Fury

[This is a contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir), the second Film Preservation Blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. The blogathon has been organized for the benefit of the Film Noir Foundation, who do important work to restore and preserve the noir heritage. Please consider donating to the Foundation during this week. The blogathon will run from February 14-21, and during this time I'll be posting about some noirs to raise awareness of the blogathon and its worthy cause. The 1936 film I'm writing about today is based on the same story that later provided the impetus for Cy Endfield's 1950 The Sound of Fury, which is the film that is targeted for preservation by this particular blogathon.]

Fritz Lang's Fury is a harrowing film with a preachy but important message at its core. It was Lang's first Hollywood film, and it is obvious that he wanted his American debut to be a film that meant something, a film that, in a way, sent a message about what Lang saw as distinctively American values and vices. It's thus a film about justice and injustice, about goodness and corruption, about the loss of faith in the ideals upon which American democracy is built. Early on, in a scene in a barber shop, the customers discuss the American Constitution, with one right-wing man advocating for laws restricting the freedom of speech, suppressing those who say things that he disagrees with. The barber, an immigrant, speaks up, saying that the other man should read the Constitution, that such ideas run counter to the foundation of the country — he's read the Constitution, he says, because he had to in order to become a citizen, while those who are born here seldom bother. This seems like Lang's assertion of his own foreign perspective, his statement that, as an outsider, he's pointing out both what's best in this country and what threatens to destroy those great ideals, those noble concepts.

The film's central character, the ordinary working class guy Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy), suffers the loss of faith in these ideals over the course of this film. When the film opens, he's planning to marry his sweetheart Katherine (Sylvia Sidney), although the happy couple are first forced to spend a year apart in order to save up enough money to get married. Joe's an honest, upright man, a man who tries to pass his values and ideals on to his two brothers, Charlie (Frank Albertson) and Tom (George Walcott). Charlie's caught up in some dishonest activities, running around with a mob outfit, and in many other noirs this would provide the central conflict: one can see Joe getting pulled into Charlie's criminal world, drawn by greed, forced to sacrifice his goodness and his honesty in the pursuit of enough money to reunite him with his woman. Instead, Joe pulls Charlie up into the light, convincing his brother that this flirtation with lawlessness is misguided. Lang intentionally inserts the gangster movie references as a red herring, a hint at a different kind of movie, and Joe's casual rejection of those clichés establishes him as seemingly incorruptible, unshakable in his faith and righteousness. So many noir antiheroes spiralled to their doom through this kind of temptation, but Joe is not swayed — and he spirals to his doom anyway.

Joe's sense of faith in goodness — the idea that a good life is its own reward — is eventually shattered, in the most dramatic way. The film's centerpiece is a jaw-dropping, heart-squeezing sequence of wrongful imprisonment and tragedy, as anxiety-inducing as any of Hitchcock's nightmarish "wrong man" scenarios. Joe gets mistakenly identified as being involved in a prominent kidnapping case, gets put into a small town jail, and while he's waiting for his innocence to be proven, he finds that the townspeople don't want to wait, that they want swift, brutal punishment for the man they believe to be a kidnapper. Lang's exaggerated vision of small town gossips and petty rabble-rousers transforming into a bloodthirsty lynch mob is patently artificial and stylized, but it's no less affecting for its contrivances. What matters is the impression that the institutions of civilization and democracy are horribly fragile, that at any moment the veneer of decency and justice can be peeled away, replaced by a mob mentality that overruns all of the values usually upheld in this country — or in any other country; after all, Lang had just left Germany in the early years of the Nazi government. What's striking about these sequences is that even in this nightmare vision of society run amok, Lang doesn't present the onset of hysteria and violence as inevitable: a few voices of reason do speak up and sway the crowd back from the brink, only to be overpowered again by other, less reasonable voices. And it's telling that the voice that finally does push the crowd fully over the edge is the voice of a strikebreaker, a man who'd just come from violently suppressing workers in a nearby town, and who now advocated similarly violent and horrible action in this town.


In the scene where the lynch mob starts gathering, pouring out into the streets towards the jail, a black man is nearly pushed aside by the swinging doors of a bar as the angry crowd races out. The man leaps up onto a table, hiding in the corner, out of the path of the enraged townspeople, and he remains in the back of the frame as the crowd rushes by. It's obvious that Lang is giving a little nod to this story's real subtext, to the real injustice that his film is, at root, really about. "Lynching" is a loaded word, a word with a real racial subtext to it in American history, and there's no escaping the obvious fact that all of this film's bold courtroom speeches about the prominence of lynchings in America are directed primarily at the lynchings of black men by white mobs. The film is, like many Hollywood films of the era, in code — it's quite possible that a film about a black man being lynched would have been impossible to make, and the enactment of a lynching story with a white innocent standing in for a black one allows Lang to make his observations about justice, revenge and the hatred and evil that can be so easily stirred up from petty motivations in otherwise normal people.

The lynching itself — the burning of the jail, with Joe inside, looking on in horror as law and order fall apart outside — is one of the most absolutely horrifying and sad sequences in cinema. Its impact is like slamming into a brick wall, as the fearsome, raw emotions of this sequence are unlike anything else in the film to that point. When Katherine arrives just in time to see the building engulfed in flames, with Joe at a barred window screaming, Lang holds a closeup on her stunned, horrified face, her eyes wide and glossy with tears, her mouth trembling open to murmur denials, as though she could wish away what she's seeing. These closeups are devastating, as is the hushed silence of the crowd as they watch the jail burn, stoically admiring the results of their actions, with Katherine's grief lost amidst the crowd, singled out only by Lang, who alternates closeups of Katherine with Joe at his barred window, even though the latter doesn't see his would-be bride and her horror.

The film's second half, after this pivotal event, chronicles the disruption of the American dream by this kind of hatred and violence. It is, inevitably, somewhat preachy and didactic, with plenty of courtroom speeches and showboating by the unnamed district attorney (Walter Abel), who often comes across as smug even though he's technically on the side of good. Compared to the bracing, darkly beautiful quality of Lang's images of the imprisonment and fire, it's of course a letdown when the film shifts almost entirely to courtroom theatrics, but the film's hammering sloganeering clearly comes from a place of real feeling. As a result, the film remains passionate and engrossing even when the courtroom scenes kill the momentum of the story. This is a fascinating film, a rumination on the justice system and the concept of revenge, but even when it threatens to become a wordy tract on these subjects, the film's strong emotional foundation prevents the speeches from overwhelming the characters.

La nuit du carrefour

Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour is a rough, gritty film noir, set, as its title suggests, in a seeming perpetual night at a sleepy rural crossroads, a small settlement with just three houses and a gas station. This way station is always bathed in fog, isolated in the middle of the looming woods, where mysterious figures skulk through the dark on strange errands. A man shows up dead here, a jeweler, his body left in a stolen car in the garage of the Dutch immigrant Andersen (Georges Koudria), who insists that he's innocent. The French police suspect otherwise, but have nothing to prove it, and so they send the wily inspector Maigret (Renoir's brother Pierre) to investigate. Maigret is a great cinema detective in the traditional mold, clever and intelligent, able to piece together the facts from minimal evidence, observing every small detail and making deductions in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. In trying to make sense of this crime, he's confronted with no lack of suspects, but rather too many: Andersen's seductive sister Else (Winna Winifried), a true femme fatale; the gas station owner Oscar (Dignimont); Jojo (Michel Duran), the gas station attendant who flirts with Oscar's wife when no one (except the audience) is looking; the bourgeois Michonnet (Jean Gehret). All these people act suspiciously, creeping around, dropping knowing comments; they all seem to have some secret, to be willfully drawing suspicion to themselves, wandering through the foggy nights with guns, poisoning bottles of beer, smuggling contraband. Maigret seems to have stumbled into a confluence of odd events and shady characters.

Renoir builds this atmosphere brilliantly. His storytelling is extremely elliptical, marked by diversions that give the editing an abrupt, choppy rhythm (and it doesn't help that one reel of the film was lost outright, though such accidents seem appropriate for a film that already must have been especially loose and rough). When Andersen is first brought in for questioning, Renoir cuts away periodically to a curb-level shot of a local newsstand, capturing the passage of time through the transition from early edition to afternoon edition to evening edition to the evening paper getting swept away the next morning. Later, he frequently cuts away to some seemingly random event, some of the area's residents doing some inscrutable action, acting strangely. The night, and the fog hanging low over the tree-lined dirt roads, also serve as punctuation. At one point, in one of the most surreal interjections, Else is seen lying in her room, lazily smoking a cigarette, as a turtle crawls slowly along the bed next to her; it's baffling but evocative. The missing reel can only explain so much; at some point it becomes obvious that Renoir just doesn't seem especially concerned with narrative clarity. It's seldom clear who's shooting at whom until the obligatory parlor scene at the end, when the detective explains the film's events with such coherence and detail that one wonders how he managed to get all that out of this strange string of events.

