by ·1 Comment

JUDGE PRIEST (1934)

Something like John Ford’s 80th film, if IMDB can be trusted. Contemporary with L’Atalante and the silent Story of Floating Weeds. Set in 1890’s Kentucky – a couple decades past Civil War, which was still on everyone’s mind. And after all, the war wasn’t all that long ago… older audience members watching this film would’ve had parents who participated in it. Strange to think about now, a few more generations removed – my dad wasn’t born yet when this came out.

image

Humorist cowboy and populist philosopher Will Rogers plays the titular good-ol’-boy judge, and controversial sleepy-eyed black actor Stepin Fetchit is his sidekick. Priest is a former confederate soldier (“I kinda calmed down”) who is endlessly proud of Dixie, but respects the law and modern reality, or seems resigned to them anyway.

image

The judge’s nephew Jerome (Tom Brown) comes back to town and you can tell he’s supposed to end up with the neighbor girl Ellie May (Anita Louise) but he keeps ending up on dates with a dark-haired temptress instead (Rochelle Hudson, who voiced MGM cartoons and later appeared in Strait-Jacket and Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors). Of course they do end up together after wasting plenty of screen time we’d rather be spending with Will Rogers, but first there’s some problem about Ellie May not having a father.

Our generic romantic leads… everything else in the film is more interesting than these two:
image

Trouble starts in town when the mysterious new guy in town, a blacksmith (the Walter Matthau-looking David Landau of Horse Feathers) punches out Flem the barber for making a crack about Ellie May. He is to be tried in court before Judge Priest, but meddling, villainous-looking senator Horace Maydew points out that Priest was present at the incident and took the blacksmith’s side, so Priest agrees to step down and let someone else (Henry Walthall, in the movies since 1908, costarred in Birth of a Nation and London After Midnight) preside. Priest stays involved by offering to defend the blacksmith, finally, triumphantly revealing him to be an ex-con, a confederate war hero, AND Ellie May’s father.

image

I found less stirring emotion in the overlong “dixie”-soundtracked heartfelt courtroom ending than in a scene early on with the judge talking to a photo of his dead wife. He’s supposed to be a lonely man, but with the young lovers and the big trial, and with Priest’s jovial nature, Ford doesn’t dwell on that aspect too much… just gives us that one lovely scene providing Priest with a deep enough soul to last the rest of the film.

image

Otherwise things stay pretty light, and there’s plenty of worthwhile diversions like the outrageous performance of Stepin Fetchit, and Hattie McDaniel (as Priest’s maid) singing “the sun shines bright in my old kentucky home.”

Look far-left for Hattie:
image

Screenplay written by Atlantan Lamar Trotti (American Guerrilla in the Philippines) and Dudley Nichols (Man Hunt, Scarlet Street). Based on a series of books by Irvin Cobb, author of McTeague (Greed), who hosted the Oscars the following year (1935 – this wasn’t nominated). Will Rogers had hosted in ’33. Time was unkind to the lead actors… Rogers, Walthall, and Landau all died within two years of the film’s release.

Sneering villain Horace Maydew:
image

–
THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT (1953)

I’d thought this would be a remake of Judge Priest, but not exactly. Sure, at the beginning a young man comes home and starts romancing a young girl with a conspicuously missing parent, and sure Judge Priest (now played by Charles Winninger, the captain in Show Boat) is our central character and Stepin Fetchit (the same actor!) is his slow, slurred-voiced sidekick/servant, but things take a turn from there.

image

Priest is still a likable soul, but now he’s an alcoholic on the verge of losing his seat to slick Horace Maydew. Priest doesn’t seem like he runs this hick town anymore – he’s an increasingly irrelevant member of a rapidly growing city. He’s a wise and engaging character, but he’s no Will Rogers. And while the first movie showed us the judge’s loneliness at the start then cheered us up for the next hour, this one gives the judge a rocky start (waking up and yelling for his negro servant to bring him whiskey!), builds him up more and more, then fires off a devastating visual ending, the judge silently retreating into his house alone.

Horace Maydew isn’t as cartoonish a bad guy in this movie:
image

The twist this time: young Lucy Lee’s mom, a prostitute who left town so her daughter wouldn’t grow up in shame, returns home to die. Lucy Lee finds out about this, and about her grandfather, the solitary wealthy General Fairfield (James Kirkwood, a director in the silent era, and the farmer in A Corner In Wheat), a former confederate who has distanced himself from his past and won’t talk before the veterans group which Priest leads each week.

