QUENTIN DURWARD (Richard Thorpe, 1955).
The medieval swashbuckler genre was fairly successful in the 1950s,
when a widescreen format and high production values could be employed
in its service. This film is an adaptation of a Walter Scott novel about
a 15th century Scottish nobleman who is sent to France by his uncle
to arrange a marriage for him with a young countess. He discovers that
she is being exploited in a deadly political fight between the King
of France and the sinister Duke of Burgundy, and of course the noble
hero comes to her rescue.
In the title role we have--a piece of wood. His name was Robert Taylor,
and no one went further in Hollywood on good looks and minimal talent.
We can be thankful that he doesn't try to do a Scottish accent--Durward
sounds like he stopped by the Middle Ages on a trip from Ohio--but the
film would have benefited from just a bit more animation in its leading
man. Everyone else in the picture tries to act up a storm, in various
kinds of English or pseudo-English accents, while Taylor lumbers through
the picture, a star system bull in the film's china shop.
This was clearly an attempt to repeat the success from three years before
of another Scott adaptation, Ivanhoe, also directed by Thorpe
and starring Taylor. The story and screenplay are not nearly as good
this time, and instead of Deborah Kerr and Elizabeth Taylor we have
Kay Kendall (Grace Kelly refused the part). On the other hand, Robert
Morley hams it up nicely as King Louis XI, a character both charming
and refreshingly amoral, and his scenes are the film's liveliest.
The costumes, the music, and the color photography are splendid, but
there is not enough action (a real sin in this genre), and what little
there is fails to impress very much. To be fair, Quentin Durward
is slick and entertaining in a low-expectations sort of way, and I can
imagine going to see it in '55 on a big screen and having an enjoyable
evening. Such productions were rather common in those days. MGM could
make an extravaganza like this with one hand tied behind its back, and
in this case it seems that it did.
MÉLIÈS THE MAGICIAN (2001).
This DVD, released by the indispensable Facets Video, provides an excellent
overview of one of cinema's greatest pioneers: Georges Méliès
(1861-1938).
The earliest filmmakers were inventors and businessmen, and the product
was made up, for the most part, of "actualities," filmed records
of real events. The novelty of motion pictures kept audiences entertained
for a while, but for the movies to make the leap into a truly popular
art, they needed a showman, and Méliès was the right man
at the right time. He was an actual illusionist, the stage manager of
the best magic theater in Paris. When he started filming in 1896, he
discovered the perfect film analogy for the magician's art: the trick
shot. By stopping the camera and then starting it again, he could make
things disappear, inanimate objects move, and many other delightful
illusions.
The DVD contains The Magic of Méliès (1997),
a documentary by Jacques Meny on the life and work of the director.
Comprehensive and detailed, it opened my eyes to the importance of this
man. He wrote, shot, designed, and directed close to a thousand films,
and acted in many of them as well. He was a powerful force in cinema
for a decade, with his films in high demand around the world, including
the United States. One of the most fascinating parts of the documentary
shows the workings of his studio in Montreuil-sous-Bois, more sophisticated
in its lighting and configuration than anything yet attempted. We are
also shown many clips from Méliès' films, and the DVD
allows one to click the menu to see the entire film instead of just
the excerpt, after which the viewer is returned to the documentary.
The second part of the DVD is Méliès' Magic Show,
a collection of fifteen Méliès films screened before an
audience at a Paris theater, and introduced by his granddaughter. After
watching his films, it becomes clear that Méliès' work
had a special style that could not be imitated. Although he stays within
the theatrical proscenium arch, the frame bustles with action, and the
visual tricks are meticulously done. One film shows Méliès
pulling his head off and throwing it onto a musical staff background
as one of the notes. Another head pops out of his neck, and that gets
thrown on the wall as a new note. And so on. A later work shows him
unpacking an infinite suitcase, from which he pulls furniture and throws
paintings against the wall, in a frantically paced use of backwards
filming. There are fairy tale films and historical pageants as well
as trick films. The director's showmanship makes almost all the films
engaging and entertaining, and the prints here are excellent.
The most famous of his movies, and justly so, is A Voyage to the
Moon (1902), loosely based on Jules Verne, in which a group of
astronomers are shot to the moon by a super-cannon. The picture has
a quaint, waggish humor, making fun of popular fantasies of space travel,
and demonstrating a flair and sense of delight not found in films by
other studios.
Méliès couldn't keep up with the rapid expansion of the
film industry after World War I, and he ended up losing everything in
the 1920s. In despair, he burned all his negatives--a terrible loss.
But some young movie lovers rediscovered his work, and managed to rescue
the surviving prints. He was honored at a 1929 gala in Paris, where
some of those films were shown again, to standing ovations. The
Magic of Méliès has done a similar service. By combining
a choice selection of his work with a fine documentary, it firmly secures
the place of Méliès in the cinema pantheon.
WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP (James Marsh, 1999).
Frontier life in 19th century America seems so far removed from the
way we live today that we can barely imagine it. We have filtered history
through popular culture, but the familiarity of the images from books
and films is deceptive, and Wisconsin Death Trip seeks to undermine
that familiarity and restore an essential strangeness to our history.