That's part of the fun, of course, and Pierre Renoir plays the inspector with such charm and wit that his investigation, elliptical and aimless as it is, is seldom anything but entertaining to watch. Maigret always seems to have a little smirk on his lips, even when they're wrapped around a pipe. He's ahead of everyone else, and he knows it very well. Renoir lets the audience in on his deductions by drawing attention to the relevant objects at precisely the moment that Maigret notices them: a box of cigarettes that should be too expensive for its owner to afford regularly, a spare tire that doesn't match the truck that takes it. But the mystery isn't the point here. Instead, it's Renoir's power of observation that's being showcased. He's as interested in the details that reveal something about human behavior as the ones that reveal something about the mystery. This milieu is wonderfully detailed, with so much activity always going on in the fringes. It's rare that Renoir puts some action in the foreground and nothing else. The frame is always bustling, packed with nuances, like the way that, when Maigret calls the police station, the workers at the gas station go about their business all around him, while his boss at the station is surrounded by cleaning people going about their business behind him. Renoir's compositions are striking but somehow don't seem staged. There's messiness and imprecision in the way that he contrasts foreground and background, sometimes making the focus of the shot something other than what one would expect. When Maigret meets Else for the first time, the inspector and the Andersens are all in the blurry, out-of-focus background of the shot, while in the foreground, in crisp focus, a pile of furniture partially obscures the introduction. Renoir has this feel for making what might be considered "wrong" seem right: it feels real and unscripted, a casual introduction that will soon acquire a more pointed, artificial feel as Else begins her kittenish seduction of the inspector.


This is a film where setting and geography are very important. The crossroads, this small locale with a limited set of characters and places, is the site of most of the film's actions, and the denouement depends on the movement of characters between the area's three houses and the gas station. Earlier, the inspector's first visit to the Andersens' home is marked by his methodical examination of the drawing room, walking around the space as Else watches and describes some of the objects he sees; he stops by a music box, a record player, a box of cigarettes on the mantel, a tub of water in the next room. Renoir's camera motion and editing give the sequence the feel of an arc, tracing a curved line as the inspector circles the young woman, using the room and its objects to gauge her.

Else, of course, turns out to be crucial to the plot. She's a femme fatale in the classic sense, a treacherous woman with a dark past, and she's characterized as using sex to get her way. She tries it with the inspector, too, and nearly succeeds, and Renoir's presentation of her makes her so irresistible that it's not hard to see why: the light glistens off the buttons on her shirt, making her arms sparkle, and her bare leg, with a high stocking, is constantly creeping out into the open through the slit up the side of her dress. In the true noir tradition, she's the cause of all the problems for the men, trapping and corrupting men through her sexuality; the denouement is cleverly ambiguous, too, about whether she's really reformed in the end or not, as the inspector pushes her off in the right direction but not before her sly smile and instinctively sexy posture suggest that she's still got other ideas. It's typically sexist, to the extent that the femme fatale archetype is always about the dangerousness of female sexuality, but at the same time Else is such a compelling example of the form that she makes such concerns moot. Despite her few moments of weepy contrition, she enjoys being dangerous and destructive, and we enjoy watching her.

What's most refreshing about the film, though, is that Renoir approaches it all with such a wryly comic sensibility. Not that he doesn't take the mystery seriously, but that he's observing these noirish twists and turns with a slightly detached sense of irony. This comedic perspective is apparent in Maigret's slightly bumbling assistant Lucas (Georges Térof), who at one point has an entirely mimed and very funny interplay with Else when he believes that Andersen has poisoned a pot of tea; nothing is said, and the moment isn't emphasized, but is instead allowed to play out entirely in gestures in an offhand way. Later, a doctor (Max Dalban) shows up and keeps repeating the same laconic phrase ("Where is the patient?") over and over again to anyone who will listen, with the same drawling and intrinsically funny voice, and encounters only brush-offs and insults despite the fact that a man is badly wounded somewhere. Renoir also delights in the sarcastic, standoffish Jojo, who radiates thuggish charm and in free moments pinches the bottom of his boss' wife. These people may all turn out to be criminals and murderers of various stripes, but Renoir has some low-key affection for them too, mingled with satirical mockery. This film is smart, silly, funny, and exciting in roughly equal measures, using a mysterious murder and its aftermath as a way of closely examining this societal microcosm, pulling apart the seams to observe what's underneath.

I Was Born, But...

I Was Born, But... is an utterly charming, hilarious silent comedy of childhood by Yasujiro Ozu, displaying the lighter, more playful side of his sensibility. The film concerns itself almost exclusively with the child's point of view, focusing on the perspective of young brothers Keiji (Tomio Aoki) and Ryoichi (Hideo Sugawara). The boys have just moved to a new town with their father (Tatsuo Saito) and mother (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), since their father has moved to the suburbs so as to be closer to his boss. The film's genius is the way Ozu keeps unceremoniously cutting away from the film's adult dramas — the father's desire to advance at work and make a good impression on his boss — to follow the kids instead. It's like there are two entirely separate worlds coexisting here. When the father goes to visit his boss on the weekend early in the film, Ozu watches just long enough to establish that he's doing a little sucking up, looking obviously subservient with his stained jacket and nervous mannerisms, and then the camera chases off after the boss' son Taro (Seiichi Kato) as he runs away with some friends to go bully the new boys.

These scenes have an exuberance and energy that's nearly irresistible, as Ozu traces the way that small dramas can be of big consequence in a child's world. Keiji and Ryoichi must adjust to their new home, to new challenges from a bully and the gang he leads. They are dogged, too, by their father's insistence that they do well in school, even though they don't even want to go because of the bullies there. When asked if they like school, the boys immediately respond, "we like the walk there and the walk home, but in between is no fun." There's a real sharp wit in this film, a sense of pitch-perfect comic timing that's as present in the physical comedy as it is in the sporadic dialogue provided by the titles. When the bullies confront the two boys, it's staged like a dance, with each side stepping forward a little bit at a time, hesitantly posturing for one another, the leader gliding forward and the others behind him nervously inching up to support him or at least to see what's going on.

Ozu has great fun with all these scenes, enjoying the kids' mugging and goofing around, the way they make faces and stand on one foot, try to find sparrows' eggs because they think it'll make them stronger, and play a funny game of raising the dead, gesturing to make a kid fall to the floor, then crossing themselves and holding their hands out to bring him back to "life." There are plenty of wonderful comic set pieces and characters, like the beer delivery boy (Shoichi Kofujita) who teases the boys by pretending he'll forge a good grade on their faked homework assignment, then drawing a backwards character instead. Later, the boys convince the delivery boy to help them beat up the bully who's bothering them, because they tip him off when their mother wants to buy beer. Helping him get a sale earns the boys his temporary loyalty, but it's not enough to get him to also take on Taro: as he explains, Taro's family buys much more than Keiji and Ryoichi's family. This is a first indication, though the boys don't understand it at the time, of the concept of social status and hierarchies.

Their understanding of hierarchies is limited to the idea of who can beat up whom, of who's bigger and stronger, who's tougher. They don't get that the adult world has different priorities, that money and class dictate the separations and relationships between people once they grow up past childhood. Once the boys dispense with the bully, they take over leadership of the gang, including Taro, who becomes their friend and lackey. To them, they're equals at least, so it's puzzling to get some hints that things might be different for their parents. This conflict comes to the fore in the film's final third: after spending an hour dealing with light slapstick and goofy little set pieces involving the kids, Ozu unexpectedly introduces a note of pathos and drama when the boys see some amateur movies of their father acting like a fool at work, making funny faces and trying to amuse his boss. They had worshiped and respected their father, believing him to be an important man, defending him in the usual kids' arguments about whose father is the best. When they see these movies, they suddenly see him in a totally different light, as a clown, as someone who has to be obsequious with Taro's father, constantly bowing to him. And when their father tries to explain that he is only an employee, that Taro's father is above him in rank, the boys are only even more devastated, understanding in a flash that the world does not work the way they thought it did, that their father was not the "great man" they'd thought he was.


The film's final act is moving and nuanced in its treatment of this theme, replacing the humor of the earlier scenes with an honest, direct look at class and honor. The father sighs that coping with the limits of status, with settling for being just a lowly employee, is "a problem kids these days will face all their lives," suggesting that he sees a future, sadly enough, where his own sons will grow up to be just like him, cogs in the machine rather than truly important men. He watches them sleep, with tears drying beneath their eyes, and urges them to strive to be better, not to settle for a working man's life and status the way he had. It's deeply affecting, to see this man struggling with his emotions as he realizes how badly his sons' confidence in him has been shaken. He briefly sinks into despair, grabbing a bottle of liquor and threatening to drown his sorrow in it. Ozu captures this low point quite effectively, framing the image with the father leaning against the doorway in the right side of the frame, the liquor bottle in his hand hanging down into the foreground, as his wife sits in the center of the frame in the background. It's a wonderful image of resignation and sadness. It is also the payoff to Ozu's decision to stage the film so completely from the kids' perspective prior to this: this sudden shift to the father, to his long-subdued frustration and mild shame at his limited position in life, is striking in its emotional impact.