The judge and the general share a tender moment:
image

Before LL’s mom died she asked brothel madam Mallie Cramp (Eve March: the little girl’s teacher in Curse of the Cat People, Hepburn’s secretary in Adam’s Rib) to give her a proper funeral and burial and strong-willed Mallie would like to, but she’s met with resistance by the townsfolk, who of course support the brothel but bristle at the idea of those women having public lives or even deaths.

image

The rest of the plot is more complex than in Judge Priest. No big climactic court case, but a few overlapping issues. First, Priest is up for re-election and it’s a close race with Maydew (Milburn Stone, a detective in Pickup On South Street the same year), who paints Priest as old-fashioned and out-of-touch. Young lover Ashby (stiff, cliff-faced John Russell, the main bad dude in Rio Bravo) wins a whip-fight (!) with slimy rabble-rouser Buck Ramsey (Grant Withers, who killed himself a few years later) over Lucy Lee (Arleen Whelan of Young Mr. Lincoln), and Ramsey returns leading an angry mob hoping to lynch young black harmonica player U.S. Grant Woodford suspected of raping a girl out of town. Priest is already politicking around town, leading his confederate group, and dealing with the Lucy Lee situation when he decides to risk his life by blocking the lynch mob and risk his reputation by being the first to follow the prostitute funeral procession through the streets. Priest closes those matters out (U.S. Grant is proven innocent and released, actual rapist Buck is shot trying to escape, Lucy Lee reconnects with her grandfather) just in time to cast the decisive vote re-electing himself. In the end he’s a hero of the town, and everyone stops by his house to wave and sing praises… but he still goes home alone.

image

There were 30+ John Ford films between Judge Priest and this (including Rio Grande and The Quiet Man) and he had nearly 20 more left in him. This one, unlike the original, can definitely not be called a comedy. It has some comic relief though, in the form of drunken hick sharpshooter duo Francis Ford (his 32nd and final appearance in one of his brother’s films) and Slim Pickens (a decade before Dr. Strangelove and Major Dundee). I wanted to like the 30’s movie more, with its lighter tone and a Judge Priest character who is affable without having to humbly heal the whole town’s social wounds while saving a boy’s life, but I think the latter movie impressed me more deeply. No doubt they’re both excellent and make for a lovely double feature though.

image

Jonathan Rosenbaum:

Today The Sun Shines Bright is my favourite Ford film, and I suspect that part of what makes me love it as much as I do is that it’s the opposite of Gone with the Wind in almost every way, especially in relation to the power associated with stars and money. Although I’m also extremely fond of Judge Priest, a 1934 Ford film derived from some of the same Irvin S. Cobb stories, the fact that it has a big-time Hollywood star of the period, Will Rogers, is probably the greatest single difference, and even though I love both Rogers and his performance in Judge Priest, I love The Sun Shines Bright even more because of the greater intimacy and modesty of its own scale.

I should add that in between Judge Priest’s stopping of a lynching and his triumphant re-election brought about in part by the potential lynchers is the act that the Ford regards as his key act of moral and civil virtue – arguably far more important in certain ways, at least in this film’s terms, than his prevention of the lynching. I’m speaking, of course, of his joining a funeral procession for a fallen woman on election day, thereby fulfilling her dying request that she be given a proper burial in her own home town. Once Billy Priest joins this procession, he is followed by almost every other sympathetic member of the community, starting with the local bordello madam and her fellow prostitutes, and continuing with the commander of the Union veterans of the Civil War, the local blacksmith, the German-American who owns the department store, Amora Ratchitt (Jane Darwell), Lucy Lee, Ashby, Dr. Lake, and finally – after the procession arrives at its destination, a black church – General Fairfield, Lucy’s grandfather, who has up until now refused to recognised his daughter under any circumstances.

There are actually two protracted and highly ceremonial processions in the film, occurring quite close to one another – the funeral procession for Lucy Lee’s mother and the parade of tribute to Judge Priest – and the fact that these two remarkable sequences are allowed by Ford to take over the film as a whole is part of what’s so extraordinary about them. Retroactively one might even say that they almost blend together in our memory as a single procession – despite the fact that the first is an act of mourning and the second is an act of celebration – and this undoubtedly contributes to the feeling of pathos in the film in spite of its overdetermined happy ending.