The movie is based on a 1973 book by Michael Lesey that presented actual
photographs and newspaper clippings from the small town of Black Falls,
Wisconsin, in the 1890s. The town suffered a streak of bizarre occurrences
during that time, including unexplained infant deaths, suicide, murder,
insanity, and a wmoan cocaine addict who couldn't stop herself from
throwing bricks through windows. The film skillfully combines the photos
with mostly silent black-and-white reenactments and a narration of the
newspaper clips by Ian Holm, whose restrained delivery lends the picture
a fine, sardonic air.
The weird events are fascinating in themselves, but the effect of the
film goes deeper. We are brought face-to-face with the ignorance, loneliness,
and inchoate desires of American rural life at the turn of the century.
In opposition to the image of courageous and God-fearing pioneers, we
are presented with a vision of America as a land of rootless immigrants,
haunted by fear, compulsion, and insidious hatreds.
Marsh makes the mistake of including color footage from the 20th century
Black Falls, in which residents talk about the town's heritage and speculate
about various strange things. The attempt to link the modern town with
its macabre past fails, and even comes off as faintly arrogant towards
the inhabitants and their mundane concerns. The film would have been
better confining itself to the 1890s.
I can't escape the impression that Wisconsin Death Trip is
a good movie that shouild have been a great one. Walsh isn't able to
take things to another level, to link the incidents together in a thread
that provides some significance, however dark it may be. In the end
we're left with just a tantalizing glimpse of an America that has been
repressed from the collective memory.
EARLY SUMMER (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951).
Ozu's interest in the quiet drama of family relationships never waned.
In this film, Setsuko Hara plays a 28-year-old woman named Noriko, whose
family, otherwise quite content, is impatient for her to find a husband.
Noriko and her girlfriend tease their married friends, and are teased
in turn about being single. The fact is, she is happy with the way things
are, and she's so nice that it's hard for anyone who knows her to disapprove,
but the matchmakers quietly get to work anyway. A 40-year old businessman,
an acquaintance of her boss, is mentioned as a possibility, and soon
the family has got their hopes and expectations up, spearheaded by Noriko's
brother, who pushes for an engagement. Everyone begins to assume that
a wedding is on, before Noriko has said a word. With marvelous economy,
Ozu shows how the best intentions of lovedones can become increasingly
intrusive.
The story unfolds with an ease and naturalness that is remarkable even
for Ozu. His trademark style is fully in evidence here--the floor level
shots, stationary camera, staying in a room after the people have left,
and so on. The pace is lighter and less ponderous than usual. We get
a vivid sense of the ordinary life in Japanese houses,
the perpective of daily routine parceled off in little squares, like
the shots of caged birds we see from time to time. The theme of generational
change is very subtle here--the contrast between the brother's hectic
routine with his wife and two kids, and the more contemplative behavior
of the parents, is evident but not overly pronounced. Hara's character
presents both aspects, combining a fun-loving modern attitude with a
kind of sweetness and fidelity. It is an essential part of the film's
beauty that we underestimate her at first, only gradually discovering,
and being surprised by, her complex motives and feelings.
Ozu has gained an undeserved reputation as an artist of overly rarefied
sensibility. But nothing could be more direct, earthy, and unpretentious
than the method of Early Summer. The picture seems almost spontaneously
graceful--only when the quietly building succession of detail finally
culminates in a heartrending emotional climax do we reflect on how painstaking
Ozu's construction of the film has been. The next film he made was Tokyo
Story, and Early Summer has ended up in that great work's
shadow. It is, however, a masterpiece in its own right.
LE BEAU SERGE (Claude Chabrol, 1958).
François (Jean-Claude Brialy), a young man suffering from TB,
returns to his small hometown to convalesce. He's been gone ten years,
and he discovers that his old friend Serge (Gérard Blain) has
become a self-pitying drunk and abusive husband, obsessing about the
stillborn death of his deformed first child. François wants to
help Serge, but his years in Paris have made it impossible for him to
comprehend the backward way of life in the provincial village, and the
townspeople look on him with mistrust and disdain.
The picture is famous for being the first feature-length production
by a member of the Cahiers du Cinéma group, the young critics
who ended up launching the "New Wave" of French film. It has
a raw, unstructured style that seemed very different at the time--except
for the ending, the movie defies dramatic conventions. The action proceeds
in a casual manner that feels almost indifferent, a mood that is fully
in keeping with the suffocating atmosphere of a little backwater town.
Other characters include Serge's suffering victim of a wife (Michèle
Méritz), her sexpot teenage sister (Bernadette Lafont) who tries
to escape boredom through cynicism and romantic intrigue, and a sinister
older man (Edmond Beauchamp) who has become Serge's drinking companion.
All of them take center stage at one point or another; all have their
own stories; and all try to conceal an underlying emptiness and despair.
Le Beau Serge was an auspicious debut. Chabrol makes certain
that François is not a hero, but a flawed, confused young man
whose moral superiority to his friend Serge is due more to circumstances
and experience than character. This is a remarkably clear-eyed and unsentimental
approach for a young director. The picture shows its director's youth
in less fortunate ways as well--the overwrought music, for instance,
is completely wrong for such an understated film, intruding at key moments
like a loud, unwelcome guest. The ending, for all its thematic significance,
seems clumsy compared to what has gone before, as if Chabrol felt the
need to resolve the story's intractable dilemmas in dramatic fashion,
abandoning the more distanced, and more interesting, approach of the
rest of the film. Still, the mood of Le Beau Serge stays with
me, gaining in power as the memory of its faults recedes.
©2006 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