There are hints of this sympathy to the father's perspective earlier in the film, too. Ozu's editing frequently suggests the continuity between father and sons even before the theme comes up explicitly in the film's denouement, by drawing parallels between the generations through juxtapositions of images. At one point, the camera pans (a camera move much more frequent in silent Ozu than it would be later in his career) across a row of office workers hunched over their desks, writing. Ozu then cuts to a cluster of students at their desks, learning calligraphy while a teacher admonishes them for goofing around or staring off into space, and finally the camera pans across an open field where the two kids cutting school are sprawled out, also writing as they lie in the grass. In all three shots, the camera move is the same, even as subtle shifts in the angle calls attention to the cutting, preventing a smooth transition from one shot to the next. It is purposefully disjunctive and jarring, suggesting both that the generations are linked by similar behaviors and situations, and yet that there is some necessary break, some trauma, that leads from childhood to adulthood. That break, perhaps, is the children's later realization of their father's place in the social strata.

Ozu chronicles the changing relationship between father and sons throughout the film by returning several times to a particular primal scene, the father and the two boys leaving the house together in the mornings, walking together as far as a train crossing before splitting up, the boys going off to school and the father to work. When this scene recurs at the end of the film, after the boys have started to come to terms with their father's place in the world, it mirrors the earlier ones, in which the boys had unquestioned respect for their father. But there's a new emotional undercurrent here, a hint of hesitancy that's cleared up when the boys give their father permission to go greet his boss, confirming that they now understand and have once again gained respect for him, albeit a new, more realistic respect, one founded on simple love rather than a mistaken belief in the father as an idealized "great man." It is a poignant and warm ending to a wonderful film in which Ozu affectionately, sensitively explores the nature of familial bonds and the role of honor in a new world where social class is calcifying into a rigid hierarchy.

Tokyo Chorus

Tokyo Chorus is an early pre-war silent film from Yasujiro Ozu, whose silent work generally reveals quite a different director from the later static, patient sensibility of his mature oeuvre. Of course, there is still a continuity in terms of themes and subjects connecting these earlier silents to the sound films. Tokyo Chorus is, like almost all of Ozu's films, concerned with domesticity and family relationships, and with the changes wrought on the family by outside pressures and developments. In Ozu's post-war films, these pressures take the form of encroaching Westernization, of the old traditional ways transitioning into a new modern sensibility. Obviously, there are some slightly different concerns at the core of this pre-war film, made in 1931 with the Great Depression affecting Japan as much as any other country — as one character jokes early on, "Hoover's policies haven't helped us yet," a wry punchline made even more bitterly ironic by the retrospective knowledge that Hoover's policies didn't help anyone very much.

The film centers on one family struggling to make ends meet during this difficult economic time. Shinji (Tokihiko Okada) is introduced as a rebellious, goofy schoolboy, but a few years later he has a family: a wife (Emiko Yagumo), a son (Hideo Sugawara), a daughter (Hideko Takamine) and a baby. Ozu introduces Shinji in a lengthy and near-slapstick sequence as a stern school teacher (Tatsuo Saito) tries to maintain control over a rowdy line of students (though, admittedly, the fact that all these schoolboys look like grown men initially makes it hard for an outsider to figure out the context of this scene). Ozu pans across the line of students, his camera moving across a diagonal composition that is repeated several times throughout the film. Such motion would later become rare and uncharacteristic in Ozu's post-war work, but here his aesthetic is not pinned down to the static, low-height observation that would come to be his most salient visual characteristic. Instead, Ozu's camera tracks along with the characters as they walk, or passes along rows of people lining a street.

During the opening scene, Shinji and the other students goof around and play, as the instructor makes disapproving notes in a little book, calling them out to examine their outfits and their posture. Shinji gets in trouble for not having a shirt on under his jacket, and is left sitting alone, picking at something (bugs? stray threads?) on his pants as the rest of the students are led away. This introduction establishes the film's broad sense of humor, telegraphed through the loping gait of the students as they act surly towards the teacher, or the instructor's head-bobbing bounce as he surveys them. From this opening, Ozu cuts away to a few years later, when Shinji is working at an insurance company. It is not stated directly, but the gap is meant to represent the onset of maturity, the rowdy schoolboy gaining responsibility as he settles into life with a family and a respectable office job.


This stability is disrupted when Shinji loses his job after defending an older employee who he felt had been unfairly fired: his earlier insouciance towards authority manifesting itself again in an act of benevolent defiance. The scene is nearly played for comedy — Shinji and his boss get into a slowly escalating shoving match by tapping each other on the shoulder with fans — but there's no mistake that the consequences of this lost job are truly dire for a man with a wife and three children in the middle of a terrible depression, with no jobs available. The central theme of the film is this man's struggle to maintain his family's honor and his own self-respect when faced with the loss of his profession and, with it, his claim to respectability. Honor is central to the film, especially as expressed in the way that Shinji's wife looks at him; Ozu captures the impact of a look, the humiliation of seeing her husband in a menial job that is beneath his station, a job he only got because of a chance encounter with his sympathetic former teacher.

What's interesting, though, is that Ozu ultimately critiques, in his own indirect way, the concepts of honor expressed here. Shinji's wife at first resists her husband "stooping" to a job carrying banners to advertise his former teacher's new restaurant; when she sees him doing this, she is humiliated. In fact, it's a rare moment when Ozu reinforces her feelings with an intertitle that outright says she's humiliated; Ozu generally uses such titles sparingly, preferring to capture such emotional nuances in the actors' performances, using the editing to emphasize certain glances and expressions. This, apparently, was a beat that Ozu felt the need to hammer home more forcefully, however, hitting his audience over the head rather than risk anyone missing the wife's sense of disgrace. She tells Shinji that he should remain proud and not do anything so obviously beneath his status. But Shinji resists, insisting that he is doing the right thing, that all a man in his situation can do is take whatever opportunities come to him. His wife soon gives way as well, agreeing to help him in his new job and supporting him until, at the end, his former teacher comes through with an offer of a better job in education. The lesson seems to be that abstract concepts like honor and pride are not nearly as important as putting food on the table for one's family, just as keeping up appearances must be secondary to providing the necessities of life for one's loved ones.

Tokyo Chorus is a fine film if not a particularly distinguished one. It reveals Ozu's nascent sensibility in its earliest state, as he deals with his usual themes — family dramas, the conflict between traditional values and changing conditions, the rhythms of domestic life — in a less formally rigorous way than he would in later years. The film is unfailingly direct and straightforward in its approach, telling a simple story simply. It is thus not quite a peak Ozu film, but perhaps an important work in his development, a step towards the greater depth and aesthetic richness of his later films. It is, regardless, an affecting film, particularly in two scenes between Shinji and his teacher. In the first, when the teacher offers Shinji a job, the latter offers some token resistance based on honor, saying that if the teacher merely feels pity for him, then he can't accept, but that if it's a gesture of friendship instead, he can. Shinji is essentially constructing a way for him to take the job and still feel like he's not sacrificing his honor; Ozu captures the desperate yearning on Shinji's face as he fears that perhaps his teacher will withdraw the offer, and the knowing nod from the teacher as he accepts this face-saving gesture. Later, in the final scene, Shinji's former classmates have gathered together for a reunion, and are singing a song together. Shinji and the teacher both join in, but as Ozu cuts between closeups of the two of them, isolating them within the crowd, their faces are troubled briefly by sadness and introspection before they regain their composure and join the celebration. Even in a relatively straightforward and conventional film like this, Ozu asserts his mastery with shots like these, shots where complicated emotions arise from his probing of the faces of his actors, and the juxtapositions between uplift and loss that flow through this film.

Horse Feathers

The fourth Marx brothers movie, Horse Feathers, is a typically loopy outing for Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo. Here, Groucho is Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the new president of Huxley College — not that it matters, since as usual in a Marx film the plot is strictly a secondary concern. The Marx brothers cut to the chase right from the beginning: in the first scene Wagstaff's new presidency is announced, and his introductory speech quickly becomes just a thin excuse for Groucho to keep riffing on all sorts of jokes that have little or no connection to the supposed situation. And he caps it all off with a musical number dedicated to nihilism. "Whatever it is/ I'm against it," he sings, and leads a group of professors in a swirling dance as he leaps up on a table, promising to oppose whatever's normal and ordinary. And they're off, eventually throwing Chico and Harpo into the mix as a pair of goofballs who Wagstaff somehow manages to mistake for football players, bringing them in as ringers to help his school defeat their rivals in the big game.

Director Norman McLeod, who also directed the brothers in Monkey Business, has a good handle on the quartet's manic sense of pacing and their near-perfect interplay with one another. The film moves crisply, careening along with barely a pause for breath. As usual, the brothers take a variety show approach, disregarding the narrative and instead just indulging whatever gags and performances they feel like doing: Harpo doing one of his usual harp performances, Zeppo earnestly wooing a vampy widow (Thelma Todd), or all four of the brothers taking turns putting their own spin on "Everyone Says I Love You," each one offering up their own lyrics, ranging from Zeppo's crooning balladry to Groucho's cynical take on this romantic tune. And of course, the film is packed with the brothers' signature wordplay, particularly between Groucho and Chico, whose verbal dexterity always drives the Marx brothers' films. Chico's the one who informs us that a sturgeon cuts you open when you're sick, or that you cure a haddock with aspirin, or that he used to teach a woman with a false set of teeth but now he teaches a falsetto, or that you can't sleep on a football.