Ultimately, what the film may be expressing is neither celebration nor lament, perhaps just simply affection for cantankerous individuals who exude a certain sweet pathos because history has somehow passed them by – as someone says in the film, I believe in reference to the Confederate veterans, ‘the doddering relics of a lost cause’, which also suggests The Southerner as Everyman. This implicitly suggests a certain darkness as well as lightness – which is why the local blacks serenade the judge with ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ the first line of which is, ‘The Sun Shines Bright’ – and yet this is a film bathed mainly in the melancholy of twilight. For to emphasise and focus on lost causes as opposed to causes that still might be won assumes a certain abstention from politics associated with defeatism – one reason among others, perhaps, why the Civil War plays such a central role in American history as well as in Ford’s work.

Someone can tell me if I’m out of line in quoting too heavily from this, but it’s so nice to see long, well-thought article devoted to an obscure classic film. If only EVERY film had as thorough a write-up on these internets. Maybe some day.

Our generic romantic leads. Once again, everything in the film is more interesting than these two, but this time Ford seems to realize it.
image

Merian C. Cooper’s name is on the title card – first time I’ve seen him mentioned in a non-King Kong context. I guess he exec-produced a bunch of John Ford movies. Shot by Archie Stout, who won an oscar the previous year for Ford’s The Quiet Man.

by ·Comments Off on Easy Living (1937, Mitchell Leisen)

Only written by Preston Sturges, but I have no problem calling this a Sturges movie, full of his witty dialogue and manic energy. Sturges, who I’d just accused of ignoring women in Christmas In July, writes a fantasy chick-flick here. Girl works hard at menial job, then out of nowhere she gets fanciness thrown at her and a hot rich guy falls for her.

God’s own Jean Arthur is the girl, cuter here than in You Can’t Take It With You (in which this movie’s stuffy rich guy Edward Arnold played an even stuffier rich guy). He tosses a mink coat out the window and it lands on her, setting into motion a rags-to-the-appearance-of-riches story a la The Million Pound Note. A young Ray Milland (minus his X-Ray Eyes, some years before The Major and the Minor), earnest son of the Edward Arnold, falls for her and Louie, a chef turned hotel owner (played by Luis Alberni, who would go back to being a chef in The Lady Eve), thinking she’s having an affair with Edward Arnold, gives her a free suite to attract other trendy, wealthy socialites. Pretty sure she ends up with Ray Milland.

Katy liked it, too.

by ·Comments Off on Alexander Nevsky (1938, Sergei Eisenstein)

This will sound awfully disrespectful, but you’d think the renowned master of montage Eisenstein, he who reinvented movie editing, could pick up the pace a little. This movie drags. Each shot has a wonderful composition, and each shot is held for a second or two too long. And to be more disrespectful still, I beg to differ with E. Von Mueller calling Prokofiev’s score the best in history. But maybe he’s kicking back at home with an LP of the full orchestral arrangement, not the weak bits on the film itself (Criterion essay on the director/composer collaboration calls the soundtrack on the film “like a chamber ensemble recorded over a telephone”). I’ve still got to hear the re-recorded score sometime. And I intended to… but after the movie and the DVD commentary, I didn’t feel like going through it a third time.

The bloodless battle on the ice wasn’t exactly choreographed by Sammo Hung… buncha overarmored guys clumsily smacking into each other with weapons. But I’ve made fun of the acclaimed classic film enough now. Composition-wise it is beyond reproach… some of the most amazing-looking shots of the 30’s. A beautiful movie and a swell piece of anti-German propaganda (which is why it was celebrated, then banned, then celebrated).

How you know the Germans are Bad Men: they toss naked babies into fire:
image

Russia is under Mongol rule, but this is mostly ignored. Nevsky kicked the asses of the Swedes or some other country previously, so he’s called on to protect Russia from the invading Germans, who have already conquered one major town and killed everyone in it, including babies. Meanwhile in another town, two tough guys are competing for the only pretty girl. She says she’ll marry whichever fights the most bravely. So off they go with Nevsky, the town armorer (who dies from being too generous, giving away his best armor and saving the leftovers for himself) and a hot warrior woman. Battle on the ice lasts some 30 minutes. Crowd scenes outdo most of your Braveheart / Lord of the Rings epic battles with lovely, artistic shots of actual masses of people (outdone later in Ivan The Terrible), but close-ups of battle are a little lame. After, one guy is dying, other guy generously tosses the pretty girl at him and goes after the hot warrior chick. The glory of Russia is restored (well, they’re still under Mongol rule) and Nevsky goes back to his humble fishing life, after issuing a stern warning to the Germans which is screamed across the screen in giant bold text!

