at or pitied, the film places their despair and addiction in the wider
context of a world that is smothered in lies and facades. It's one of
those rare filmed plays that succeeds in conveying the power of the
source without distancing the viewer.
©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