Chico's humor, based on such mispronunciations and verbal puns — like a fast-paced absurdist exchange with Harpo about hogs, pigs, hugs and picks — is a sharp contrast to Groucho's non-sequiturs and one-liners. Whereas Chico and Harpo seem to be perpetually caught in loops of misunderstanding and repetitive silliness, Groucho is constantly reacting, bouncing off of the people and things all around him, riffing on whatever he sees and whatever anyone else says, offering up his own wry commentary on the goofiness of others. He even makes this explicit in this film by actually walking up the camera at one point and directly addressing the audience, telling the viewers that they should go wait out in the theater's lobby during what Groucho deems a tedious section, as Chico plays the piano and sings. That's the way it always seems to work: Groucho's the conspirator with the audience, the one who seems to be winking at all the lunacy going on all around him, even as he gleefully contributes to it. That's why he's perfect as the ostensible authority figure, the university president, who actually winds up destabilizing everything and adding to the general anarchic breakdown of order and stability.


This is the general form of the Marx brothers' humor: infiltrating authority and prestige with their absurdity and their total lack of respect for the rules. In the football game at the end of the film, Harpo gleefully subverts the mechanics of the game at every point. There are countless shaggy-dog sports movies where a group of misfits play a game by their own rules and come out on top, but the Marxes exist somewhere outside that tradition, at right angles even to that conventional depiction of anarchy. Instead, Harpo throws banana peels at the opposing team to make them slip, which for a while helps his team get ahead, but then he just as gleefully throws banana peels under the feet of his own teammate before he can get a touchdown: he's not breaking the rules to win, in other words, but breaking the rules because that's just what he does. It's as innate as breathing, and if sometimes his total disregard for order results in his team coming out ahead, at other times he'll just as obliviously contribute to his own team's setbacks and losses. Harpo, like his brothers, isn't on any team but his own. So throughout the game he repeatedly runs the wrong way, then leaps into a horse-drawn chariot to take him into the end zone, then pulls out multiple footballs to pile up the scores: he's not just breaking the rules, he's acting as if they don't even exist, and indeed they don't seem to. No one ever questions this absurdity; it's just accepted as the natural outgrowth of the brothers' personalities. Nothing behaves as it should when they're around.

At times, the anarchy of the brothers threatens to overwhelm good taste itself, and this film includes an unfortunate moment that betrays a more sinister undercurrent in Groucho's perpetual quipping and joking. In one scene, Thelma Todd's character, a vamp who's trying to seduce the brothers to get ahold of some football plays, speaks in a squeaky baby voice to Groucho, trying to play the part of the weak little femme to trick him into giving up his secrets. Groucho responds by viciously mocking her, telling her that if she keeps talking like that he'll kick her teeth down her throat. It's a startling moment in such a lighthearted film, an ugly burst of violence and nastiness that completely undercuts the supposedly comic tone of the surrounding material. It exposes, too, the darker shadings of Groucho's anarchic persona, which sometimes comes through in his cavalier disregard for propriety and taste — like the dismal way he treats Zeppo, who plays his son here. There are times when Groucho's wit and patter reveal that when you strip away order and stability, some rather ugly things escape along with all the humorous absurdity.

But that's the essence of a Marx brothers film: the breakdown of order. Even the film itself often seems to be breaking down around them. The film was censored and chopped of its bawdiest lines, and in its existing form it's a patchwork assembly that only exacerbates the anarchy and roughness that generally characterized the Marx movies. There are inexplicable cuts and splices in the film, the visible remnants of excised sequences or lines, and this splicing lends a herky-jerky quality to the film at points. In one scene, the ragged cutting makes Groucho seem to move without regard for the laws of physics, leaping across time and space as though he had been cut loose from reality as we know it. Groucho kicks Zeppo out, and as the door slams shut, there's a cut that replaces the slamming door, making the door shut on its own and Zeppo disappear. Before this disjunction can even be processed, the camera is following Groucho as he hunches down and runs across the room, grabbing a lantern from a nearby table. Then he's abruptly at the window, making a quip before another jump cut leads into him running towards the camera. Then he's leaping over a couch to stand next to Thelma Todd, and another jump cut transitions into him hopping into her lap.

This disjunctive editing is a sign of the film's looseness and roughness, its casual lack of concern for continuity or reality. Groucho especially seems to exist somewhere outside of reality as he catapults across the room, the jerky rhythms of the cuts enhancing his naturally stylized movements. As he duck-walks and stutter-steps, the film seems to be syncopating off of Groucho's own inbuilt rhythms, erasing whatever's not strictly necessary, stripping away everything but the essence of Groucho. At one point, he starts to say "where were we" but only gets out the "where" before the rest of the frames are elided, and he seems to instantly leap onto the couch again, answering himself, "oh yeah." That's it in a nutshell: there's only as much as is needed for the gag, and the rest is crudely sliced away. It's an accident of the film's troubled censorship history and the corrupted form in which it has survived, but it only enhances the film's lackadaisical economy. Horse Feathers is a typically nutty, loose-limbed effort from the Marx brothers, capturing their antics at their most hilarious and profane.

Sabotage

Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage is best known for a plot device that Hitch himself regretted using, a suspense sequence that the Master of Suspense later deemed a failure in his oeuvre. Indeed, the film is dominated by this particular set piece, a lengthy scene in which a young boy carries a package across London, not knowing that there's a bomb beneath the unassuming brown paper wrapping. The boy is Stevie (Desmond Tester), the younger brother of Sylvia (Sylvia Sidney), and he was given the deadly package by his sister's Eastern European emigré husband, Verloc (Oskar Homolka). Verloc is a saboteur, working against the British war effort at the behest of shadowy employers who urge him towards increasingly horrible crimes. When his initial acts of sabotage, like disrupting London's electrical power for a few hours, are deemed "laughable" by his superiors, Verloc is instructed to deliver a bomb instead.

The sequence in which young Stevie carries this package across town for his sinister brother-in-law is a typically masterful Hitchcockian suspense set piece, despite Hitch's later disavowal of the scene. The tension builds steadily as Stevie is continually delayed in his journey. He was told to get his package to a cloak room by a certain time, but obviously not told why or what was inside, so he doesn't really feel the urgency of the mission. Instead, he dawdles along the way, admiring the goods at an open-air market, getting pressed into a toothpaste demonstration by an aggressive street hawker and stopping to watch a parade that prevents him from crossing a street. Throughout the sequence, Hitchcock frequently cuts back to the package that the audience knows carries a sinister cargo, and also inserts shots of clock faces to show the passage of time as the minute of the bomb's detonation ticks slowly closer. It's a harrowing scene, and by the end each stoplight, each delay that keeps the boy from his destination, only makes the pulse pounder harder and faster. As the final moment draws closer, the cutting accelerates, faster and faster, until the economical final montage: a few quick shots of the package in the boy's arms, followed by a shot of the tram he's on exploding.

This shocking denouement destroys the audience's expectation that a filmmaker would never kill off an adorable kid so callously — especially after really jerking on the audience's heartstrings by having a cute little puppy playing with the boy in his final moments. It's a startling and horrifying scene, and in fact Hitchcock was probably right to disown it despite its undeniable power; it unbalances the film, elevates its stakes to a level that it would be pretty much impossible for a light thriller to justify. In the aftermath of this scene, the film struggles to find its feet again, and never quite does. Actually, Hitchcock is never really able to conjure up much credible drama here at all. Verloc is being investigated by the Scotland Yard detective Ted Spencer (John Loder), who poses as a vegetable seller and constantly hangs around outside the cinema Verloc owns. Ted takes an interest in Sylvia, who's married to the older Verloc not out of love but because he's good to her brother and provides them with stability and security. It's a familiar 30s story, the romantic triangle of the young woman, the handsome man her own age, and the older man who she respects and feels indebted to, here given a twist by making the older husband a sinister, criminal figure.


The plot is relatively inert, since from the beginning the audience knows that Verloc is a saboteur working for a foreign power, that Ted is a detective, and that by the time the film is over Sylvia will have to realize what's going on with her seemingly harmless husband and switch her affections to the other man. With not much happening on the story level, Hitchcock gets as much as he can from the pure visual storytelling possibilities of the situation. In fact, at times the film seems to consist of little besides exchanges of charged glances and slowly tracking dramatic closeups. Hitchcock encodes the drama in alternating closeups, focusing on the eyes: Sylvia looking suspiciously at her husband, wondering what's going on with him as strange men meet with him in the cinema's back room; Verloc glaring, his heavy brows arched as he contemplates his next devious and desperate step.