Mr. Nevsky:
image

by ·Comments Off on Story of a Cheat (1936, Sacha Guitry)

A washed-up gambler (played by the writer/director) sits at a cafe recounting his life. We watch different episodes while he narrates. These episodes have no spoken dialogue except for this narration. So we are listening to Guitry talk for eighty straight minutes – no easy task.

Begins as a promising comedy. Our guy (“The Cheat”) steals from his mom, so isn’t allowed to eat the poison mushrooms that kill his entire family. Goes to live with an uncle, gets a job, this is when I start to realize that he’s never going to stop talking, and it gets less fun. It’s an okay movie, light, and funny at times, but seems nothing special.

Anyway, our cheat lives honestly and works hard after the mushroom incident, but seems to attract scoundrels. Eventually he embraces it and gets rich from cheating casinos – but one day his dealer is a guy who saved his life in WWI, and he takes it as a sign to stop cheating… but now he’s addicted to gambling, so he loses his fortune. Along the way he meets a woman who tries getting him to join her jewelry-robbing schemes, he marries a girl for tax purposes (it’s a business-only relationship, but years later he has sex with her in disguise, heh), he moves to Monte Carlo and becomes a croupier, and he tries to avoid an old woman (present-tense, in the cafe) who was his first fling back when he was an elevator operator.

I liked the opening credits best – filmed like one of those knowingly cheesy behind-the-scenes pieces from classic Hollywood, Guitry introduces all the major cast and crew on-camera. This is one of Guitry’s two most well-regarded films. I’m not gonna knock myself out to see the other (incidentally it’s Pearls of the Crown).

by ·Comments Off on A Story of Floating Weeds (1934, Yasujiro Ozu)

My first mid-30’s silent film. Chaplin’s Modern Times doesn’t count, and the Russian Happiness was two years earlier. Japan still had union narrators in theaters, so their cinema stayed silent longer than most.

Traveling actor Kihachi brings his troupe to the town where his ex-girl and illegitimate son live. K. has made himself scarce, sending money whenever he can, so the boy (Shinkichi, now 20) could grow up without the burden of a no-good father, and whenever Kihachi’s in town he stays with the mother and sees the boy.

Kihachi’s current woman in the troupe suspects something is up, finds out the story through bribery and sets up younger girl Otoki to go after the boss’s son. The two fall in love, and Kihachi tries to break it up, leading to the revelation that he is Shinkichi’s father. Meanwhile, constant rain means the troupe can’t perform, and finally they’re out of work long enough to have to sell off their stuff and break up. After an emotional climax, the young lovers stay behind, and Kihachi and his girl make up at the train station, heading off to form a new troupe.

Great movie, slow-building, ends up as emotional and true-feeling as the other Ozus I’ve seen. I ought to watch at least one per year. They are refreshing. Kihachi somehow stays sympathetic even though he hits everyone in the movie at some point. That’s just how he communicates, I suppose. Definitely different kinds of families here than in Tokyo Story or Equinox Flower.

This was something like Ozu’s thirtieth movie, and it’s said to be the beginning of his mature style. It’s an uncredited remake of Hollywood’s oscar-winning part-talkie The Barker from 1928, which was also remade twice in Hollywood (with Clara Bow in ’33 and Betty Grable in ’45).

Half these actors had been in Ozu’s Passing Fancy the year before. The kid had later roles in Kon Ichikawa and Seijun Suzuki movies, and his father appeared in Ozu’s own 1959 color remake Floating Weeds. Maybe Katy will watch that with me next year – Masters of Cinema’s N. Wrigley calls it the most beautiful Ozu film.

by ·Comments Off on Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir)

Katy wanted to close out 1930’s Month with something Great, an acknowledged classic, something she is supposed to have seen but hasn’t, so I picked the one-time Greatest Film of All Time, Rules of the Game.

