DAMES (Ray Enright, 1934).
The Warner Brothers musicals of the 1930s owed most of their success
to one man: dance director Busby Berkeley, whose lavish production numbers
became more and more surreal as the years went on. At this point, he
practically had a blank check from the studio to do whatever he wanted.
Add the consistently fine songwriting of Harry Warren, and you had a
recipe for success. Storylines were a mere set-up for the music and
dance, with competent studio directors like Enright moving the actors
through their paces. And as the years went by, the plots seemed to just
get sillier.
This one involves a millionaire moral crusader (Hugh Herbert--not at
all convincing as a prig) who wants to rid the world of filthy Broadway
musicals. His sister and her husband (Zasu Pitts and the inevitable
Guy Kibbee) hope to inherit the moralist's wealth, but their daughter
(Ruby Keeler) is secretly dancing in a show and going out with a disreputable
songwriter (Dick Powell) who is also a distant (and disowned) relation
of the millionaire. So of course the crusader needs to be fooled somehow
so that the lovebirds can sing and the show go on. Meanwhile the show's
star (Joan Blondell) puts Kibbee in a compromising position in order
to blackmail him into backing the production. And so on, and so forth.
Whenever the saucy Blondell is on screen, the picture brightens up.
Unfortunately, there's a whole lot of Powell and Keeler to sit through,
and the latter's simpering little voice and mannerisms are enough to
induce nausea. When we finally get to the show, however, Berkeley manages
to top anything he's done before. First there's a very interesting number
called "The Girl at the Ironing Board" with Blondell as a laundress
singing while ironing clothes, and the underwear and pajamas start to
swing and move about to the music. In contrast to the usual glamour-girl
approach, this production emphasizes ordinariness, and the combination
of this idea with Berkeley's fanciful puppetry is quite striking.
Then there's "I Only Have Eyes For You"--a beautiful song and an incredibly
elaborate sequence in which chorus girls wear Ruby Keeler masks and
at one point combine with signs to to create a huge likeness of Keeler's
face. It goes on and on, and I have to say that the bizarre duplication
of Keeler's image seems kind of creepy, but Berkeley had never before
tried something so visually complex, and it is spectacular. The finale
is "Dames," and here the routine, with girls creating geometric designs
and kaleidoscope-type movements for Berkeley's trademark overhead camera,
comes close to pure visual abstraction.
One needs to have at least tolerance, if not love, for the most extreme
levels of kitsch in order to enjoy a movie like this. I found myself
alternately repelled and delighted. Because of the weak story, I would
place the movie third in preference behind 42nd
Street and Footlight
Parade, but solely in terms of Berkeley's peculiar vision,
Dames is about as good as it gets.
BAY OF ANGELS (Jacques Demy, 1963).
Jean (Claude Mann), a young man who works as a bank clerk, is invited
to the casino by a friend and promptly wins big at roulette. Believing
that he's developed a fool-proof method of winning, he gives up his
boring, dependable existence living with his parents, and travels to
Nice where he meets Jackie (Jeanne Moreau), a divorcee and inveterate
gambler losing big at the tables until she plays Jean's numbers and
starts to win again.
Moreau, dressed in white with platinum blonde hair, is perfection--her
character is an impulsive fatalist, a mixture of romance and world-weariness,
living only in the moment, her moods quickly rising and falling along
with her luck. The young man is infatuated with her and begins to lose
his winning ways in his efforts to please her. Her motives seem less
noble--Jean is her lucky charm, and when the luck runs out she is ready
to run.
From the time the couple first meet, the entire story, which includes
an unlucky trip to Monte Carlo, seems to take place in just a few days.
Demy finds the right tone--not too light or too heavy, the film is kind
to its characters without idealizing them. The black-and-white widescreen
compositions are beautiful and precise (Jean Rabier shot the picture),
and there's a real sense here of the rarefied atmosphere of the old
wealth casinos. The reliance on luck, with all the hunches and superstitions
it involves, is portrayed here as a kind of world view, an attitude
towards life that turns out to be founded on despair. But to Demy's
credit (and the film's benefit) we are allowed the hope of a way out,
a chance for redemption even for Moreau's seductive and amoral Jackie.
NO FEAR, NO DIE (Claire Denis, 1990).
Two Africans make a deal with a corrupt French businessman to smuggle
roosters into France for illegal cockfights. Jocelyn (Alex Descas),
quiet and intense, trains the birds to fight. Dah (Isaach De Bankolé)
handles the business dealings with the club owner Ardennes (Jean-Claude
Brialy) who, as it turns out, had some sort of affair with Jocelyn's
mother. The birds are concealed in the restaurant's basement while Jocelyn
puts them through the rigorous training that will turn them into fighters.
Gradually, Jocelyn begins to become hostile to the brutalities of the
cockfight business, especially when Ardennes decides to put deadly metal
spurs on the birds' claws to increase interest. Dah struggles to keep
things together, but then Jocelyn appears to fall under the spell of
Ardennes' current lover, the beautiful Toni (Solveig Dommartin).