This approach reaches its apex in the climactic dinner scene after Stevie has been killed in the explosion. Sylvia knows what happened and about Verloc's role in it, and as Verloc cravenly tries to act as though everything is normal, Sylvia's eyes are burning holes in him. Hitchcock accentuates the tension by patiently drawing out the moment, capturing that look of hatred and rage in Sylvia's eyes, and honing in on the details that reveal what's going through her mind. Hitchcock's camera pinpoints her fingering her wedding ring, thinking about what it now represents, and eyeing the knife she's using to serve dinner, thinking about what other uses it could be put to.

Despite the dark material, Hitchcock also still finds some space for comic relief and humorous asides. Sometimes these diversions come in the form of offhand jokes, as when a couple walks by during Verloc's rendezvous with an enemy agent at an aquarium, and Hitchcock takes the opportunity to toss in a joke about oyster sex changes. But there's also the character of the bomb-maker A.F. Chatman (William Dewhurst), who disguises his real profession behind the front of a pet shop and quarrels with his bitter daughter (Martita Hunt), implicitly insulting her right to her face. It's deliciously funny, naughty material, and Dewhurst delivers a juicy performance in a small role, clearly having fun with this nebbishy terrorist. Indeed, the performances in general — excepting perhaps Loder's thankless role as the bland Ted — are strong, from Homolka's vaguely foreign evil to Sidney's wide-eyed innocence, reminiscent of fellow Hitchcock heroine Nova Pilbeam. The film falls apart after Stevie's death, struggling to find the proper tone and ultimately finding that there is no way to salvage a lightweight thriller after such a devastating event. But even so, Hitchcock's keen eye for entertaining performances and subtle visual storytelling keeps the film interesting even when it's not wholly satisfying.

The Mask of Fu Manchu

[This is a contribution to the Boris Karloff Blogathon, which has taken place from November 23-29 at the Frankensteinia blog.]

The Mask of Fu Manchu is, it has to be said, an utterly bizarre movie in so many ways. This quickie shocker casts Boris Karloff as the titular Fu Manchu, a sinister Chinese scientist and criminal who's determined to find the sword and mask of Genghis Khan in order to secure his own power as a new world conquerer. In order to do so, he kidnaps the professor Lionel Barton (Lawrence Grant), who's about to lead an expedition to the newly discovered tomb of Khan. When this doesn't work, Fu Manchu sends out inept assassins, kidnaps more scientists and adventurers, concocts elaborate torture devices involving pits of crocodiles and spiked walls, and plots in his laboratory with his slinky, oversexed daughter Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy). The plot is so over-the-top it's not worth taking seriously, so it's fortunate that the film, directed by Charles Brabin (replacing Charles Vidor, who was fired after a few days), offers up plenty of outrageous images and outlandish moments to distract from its ludicrous narrative.

The film's whole construction is rough and even sloppy. Everything seems to be happening at an accelerated pace, as though the actors were instructed to get through every scene as quickly as possible. This is often frankly hilarious, as the actors spit out lines, sometimes stumbling and stuttering — mistakes that obviously no one thought were worth doing another take to correct — or scrambling to perform some physical task at triple speed. The film was made early in the talkie era, and this too shows in the roughshod aesthetic. Brabin films mostly in static tableaux from a distance, occasionally tracking into or out of the scene but mostly just setting up and letting the action play out in front of the camera.

What happens in front of Brabin's camera, mostly, is Karloff and Loy outrageously mugging as the sinister Chinese villains, while the ineffectual heroes — led by Barton's daughter Sheila (Karen Morley, shamelessly overacting even in comparison to the makeup-caked Karloff and Loy) and her whitebread boyfriend Terry (Charles Starrett) — stumble into their enemies' traps over and over again. Karloff, even covered in ridiculous slant-eyed makeup, is in fine form, making his Fu Manchu snakelike and strangely dignified, insisting on being called "doctor" and stressing his fancy American/British education even as he vows to destroy white culture. Loy, as his daughter, is equally entertaining to watch; Fah Lo See is a seductress who turns her attentions to Terry almost as soon as she sees him. Fu Manchu is very aware of his daughter's ways, too, first offering her as a payment to Barton (with the girl standing right there) and then telling her to hold off on her usual seduction routine until her latest target has outlasted his usefulness to Fu Manchu's plans. Indeed, the film is surprisingly open and explicit in its sexual and other undertones. At one point, trying to find Fu Manchu, the adventurer Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) asks an innkeeper for some "rest," and the obvious implication is that he wants either opium or women.


As interesting as these surface elements are, the film's strange undercurrents of homoerotic imagery and exoticization are even more fascinating. Once Terry is taken prisoner by Fu Manchu and Fah Lo See, he's stripped to the waist and chained to a slab so that Fah Lo See can lounge over him, running her long claw-like fingernails across his chest. And then there's the scene where Fu Manchu does the same thing, running his own nails across Terry's chest, mirroring his daughter's admiration of this white man. At one point, she even implicitly offers up Terry for her father's appreciation: "He is not entirely unhandsome, is he, my father?" To which Fu Manchu responds, "For a white man, no." This homoerotic undercurrent certainly extends to the black servants who are kept by the Chinese: strapping, muscular dark men, half-naked in tiny underwear-like shorts. They stand around looking like statues with their sculpted bodies, and it's hard to look at them without thinking that Fah Lo See, and probably Fu Manchu as well, likes having such models of masculine physicality hanging around.

Of course, beyond these under-the-surface sexual implications, there's the obvious fact that the film posits a fantasy world where Chinese warlords have black slaves: it's an expression of white fears about non-white races joining up to overthrow the whites. The film is shockingly racist, and not just the run-of-the-mill racism one expects of a 1930s film with stock Chinese villains. It's not just that the Chinese speak with affected accents or that the two most prominent Asian characters are played by white actors in slant-eye makeup. No, Fu Manchu's sinister plot is explicitly framed as a racial conquest, as an attempt by the sneaky, evil "yellow" people to conquer the white races. And not just conquer them, either. Fu Manchu extols his Chinese warriors into battle by promising that they will be able to kill all the white men and steal their women. Fu Manchu's goal is thus couched in terms of non-white races defiling white female sexuality, a tradition that stretches back at least to Birth of a Nation and is often at the core of racist thinking. Racist ideologies excite fear by suggesting that white female sexuality — represented here by willowy blonde Karen Morley, who looks frail and vulnerable despite her shallow tough attitude — is in danger of being corrupted and destroyed. The Mask of Fu Manchu goes even further by placing male sexuality in danger too, as Terry nearly gives in to the wiles of Fah Lo See. Of course, in one of the film's more laughable scenes — and there's some tight competition for that title — Sheila wins Terry back to white women by melodramatically urging him to put his arms around her and then smugly gloating at Fah Lo See when he wakes out of his trance.

Because of all this drama surrounding race and sexuality, The Mask of Fu Manchu is a fascinating and problematic film, messy and absurd and teeming with wild images. Fu Manchu's introduction is especially iconic, as the mad doctor appears, sneering and mugging, on the right side of the frame while on the left an oval funhouse mirror distorts and stretches his face into a disembodied monstrous mask. Later, when Terry is being whipped by some of the black slaves under Fah Lo See's direction, Fu Manchu's head appears floating in blackness, disembodied again, leering at the spectacle of the white man's torture. Images like this, along with the ornate designs of things like Genghis Khan's forbidding tomb, make the film an interesting spectacle, dominated by lurid imagery, loony ideas and unfettered performances.

Karloff/Lugosi Double Feature: The Raven/The Invisible Ray

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

The Raven is a perfect example of a classic Hollywood horror film where virtually the entire pleasure of the film rests on its central actors, two icons of horror cinema: Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. This duo, together and separately, were responsible for much of the appeal of so many of the era's low-budget throwaways. They infused these otherwise disposable films with the timeless quality of their performances. Sometimes, these two — particularly Karloff, who was far more versatile an actor than he has ever gotten credit for — could elevate a film by locating unexpected drama, pathos and depth in their mad scientists, monsters and killers. Perhaps more often, their broad, campy performances could bring a spirited energy and intensity to films that would otherwise have been merely flimsy, poorly constructed B-movies.

The Raven certainly doesn't have much to recommend it beyond the appeal of its dueling central performances; as was so often the case when Lugosi and Karloff met onscreen, they are pitted against one another, Lugosi's smiling courtliness set off against Karloff's blunt, Frankensteinian strength. Lugosi plays Dr. Vollin, a brilliant physician who has now retired to conduct private research — and also to dedicate himself to his obsession with Edgar Allen Poe, constructing elaborate replicas of the death traps from Poe's stories in a hidden basement room. Karloff is the killer Edmond Bateman, escaped from prison and showing up on Vollin's doorstep, begging the doctor to perform plastic surgery on him, to transform his face. Vollin agrees, but instead he deforms Bateman beyond recognition, giving him a half-formed face with one staring, non-functioning eye and a melted texture to his skin. He needs Bateman's sinister services, and in order to ensure the escaped criminal's cooperation, he promises that he will restore his face only if Bateman helps him with his evil plot.