An amazing looking film indeed, with some fabulous, intricate staging. Some character, actor and plot notes before I forget them yet again:

image

from left to right:
1 Andre the pilot (Roland Tautain, played “the sailor” in Lang’s Liliom) just completed some impressively long news-making flight in order to impress Christine.
2 Octave (Jean Renoir, in his final role as a film actor. He wouldn’t make another film in France until The Golden Coach 14 years later). Friend to all, father figure and wannabe-lover to Christine, a short-lived fantasy. He turns darker (along with everything else) towards the end, realizing he’s a comic figure leeching off his rich friends, goes off to make a belated attempt to be self-sufficient.
3 Robert (Marcel Dalio, had appeared in Renoir’s Grand Illusion and would later have smallish parts in films by Hawks, Fuller (China Gate), Huston and Wyler), very rich but insecure, likes noisy mechanical inventions, has a gorgeous wife in Christine but also a long-standing affair (which he is trying to break off) with Genevieve (Mila Parély, would play one of Belle’s selfish sisters in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast).
4 Austrian Christine (played by Austrian Nora Gregor, had been a star in the 20’s and 30’s, starring in Carl Dreyer’s Michael, killed herself ten years after Rules of the Game only having appeared in one movie since), a bit naive, thinks she belongs with Robert and that Andre is just a friend, until she catches Robert with Genevieve and it shakes her up.

image

Robert (right) with his “double”, Marceau the poacher (Julien Carette, my favorite actor in the group. He also appeared in the previous three Renoir films, later died from smoking in bed). Marceau wants respectability, gets hired by Robert as an indoor servant, but that doesn’t work out so well, goes off on his own at the end.

image

Christine again (left) with servant/friend Lisette (Paulette Dubost, was in Truffaut’s The Last Metro forty years later, also a couple by Max Ophuls in the 50’s), who is more devoted to Christine and her own position than she is to husband Edouard Schumacher (below). She’s Christine’s lower-class double, married to one man but wanting another.

image

Gaston Modot (Edouard) had been in films since 1909 and would keep it up till the 60’s, appearing in one of Renoir’s final films The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (and previously in Elena and Her Men, Grand Illusion and a couple others), also The Lovers and Children of Paradise. Even cooler, he played the main guy in L’Age d’Or. Edouard is jealous for his wife for good reason, since she’s happy to flirt with Marceau. He blasts through the house with his shotgun aiming for Marceau, later teams up with Marceau and aims for Octave, whom he suspects of hooking up with Lisette in the greenhouse. But due to costume changes he doesn’t realize it’s Andre with Christine in the greenhouse, and Edouard kills Andre.

–
Katy was disappointed, and disputes it being the greatest film of all time. Personally it’s only my third-favorite of the six Renoir films I’ve seen. I do love it, but I wonder about the best-film-ever label (recently surpassed by the new Batman on the all-time lists, actually), so let’s go to the DVD extras.

Ah, my old nemesis P.Bog reads the commentary, but it was written by Alexander Sesonske.

Renoir called it “a frivolous story” shot to avoid talking about the war… about “a rich, complex society where we are dancing on a volcano.”

Of André Jurieux’s radio speech in the opening scene: “His angry charge of disloyalty violates the rules of the game from the very start.”

Critics cried that Renoir cast an Austrian actress and a French jew to represent the French aristocracy.

“In a society of sharp class distinctions, Octave appears as a classless character.”

Plot shows two matched sets of husband/wife/lover/mistress and interceding friend:
1. Robert/Christine/Andre/Genevieve – Octave
2. Edouard/Lisette/Marceau/Christine(?) – and maybe Octave again.

Initially “The servants seem more sensitive to impropriety than their masters.”

“Those who know Renoir films may recognize a familiar figure, for Marceau is the incarnation of that nature god or pan figure who often graces those films from Tire-au-flanc in 1928 on. In a world where nothing is natural, it only appropriate that the nature god should appear as a little poacher in disguise and be pursued with deadly intent by a gamekeeper… But his influence remains the same. When he appears, erotic influences stir in human hearts. That these impulses are destructive rather than creative becomes one more Renoir comment on the corruption of this world.”

by ·Comments Off on Vampyr (1932, Carl Th. Dreyer)

I’m gonna get this out of the way:
“It’s like Kafka meets Lovecraft in Ingmar Bergman’s Nosferatu!”
Criterion can feel free to quote me on the upcoming blu-ray edition of Vampyr.