The unfolding of this unusual tale is not as clear as my exposition
would make it seem. Denis prefers to drop us into the middle of this
harsh world and let us find our own bearings. The handheld camera and
jumpy editing style create a mood of claustrophobia. We experience everything
from the point of view of the immigrants, with all the fear, uncertainty,
and build-up of tension that goes with their subservient status and
the criminal environment. Their situation is similar to that of the
roosters--powerless, trained in hostility and aggression, useful only
for the whims and purposes of others.
The two central performances are brilliantly contrasted. Bankolé,
who played the servant in Denis' first film, Chocolat, is angry
and more visibly emotional. His narration anchors the film. Descas is
meditative, withholding, almost eerily focused. His breakdown, the film's
central drama, is heartrending. This is a dark film, a bit rough around
the edges, but its willingness to examine the connections between violence
and ambition in the male world of the story makes it a bracing and memorable
experience.
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1940).
A brash young reporter (Joel McCrea) is sent to Europe on the eve of
war to provide a fresh perspective for American readers. He hooks up
with a peace organization in Holland, run by the urbane Mr. Fisher (Herbert
Marshall), and falls in love with Fisher's daughter (Laraine Day). When
the reporter witnesses the assassination of a Dutch diplomat who was
central to the cause of peace, he ends up on the trail of a mysterious
organization of spies.
It's easy to forget that the thriller genre didn't get very much respect
until Hitchcock came around. He brought style and dedication to the
form, and this particular example, done on loan from Selznick to Walter
Wanger, is one of the smoothest and most entertaining films of the 1940s.
There are two great set pieces. The assassination scene, in which a
man shoots the diplomat during a downpour, then escapes through a sea
of umbrellas, is a complex masterwork of editing. It's soon followed
by a sequence in a windmill (Hitchcock of course had a fondness for
staging scenes in such iconic structures) where McCrea manages to slink
through the building while escaping the spies' notice, the moving camera
providing a perfect sense of the spatial relationships in the windmill.
What was already a stock situation (good guy hides within earshot of
bad guys) is transformed into pure visual pleasure and excitement.
One of the more curious aspects of this film is the character played
by George Sanders, a suave and witty English reporter who happens to
be a friend of Fisher's daughter as well, and helps the American reporter
solve the mystery. Sanders is great--in fact, he's so great that he
becomes the film's hero, playing the key role of daredevil rescuer in
the film's finale, rather than the star McCrea, as Hollywood convention
would dictate. Did Hitchcock and his screenwriter Charles Bennett, both
expatriate Brits, elevate the English character's role as some kind
of tribute to the mother country, which was under violent siege at the
time of filming? I don't know, but it's certainly odd--not that it spoils
the fun in any way. Foreign Correspondent ends with a bit of
uplifting propaganda, McCrea broadcasting a warning to the rest of the
world, and this is perfectly understandable. But its value as entertainment
outweighs its political significance, then and now.
THE CITADEL (King Vidor, 1938).
Andrew Manson (Robert Donat), an idealistic young doctor, struggles
against a tradition of ignorance and neglect in a Welsh mining village.
He meets and marries a schoolteacher (Rosalind Russell) and gets into
hot water with the authorities for claiming that the miners' respiratory
illnesses are caused by unhealthy work conditions. After moving to London,
Manson succumbs to the allure of wealth held out by an old friend (Rex
Harrison) who makes a killing by treating rich hypochondriacs. It takes
a personal crisis to wake him from his complacency.
The picture's first half is lively and full of little touches in character
and setting that are typical of Vidor's conscientious style. There is
an occasional broad stroke--we're asked to believe that Russell's character
would agree to marriage to a virtual stranger on a moment's notice,
but this isn't so unusual in romantic dramas of the time. The young
Ralph Richardson, very funny and engaging, is on hand as an opinionated
fellow doctor, and the feeling for working class life and manners is
rather vivid. I settled in for a good drama about the struggle for sound
medical practice in a mining community.
Unfortunately, the film goes downhill once the married couple leaves
Wales for London. Character devolves into stereotype. The film's moral
lesson, that idealism and dedication to a cause is more important than
money, is slammed over the audience's head repeatedly as if we were
too stupid to follow the drift. The main problem is that Manson's change
is too sudden and too total to be at all believable. The wonderful and
hard-working doctor of the first half becomes a vain, bored and insensitive
money-grubber in no time at all. And Donat just doesn't convince as
a corrupt person.
For the story to work, the characterization would need to be much more
subtle. If we could still see the doctor's kindness and decency, and
if he could retain some of his previous thoughtfulness, we would better
understand the softening of his principles by money. A man's inclination
to greater ease and comfort needn't be a drastic change in his nature,
only enough of a change to spoil a great man's potential. But The
Citadel takes the simpler melodramatic route, where everything is
black and white and easily explained, and in the process it becomes
a much lesser film than it could have been--preachy, plodding, and hollow.
Donat's energy provides a few sparks, but not enough. Russell is wasted
in what is essentially a standard supportive wife role. This was a prestige
picture for Metro, and it was nominated for several Oscars. It seems
that prestige often requires a certain level of mediocrity: The Citadel
is better than many of its day, but it's not nearly as good as it should
have been.
©2005 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