Vollin desires revenge for being denied the great love of his life. He had saved the life of the pretty young dancer Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware), but she was already engaged to another doctor (Lester Matthews) and her father Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) urged Vollin to back off. Vollin's not exactly a stable guy, and this is enough to drive him over the edge: he invites Thatcher and his family to his home for the weekend, plotting to use Bateman to exact his revenge. The plot is, obviously, beyond silly, really little more than a flimsy excuse to trot out some of Poe's elaborate torture devices, as well as providing a framework for Karloff and Lugosi's sparring. The film is strangely a bit like a Marx brothers movie, formally speaking, in that everybody else in the cast is playing it straight while the main characters are on an entirely different level. While Karloff and Lugosi are wildly gesticulating and enjoyably hamming it up, everyone else seems to be on the verge of falling asleep, and not just when they're exaggeratedly yawning to convey their sleepiness. It's like there are two different movies here, and nobody else seems to realize that there's a Gothic chamber horror story playing out in the basement, while up above the Thatcher family and Vollin's assorted other guests amiably sleepwalk through some melodrama and light comedy.

Needless to say, whenever the focus is off Karloff and Lugosi, the film is simply dreadful, featuring some of the most stilted, painfully horrible line readings imaginable. The supporting cast is composed entirely of forgettable non-entities, including even Ware as the love interest; it's hard to imagine this drone, pretty as she is, driving anyone truly mad. The cast alternates between melodramatic overacting and barely acting at all, rendering the already minimal plot even more irrelevant. No, this is strictly a two-man show, and thankfully both Lugosi and Karloff rise to the occasion. The former is especially good here, playing Vollin with a smarmy self-righteousness and sense of entitlement, always tinged with a note of madness even before he really goes mad. He's a smiling sadist, fascinated with pain and torture: "toooortuuure," he drawls the word out in his signature Hungarian accent, savoring its every syllable, rolling it around on his tongue as though tasting it. There's a chilling scene where he clumsily tries to seduce Jean after her surgery, running his hand along her neck to examine her wounds. "Does it still hurt?" he asks her with a gleeful smile on his face, eying a surgical scar with the pleasure of a small child playing with a puppy. His broad smile is creepy; he takes such obvious pleasure in doling out pain.

Karloff is equally good, playing a character with more dramatic and emotional shadings. His character is haunted by the things he's done, and obsessed by the idea that his crimes were a reflection of his ugly, brutish face: if only he could have a different face, he could be good. Instead, Vollin makes him even uglier, suited only to revenge and cruelty, using him as an instrument in his evil plans. Bateman is a poignant character, and Karloff conveys his despair with the use of only one eye and half his face, the other half frozen beneath thick makeup, an obviously fake eye staring dead ahead at all times. The makeup isn't necessarily convincing, but it's creepy enough to do its job, and the strength of Karloff's performance is such that after a while one forgets the makeup is even there. This is what Karloff unfailingly brought to these low-budget ventures, infusing his characters with depth and resonance far beyond what was called for, getting across his inner state even through the most formidable of barriers. His one good eye, casting desperately about as he tries to avoid further corruption, is all he needs to craft a powerful performance.

The interaction of these two greats is all the film has to offer, but it's more than enough. It's a flimsy, utterly ridiculous story, flatly directed (by journeyman Lew Landers, on his first film) and hampered by the overall low quality of its acting. Even so, Karloff and Lugosi manage to craft an entertaining and even dramatically satisfying opposition between mad cruelty and a crooked man who desperately wants to change.


Unlike its predecessor The Raven, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi's next film together, The Invisible Ray, was one even these legends couldn't quite redeem. The film has a convoluted plot and some absurdly funny science fiction contrivances, as well as special effects that pretty much guarantee its status as a camp classic of a certain kind. But in between scattered scenes of over-the-top silliness, it's surprisingly dull and monotonous, allowing much of its action to occur offscreen while focusing at interminable length on the least interesting aspects of the story.

Karloff is the star of the show here, playing the brilliant but isolated scientist Janos Rukh, who has studied by himself for years, mocked and ostracized by the scientific community for his unconventional theories. Frankly, I'm still not sure what those theories are, though he goes to great lengths to explain them during the unintentionally hilarious opening scenes, when he presents a demonstration of his ideas along with some proof that he'd been right all along. Basically, he gathers together a group of scientists for a big planetarium show, projecting rays into space and somehow getting an image of Earth from the distant past, just in time to watch a big glowing meteor crash into the planet and land in Africa — just as Rukh had predicted, how convenient! The scientists, led by Rukh's rival Dr. Benet (Lugosi), then head off with Rukh into the interior of Africa in search of the mysterious meteor that crashed there so long ago. They drag along Rukh's wife Diane (Frances Drake), who married the much older Rukh out of respect for his intellect rather than genuine love — which doesn't exactly explain why her eye wanders, once in Africa, to the fey, annoying Ronald Drake (Frank Lawton, who can't quite suppress a silly grin throughout the film, as though bemused by his own career choices).

Anyway, things quickly begin going wrong for Rukh. He discovers his meteor, but finds that it turns him radioactive and deadly, so that anything he touches will die. He also glows in the dark, a neat party trick rendered here with some of the laziest special effects ever trotted out for a Hollywood production. Benet is able to cure Rukh's radioactivity, but it's not permanent; Rukh has to continually take shots to counteract the effects of the meteor, or else he'll return to his lethal state before dying himself. Not long after, while Rukh is once again absorbed in his research, he finds that not only have Benet and the other scientists taken it upon themselves to report the discovery of the meteor, but Diane has left Africa, leaving him a note that she's in love with Drake. Rukh returns to Paris broken and enraged. He gets credit for the discovery of the miraculous "Radium X," which can cure all sorts of diseases when harnessed, but Benet and the other scientists wind up getting more attention for actually putting the substance to practical use. And in any event no amount of accolades are a consolation for seeing his wife with another man. So Rukh fakes his own death and begins stalking the other members of his expedition, killing them off one by one.

Despite the needless twists and turns of the plot, at this point the film's horror premise should kick into high gear, as Rukh tracks down his victims, merely touching them in order to infect them with his murderous radioactive emanations. This should make for a supremely creepy, horrifying movie. But director Lambert Hillyer, perhaps constrained by a limited effects budget, keeps the action almost entirely offscreen. Rukh's activities appear in newspaper headlines, but none of his murders are actually shown, nor are the incidents when he uses his invisible ray gun to symbolically destroys a set of church statues that represent, for him, his victims. This makes for a rather dull, plodding film, with a whole lot of exposition and irrelevant melodrama and build-up for suspense sequences that never actually come.

Karloff delivers a fine performance as the slowly unraveling scientist, and in a more straightforward and secondary role Lugosi does his best, exuding a cool reserve as Rukh's rival colleague. He also presides over a great scene in which he reveals for some police inspectors the irradiated handprints on a murder victim's throat, one of the most memorable images (besides the glowing Karloff) from this mostly visually undistinguished film. This is a minor sci-fi/horror offering from Universal, and a minor pairing for Karloff and Lugosi, who despite their best efforts can't manage to inject any real vitality into this lackluster project.

Tod Browning Double Feature: Mark of the Vampire/The Devil-Doll

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

Tod Browning's bizarre, elliptical Mark of the Vampire must surely rank among the strangest of the early Hollywood horror films — not an insignificant title considering the sheer variety of lunacy on display in the countless low-budget shock-fests churned out during this era. This outrageous film runs barely an hour long, and the evidence of the significant cuts it suffered at the hands of meddling producers — over twenty minutes worth of footage are reportedly missing — is apparent at every point. Who knows what Browning's original film was like, but the film as it exists now has a stuttery tempo that actually lends an air of accidental surrealism to the whole affair. Characters abruptly show up without introduction, times and locations collide awkwardly into one another, scenes end suddenly without resolving their action, only for a new scene to begin, without explanation, in the middle of something else altogether. Incidents happen and then seem to be forgotten just as quickly, as the timeline leaps forward and the same characters reappear in a totally new scenario. One tries desperately to follow the plot by reading between the lines of the fragmentary dialogue, trying to guess what could possibly be going on.

The film is a complete mess, but a delightfully entertaining one. Its schizophrenic editing never settles down, never stops frenetically jumping around from place to place without providing any sense of context. From what I can gather, one night the nobleman Sir Borotyn (Holmes Herbert) is killed; he's found drained of all his blood and the local populace is terrified by the idea that a vampire did the deed. They pin the blame on the creepy Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) and his pasty-faced daughter Luna (Carroll Borland), who live in the town's requisite abandoned castle. Then for some reason Professor Zelen (Lionel Barrymore) shows up suddenly, talking about killing vampires and stuff like that, and the Count and his daughter are prowling through the nights, preying on Borotyn's daughter Irena (Elizabeth Allan) and her fiancé Fedor (Henry Wadsworth). This is when things get really baffling. Mora and Luna keep showing up, turning into patently fake puppet bats or slooooooooowly wandering through the halls of their castle, which is also populated by both real animals (notably, a grinning opossum) and some more puppet creatures, like a spider so laughably fake it practically has a pair of googly eyes glued to its head. Meanwhile, Zelen is frenziedly preparing to defend against the vampires, despite the initial skepticism of local police inspector Neumann (Lionel Atwill) and Irena's guardian, Baron Von Zinden (Jean Hersholt).