Not an official 1930’s Month selection since I watched it by myself while Katy was enjoying reality TV in the other room. I don’t have a hella lot to say about this movie other than it is a masterpiece of mood and weirdness, a slow, trippy phantom dream of a vampire flick. Love how three of my favorite movies are by Dreyer and those three are almost nothing alike.

Allan Gray, dreamer and occultist, drifts into town, gets a room, starts seeing weird things right away. Old guy comes in, gives Allan book on vampires, says “she must not die” then goes home and dies himself. “She” is probably one of his two daughters, Leone, who gets bitten. With help of the frozen-faced other daughter, blank-faced Allan goes off into the world of shadows… but unlike most movie heroes, he never actually does anything. The thankless house servant discovers that the lead vampire is a woman named Marguerite Chopin so he opens her tomb and stakes her, releasing the spirit of the dead father whose ghostly head scares the doctor’s henchman into falling down the stairs, while Allan himself is busy having out-of-body experiences while his body is carted off in a coffin. The death of the vampires fixes everything, Leone wakes up happy and Allan and Gisele stroll together into the sunlight as the doctor drowns in flour, trapped in the mill by the house servant. If that doesn’t all make sense, well, I don’t think a straightforward storyline was the point of this film.

an evil doctor drowning in flour:
image

Assorted gems from the Tony Rayns commentary:

What Vampyr has in common with Penelope: distributor shelved it for a year before release (Tony didn’t phrase it that way).

Main dude who played Allan Gray was no actor, but a fashion journalist, a rich baron who financed the movie. “I think Dreyer makes astute use of his blankness in this role.”

Allan Gray as a blank-faced corpse:
image

Allan Gray as a blank-faced ghost:
image

On the film’s style: “it’s full of disjunctions; it’s full of unorthodox editing, unorthodox framing and unorthodox cutting. None of it fits together in the way that one has come to expect classical storytelling in film to do… constant dislocations.” Has a lot to do with subjectivity, opening titles introduce Allan Grey as an occultist, a dreamer. Film came hard on the heels (eww) of L’Age d’Or and Blood of a Poet – indie weirdo films were briefly in fashion in Paris at the time.

At the nineteen minute mark – “etc., rendering indistinct and uncertain the offscreen spaces of the film,” he’s still going on about how weird a film it is. Like I know.

Lead vampire Marguerite Chopin talking with the Doctor (who may also be a vampire) around 19:30 is the first scene not directly witnessed by Allan Gray, but by an animated skull on the dresser. Hmmm. Allan himself is out with “the grave undigger and the world of shadows,” awesome.

Like The Passion of Joan of Arc, made up of many short shots, also many close-ups, but Joan was extremely planned, each detail carefully chosen, Vampyr by contrast is a very cluttered film, but every detail counts. Reading that again, I’m not sure that I see the difference he’s talking about.

Sybilla Schmitz (below) who plays daughter Leone (one of the only pro actors here) had a small part in Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl – her real-life story of morphine addiction was the prototype for Fassbinder’s story Veronika Voss.
image

Three choice quotes:

– “It’s almost like a Mike Leigh film in a sense in that people are passing cups of tea.”
– “It’s a kind of anti-Griffithian cross-cutting – but let’s not get too film-theoretical about this.”
– “He’s informing himself how to slay vampires. This, needless to say, is more than seven tenths of a century before Joss Whedon and Buffy. The modus operandi for slaying a vampire hasn’t changed all that much.”

Commentary mentions why Vampyr was a long-coming follow-up to Joan of Arc (legal/financial battles), but why was it over a decade before Dreyer’s next proper film, the hugely excellent Day of Wrath? Oh, IMDB says everyone hated Vampyr so he went back to being a journalist after that. Also there’s whole documentaries on the DVD so I should not blame the commentary for lack of stuff.

His spirit released, the old man’s head seeks vengeance:
image

Cast/crew photo. I think that’s Dreyer on the left with his hand up. Dig how Allan Grey stays in character, haha
image

Didn’t know that Pál “Lonesome” Fejös did a remake of Fantômas – it came out the same year as this and featured the actor who played the murdered master of the house in Vampyr (Maurice Schutz, below, also of Passion of Joan of Arc).
image

–
From the Casper Tybjerg doc/essay:

He pronounces it sorta like “Vam-pure”. I’d been wondering.

Dreyer: “I just wanted to make a film different from all other films”

All films shot on actual locations. Movie was shooting as early as April 1930.