The film is a mad jumble of isolated scenes, each of them bizarre non sequiturs in relation to one another. The film's structure, already loose, pretty much falls apart at this point, opting for a disconnected stream of consciousness, like a distilled vision of the vampire myth, a fractured story with all the connective tissue crudely chopped away. It's the absolute essence of the vampire story: the creepy, silent vampires, their faces pale and severe, their eyes wildly staring as they hypnotize their victims; the foggy moors through which the creatures stalk; the castle strewn with spider webs and infested with vermin; the crypt from which the vampires arise at night; the dazed victims who remember little of the vampire's bite.

The film is itself a hallucination, a fevered dream experienced while in the vampire's irresistible sway. Lugosi and Borland, as the vampires, get barely a word of dialogue in the entire film but they're both electric presences. Lugosi is of course the archetypal vampire, but here he sheds Dracula's courtly charm for the eerie blankness of the grave, and a sinister, leering smile that perhaps provided the inspiration for Robert Blake's monstrously cheerful demon in David Lynch's Lost Highway. Borland, heavily made up to give her a corpse-like pallor and gauntness, seems to glide through the film in her long flowing gowns, another creepy incarnation of the undead.

Adding to the film's lunacy is the utterly ridiculous denouement, which twists things around in a way that explains at least some of the odd inconsistencies and gaps in the story, but at the same time creates a whole new set of problems, shattering much of the sense that could be garnered from the rest of the film. Still, it hardly matters. The film is a shambles, but its mad illogic is part of its appeal, as is its hammy overacting (Barrymore in particular is full of portentous orations, and his "good guy" character winds up being even creepier than the vampires at some points). There's always someone screaming, sending everyone rushing around from one room to the next, chasing after the source of all this commotion. And one can be sure that as soon as any given scene starts to make some sense, it will suddenly fade out to be replaced by something that throws everything into confusion again. It's a mess of a film, and though it's easy to blame studio interference, it's hard to imagine even an additional twenty minutes of footage could make sense of all this chaos.

Not that I'd ever want this film to be tamed. It's delightful because of its freedom from logic, its true commitment to taking things moment by moment, scene by scene, without worrying if the film as a whole fits together or tells a coherent story (it doesn't!). In this respect, Mark of the Vampire is best appreciated as a true surrealist film, a film in which meaning and narrative are at most secondary to the pleasures of sensation, of visceral thrills, of the textures of the image.


The Devil-Doll is an unsettling, complex horror film from director Tod Browning, a film that often hardly even seems like a horror film at all — it's also a story of revenge, and a family drama, and in a weird and unexpected way, also a story of redemption. The story opens with former bank president Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore, much less hammy than in Mark of the Vampire) escaping from prison after seventeen years behind bars. He'd been framed by his three former business partners, who had taken over his bank and his fortune while he languished in jail. He escapes with his aging cellmate Marcel (Henry Walthall) and the duo manage to make their way to an out-of-the-way cabin where Marcel's wife Malita (Rafaela Ottiano) is hiding away. It seems that Marcel and Malita are mad scientists, and Malita's been continuing her husband's work in his absence, shrinking down dogs to miniaturized size. It's another of those wacky mad scientist plots that are meant to save the world, though really it's just loony — that's what makes it mad science, I guess. Anyway, Marcel soon dies of a heart attack, and Lavond sees a perfect opportunity to use his friend's experiments as an instrument of revenge against his former associates.

Along with Malita, Lavond moves back to Paris, where he disguises himself as an elderly, hunched-over old woman in a gray wig, earrings and a dress. So even with all of Paris searching for him, he hides in plain sight, setting up a doll shop and plotting his revenge. Using the shrunken figures of people, which he can control with his mind, Lavond begins methodically, one by one, enacting his vengeance on his enemies, the bankers Radin (Arthur Hohl), Coulvet (Robert Greig) and Matin (Pedro de Cordoba). The mechanics of Lavond's vengeance are simple, but Browning crafts these scenes into well-made suspense sequences. What's interesting about these scenes, and the movie as a whole, is that it's not clear who the audience is meant to be rooting for — there's no sympathy for the corrupt bankers, who certainly deserve their comeuppance, but Lavond's thirst for revenge makes him mad and sinister himself, cruel and cold.

Nevertheless, Browning never allows Lavond to become fully the villain of the piece. More than anything, Lavond is motivated by his love for his daughter Lorraine (Maureen O'Sullivan), who hated him because she believed him to be guilty and blamed him for her mother's suicide. Lavond is deeply hurt by his own daughter's contempt for him, and yet he is unable to reveal himself to her, speaking to her only in disguise as an old woman. In the film's second half, Lavond's cruelty and madness are redeemed when his true purpose is revealed — not just revenge, but the possibility of happiness for his daughter, the redemption of his own image not for his sake but for hers. In a clever paradox, he makes himself a criminal, makes himself guilty of murder and worse, in order to prove himself innocent of other long-ago crimes. Despite his brutality — and despite his pre-Norman Bates cross-dressing — Lavond is basically a decent guy, even if he is rather terrifying whenever he's controlling his dolls, directing his thoughts to animate them with an intense stare.

The film as a whole interestingly incorporates its sci-fi/horror premise into a melodramatic structure, creating these weird tonal ambiguities in Lavond's character. At some points, he's required to be the horror movie mad scientist, driven and frightening and capable of startling cruelty. But at other times he is sympathetic and complex; he loves his daughter and genuinely regrets that he hadn't been able to raise her. This complexity extends as well to Malita, who's more of a typical mad scientist — she even has a Bride of Frankenstein-esque band of gray hair running through the front of her frizzy, mangy hair — but who is driven by her overpowering love for her husband and her desire to fulfill his wishes now that he's gone. The film as a whole is an appealingly rough, emotionally nuanced thriller. Its effects are crude but effective, especially since Browning combines trick photography and multiple exposures with the use of oversized sets, as in a sequence when one of Lavond's tiny "dolls" scurries across a dressing table in order to steal some jewels. Browning takes a potentially silly premise and turns it into an odd, memorable little B-movie classic.

Films I Love #31: Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)

I've written about George Cukor's sublime Holiday here before, but any list of my favorite films would simply not be complete without it. The film is a moving, joyous parable about the importance of finding your own place in life, of not only marching to the beat of your own drummer, but of pounding out the beat with your own two hands. The film boasts one of Cary Grant's best performances, as a free-spirited self-made man who thinks he's in love with a stuffy society heiress (Doris Nolan) but seems more of a natural match for her fun-loving sister (Katharine Hepburn). Every second of screentime between Grant and Hepburn glows and sparkles with the pleasure of seeing two such vivacious performers enjoying one another's company. It's obvious from the moment they're introduced and shake hands with a playful nod, that they're the film's real couple, and Nolan is all but cast aside.

The film is a tribute to remaining youthful, and there's a childlike spirit to the way Grant and Hepburn play here: riding tricycles, doing somersaults, putting on Punch and Judy shows, not to mention the witty verbal banter and playacting of their conversations. The centerpiece of the film is a New Year's Eve party where Grant and Hepburn retreat to an upstairs room, away from the snooty society crowd, along with Grant's friends (Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon) and Hepburn's drunkard brother (Lew Ayres). This small, intimate party takes place in the only comfortable room in a palatial mansion, the only room with a normal sense of scale. Throughout the film, Cukor isolates Grant in long shots of rooms that seem to have been built for eight-foot tall giants, emphasizing his discomfort with the luxury and opulence that seems to await him if he marries into this family. It's only in the upstairs playroom, with its cozy fireplace and leftover childhood toys, that Grant and Hepburn can relax and be themselves.

Libeled Lady

Libeled Lady provides an opportunity to see the unparalleled screen chemistry between William Powell and Myrna Loy outside of their six-film collaboration on the Thin Man films. This film, released two years after The Thin Man and just shortly before its first sequel After the Thin Man, offers a change from the comfort and wedded familiarity of Powell and Loy's Nick and Nora Charles. Here, the relationship between their characters is still in flux, still developing, and the film's greatest pleasure comes in watching them slowly work towards that easy interplay. When the film starts, there's a distance between them, a gap to be bridged by sheer charm and verbal seduction. Loy is Connie Allenbury, the globe-trotting daughter of a wealthy businessman and political hopeful (Walter Connolly). Allenbury had long been a rival of the newspaper the New York Evening Star, which accidentally prints a libelous and utterly untrue story about Connie, thus opening themselves up to a tremendous lawsuit. As a result, the paper's manic editor, Haggerty (Spencer Tracy), sends their best libel man to do anything he can to stop this lawsuit in its tracks, including compromising Connie so that her reputation really is ruined and the suit falls apart. This is, of course, Powell, as the compulsive and irresistible ladies' man Bill Chandler.

So the relationship between Connie and Chandler starts out as antagonistic. Connie suspects from the moment she meets him that Chandler is up to something — though her father adores this supposedly ace fisherman — and she maintains an icy remoteness that Chandler cannot crack. It's something to see the usually suave Powell utterly flummoxed, startled into silence by the mere fact that this woman will have nothing to do with him. She outsmarts him and steps neatly around his traps at every turn. From this hesitant beginning, though, the pair slowly begins developing towards their signature quick-witted repartee, with Powell's one-liners gliding effortlessly off of the ramp of Loy's pert, faux-wounded manners, her rolling eyes and puckered mouth. It's like watching the moment when Nick and Nora Charles first met and fell in love, when Nick's ragged charm and wit finally melted away the society ice queen's outer layers to find the playful girl inside.


Director Jack Conway doesn't have to do much with this pair besides get out of the way, and for the most part he does. The comic and romantic patter between Loy and Powell isn't particularly sharp or incisive — the script doesn't have the bounce or verve of the best Thin Man films — but the actors' warmth and obvious comfort with one another brings the characters to life. The film occasionally falters whenever it doesn't rely on the interplay of its leads, as in a lengthy and intermittently tedious sequence of fly fishing, with Chandler posing as a pro fisherman for the benefit of Connie and her father. To the extent that the scene relies on Powell's slapstick talents, it's a flop, because there's something deadening about seeing the dapper, self-possessed Powell trying to take a pratfall. He's not a physical comic, and it doesn't help that Conway's staging of Chandler's hapless attempts to catch a fish is flat and lifeless.

Thankfully, Powell and Loy do get admirable support from Tracy, and especially from Jean Harlow, as Haggerty's fiancée Gladys, who is used as a pawn in the plot to trip up Connie. Haggerty marries off Gladys to Chandler, keeping her hidden so that once Chandler compromises Connie, Gladys could appear to make it seem as though Connie were running around with a married man. Gladys provides comic relief throughout the film, a kind of crass, side-of-the-mouth counterpoint to Connie's prim sophistication. But in the final scene, she comes into her own, taking charge of the narrative by force. Her big moment is practically metafictional, a very self-conscious denial of the "happy ending" that seems to be developing in the final moments in the film; she sees the way this thing is heading, and she wants to make sure that she doesn't get left out of the Hollywood ending. As a result, the film seems to end twice: the narrative begins winding down and tying up loose ends only to be thrown into confusion again by Gladys at the last minute. The effect is sort of like those old Looney Tunes cartoons where the characters, conscious of their status in a fictional artifice, try desperately to exert some control over the direction of the story. Like Daffy in Duck Amuck, the cartoonish Gladys won't allow herself to be pushed around by some writer without putting up a fight, and her big speech winds up questioning not only the dictates of the story but the assumptions of the audience, who were probably only too willing to accept a "happy ending" for the charming, witty, upper-class characters while the vulgar, urban dame gets a raw deal. It's a great moment, subtly undercutting the assumptions about class underlying so many Hollywood romances and comedies. If the rest of the film is rarely so sophisticated or complex, though, it's still often funny and light and enjoyable, making this a fluffy entertainment that at the last moment hints at something more.

TOERIFC: Boudu Saved From Drowning

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's film was chosen by Rick of Coosa Creek Cinema. Visit his site to see his thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

Boudu Saved From Drowning is Jean Renoir's sardonic, wryly comic take on the antagonism between bourgeois values and lower-class crudity. The title figure, Boudu (Michel Simon), is an oafish beggar, an outrageously whiskered tramp who stomps heedlessly over the supposed dignity and sophistication of middle-class respectability. When the bourgeois book store owner Lestingois (Charles Granval) saves Boudu from drowning in the river, he becomes the tramp's benefactor, feeding and clothing Boudu and giving him a place to sleep indefinitely. Lestingois is portrayed as a decent man in many ways, good-hearted and generous, willing to do good deeds for their own sake: he gives away books to young students, recognizing their romantic, poetic spirit from his own youth, and his rescue of Boudu is not motivated by the awards and kudos heaped on him by his neighbors, with which he seems mildly uncomfortable. At the same time, however, Lestingois is an avatar of bourgeois pretensions and affectations. He has a piano in his house, despite the fact that no one plays it, because respectable families simply must have one, and he carries on an affair with his plump, giggly maid Anne Marie (Sévérine Lerczinska) because his standoffish wife Emma (Marcelle Hainia) no longer interests him.

When Boudu enters this house, he completely disrupts the family's familiar routines, which had settled into a comfortable way of life. Boudu has no inclination for social graces, and never so much as thanks his benefactor for saving his life, or for the attention, gifts and food lavished on him since the rescue. Instead, the tramp runs roughshod over everything in the house, crudely defacing and mocking any hints of respectability that he comes in contact with. Boudu simply doesn't see the point of the routines and polished surfaces of bourgeois life. Confronted with a tie, he asks what it's for, and Lestingois has to admit that it's not really "for" anything, that it's not necessary at all, it's just "a piece of cloth one wears around the neck." Boudu shows the same disinclination towards learning about cleanliness. He eats messily and spills things everywhere, but sees no need to clean. When he spills wine on the table and Emma sprinkles salt on the stain to soak up the wine, he responds by pouring more wine on top of it — to soak up the salt, of course. The purpose of the fundamentals of middle class life eludes him: he eats when he's hungry, wears clothes that simply cover him in the most basic way, and doesn't really care about much of anything, besides the black dog who wanders away at the beginning of the film, initially upsetting Boudu enough to trigger a suicide attempt but then seemingly forgotten soon after.

What's interesting about Renoir's film is how thoroughly it destabilizes questions of audience sympathy, completely disrupting any attempts to figure out where the film's own sympathies might lie. Lestingois is a harmless, kindly if somewhat silly old man, an adulterer with literary pretensions who enjoys making florid, stylized declarations of love to his frivolous maid. Lestingois might be a representative of the bourgeois but he's a surprisingly sympathetic one, just as Boudu is a surprisingly unsympathetic lower-class bum; this is no simplistic social commentary piece. It's undeniable that Boudu is crass and ungrateful and often downright rotten, willfully making a mess of his host's home by wiping shoe polish on his bed and flooding his kitchen. He's also, in his treatment of women, similar to Lestingois in his flirtatiousness, and in other ways even more despicable than his host, who at worst is a dirty old man. Boudu, on the other hand, is a rapist, assaulting Lestingois' wife at one point, though Renoir makes the scene especially distasteful when, afterward, he shows the woman getting up from the bed with a big smile on her face, having at some point given in and enjoyed the rape. At the same time, Simon's performance goes a long way towards ensuring that Boudu, even at his most destructive and hateful, is at heart a lovable tramp, funny and playful and light-hearted. It's a masterful comic performance, whether in the broad gestures (the way he rolls his eyes with pleasure when eating or hitting on a girl) or the subtler touches (the stiff-kneed walk that's his closest approximation of formality).


Boudu's roughness and casual disregard for conventions finds its aesthetic equivalent in Renoir's rough, ragged visual sensibility. Renoir's images here are rarely conventional, but instead seem to have been improvised on the fly. Figures shift unpredictably in and out of focus, and the occasional coordinated camera move seems strangely at odds with the prosaic, shabby quality of the images. At one point, the camera pans across the Lestingois home, catching from a distance the action happening in rooms faintly visible down long corridors: first, Boudu and the family eating dinner, then following the maid from room to room as she putters around at her work, finally coming forward to meet the camera at the last room along the tracking shot's path. It all seems somehow accidental, the edges intentionally left frayed, glimpses of events caught haphazardly even within the context of camera moves that must have been elaborately timed and planned out. Renoir finds himself, aesthetically, somewhere between the bourgeois respectability of Lestingois and the rough carelessness of Boudu, going to great lengths in order to appear not to care. There's something endearing about the looseness of Renoir's aesthetic, which in its own way is as playful and sprightly as Simon's performance.

The film's theme of bourgeois respectability being upturned culminates in the final scene, when Boudu literally overturns an entire boat full of fancily dressed wedding guests, then proceeds to calmly, lazily swim away from his own wedding. Not only does this put a new perspective on Boudu's earlier "drowning" — he could swim all along? — but it is his flight from the threat of becoming bourgeois himself, of settling down into a loveless marriage, a copy of Lestingois' own. Boudu earlier spit into the pages of a book about marriage, so it's not so surprising that he should flee from this ultimate signifier of respectability. He's content in his tramp's rags, lying in the grass chomping on a crust of bread he's begged from strangers. Renoir's film spends its final moments with the contented Boudu on the riverbank, then tracks back along the river to find the bourgeois, soaking wet and distressed, huddled together looking miserable in the wake of Boudu's devastation. This is, in its odd way, Renoir's happy ending, embracing the anarchy of Boudu, the unfocused destructiveness that causes him to leave a messy trail of filth and garbage everywhere he goes.