Art director Hermann Warm also worked on Caligari, some early 20’s Murnau films, and Lang’s Destiny.

Two overtly Christian scenes were removed before the film’s release. And German censors had him tone down the staking scene and remove some shots from the drowning-in-flour scene – they’re restored in this documentary.

image

by ·1 Comment

Great comedy, funny, I loved the hell out of it. Katy liked too.

Ruggles (large-faced auteur Charles Laughton) is a butler for the Earl of Burnstead (Roland Young: Topper in Topper and Uriah Heep in David Copperfield). The Burnstead family and the Ruggles family have been in the same Earl/butler relationship for centuries. Along comes the American New Rich to shake things up: wild-west Egbert (Charlie Ruggles, still recognizable by his eyes over the thick mustache) and his haughty wife Effie, who win Ruggles in a card game and move him from Paris to Red Gap, Washington, USA. Egbert treats Ruggles as a buddy rather than a servant and keeps calling him “colonel”, so when they arrive in Red Gap, Ruggles is mistaken for an important guest in Egbert and Effie’s house, and Effie has to keep up the charade to avoid embarrassment. Ultimately there’s no escaping embarrassment for stuck-up Effie, and Ruggles takes advantage of the goodwill he’s acquired in town and the sense of freedom imbued by the American West to open his own (assumed successful) restaurant, cuddle (implied) with his sweetie (also implied) boot his rival out the building, and get publicly applauded at the end.

Ruggles is a great character. He’s not exactly the typical stuffy butler who gradually learns to relax – he seems from the start to have an inner life, and he adjusts relatively easily from selfless servant to personable entrepreneur. Overall much funnier class commentary than in The Rules of the Game, yet you don’t hear Cahiers du cinema all calling this the best film ever made. Based on a play and filmed a few other times, including a silent with E. Everett Horton as Ruggles, and in technicolor with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. McCarey directed this soon after a Marx bros. movie and before a Harold Lloyd movie. Appropriately, we watched it soon after a Marx bros. movie and before a Harold Lloyd movie (neither one by McCarey, sorry bud).

character Ruggles (left) with actor Ruggles (right):
image

Besides being a great director, Charles Laughton was in everything from Whale’s The Old Dark House to Kubrick’s Spartacus. Silent star turned successful comedy/drama character actress Zasu Pitts is Ruggles’ dark-haired love interest, and Leila Hyams (also a silent star, best known for playing the nice girl in Freaks) is a blonde singer, a hot young society gal. I wanna say that Lucien Littlefield (Scandal Sheet, The Bitter Tea of General Yen) played the asshole who tried to keep Ruggles down.

by ·1 Comment

Made in the middle of Capra’s streak of sincere, goodhearted dramas, a couple years before he ramped up for the war propaganda machine. I was excited to see this because I love Robbie Fulks’ song about loving Jean Arthur, but I didn’t end up loving the movie’s Jean Arthur more than I love the song Jean Arthur. Maybe Robbie was watching A Foreign Affair, or Shane, or a different Capra film.

A corporate-greed movie, pretty funny for a self-important serious-issues drama, but still feels a tad long and obvious. Jimmy Stewart is in love with his secretary Jean Arthur, but their parents disapprove. Jimmy’s very rich & proper dad owns the huge business of which Jimmy is vice-president, and Jean’s dad (Lionel Barrymore) is a giddy eccentric who lives in a house where everyone does whatever they please (which mostly means dancing and making fireworks). Ends up in jail, then in court, with Barrymore’s lifestyle on trial. Can the stuffy rich people learn to lighten up just a bit, and can the nutty eccentrics learn to conform just a bit, so that their star-crossed lover children can be happy? Of course!

Lionel Barrymore is swell as the good-hearted old commie, but better is Donald Meek as a formerly repressed corporate bookkeeper who goes to live in Barrymore’s house, gleefully inventing and exploding things. Also cool is Russian dance instructor Mischa Auer (seen almost twenty years later in my second-to-last screenshot in Mr. Arkadin) whose strict manner clashes comically with the rest of the Barrymore house.

Lionel Barrymore (right, of Tod Browning and Lubitsch movies, later in Duel in the Sun and Key Largo) shames Edward Arnold (left, in the movies since 1916, played Webster in The Devil and Daniel Webster)
image

Donald Meek is charmed by Lionel Barrymore:
image

Small-headed Mischa Auer with God’s Jean Arthur.
image