The Cameraman's Revenge

We end our tour of the Garbo Silents DVD with this film (I know the surviving nine-minute fragment of The Divine Woman is on there, too, but how do you review something like that?), whose title is fortunately the most nondescript thing about it. Having fought the law, as it were, over her earlier films in which she kept getting cast as a home-wrecking seductress, Garbo is cast here as a seductress out to wreck a bit more than just home… it’s pre-war Europe and Greta’s a spy for the Russians, while Conrad Nagel is a captain in the Austrian army entrusted with delivering some very special papers to Berlin; needless to say said papers end up in her hands rather than whatever German official was supposed to get them, and trouble ensues… especially since the two have already struck up a flourishing little romance before this. For the third time in this set, too, the film has a scene of the male lead trying to strangle Garbo; granted this time it’s just an act of imagination, but it’s a strange running theme… Apparently Gilbert wasn’t considered for the male lead cos the novel on which the film was based found itself being reworked by the writers into a “Garbo film”, so the male role was actually downgraded some and it was felt a Big Star like Gilbert wouldn’t have been happy with that, so Nagel got it instead. I suppose he’s OK, but this really is another case of “beautiful images of beautiful women” here, and the images are, to be sure, often stunning (she looks more like “Garbo” here than in the other films, if you know what I mean); the commentary offered the interesting statistic that William Daniels was cameraman on 20 out of her 24 Hollywood films, which raises the interesting question of just how far was “Garbo” his creation. I don’t buy her as a spy for anyone and the whole thing has the substance of a neutrino, but audiences then (and I suppose now) weren’t watching the film for the plot. It was things like Garbo lighting those candles or walking through the doorway on the train that made this film a million-dollar hit. Beautiful images of beautiful women indeed.

I first saw this ten years ago, it was at one of David Stratton’s Continuing Education film history classes. Liked it then, liked it again tonight. In this film one of Hollywood’s great love affairs first reared its head, namely that of Greta Garbo & John Gilbert, although in the film the real affair is really between Gilbert and his male co-star Lars Hanson; this is a “bromance” if ever there was. The two boys are lifelong friends, the seeds of whose mutual downfall are sown early in the piece when they get home on leave from military service and Gilbert first casts eyes on Garbo; complications ensue, of course, but it’s not until after they’ve ensued and Garbo has in fact married the other man that complications ensue in earnest. I’ve seen it dismissed in one online review as being a bit soap operatic, and it is, but it’s still well done; it’s funnier than The Temptress and also more focused, in that here Garbo only has two men to pay attention to rather than (as in the other film) her husband, his best friend, her sugar daddy, the bandit chief and various Argentinian workers. This was nearly the end of her film career, too, as she famously went on strike in protest at what she thought were the shit scripts MGM kept feeding her, and had Flesh not been a big hit (made some $1.2m in an age when that was actually worth something) she might not have prevailed. Most interesting DVD feature was the alternate ending, cos 1) I didn’t know it existed and 2) unlike The Temptress, whose other ending I did know of, it actually serves more as an epilogue, an extension of the “real” ending rather than a replacement for it. Here both men have lost the girl, but Gilbert gets the other girl, Hanson’s little sister, who’s been a secondary “good girl” presence. I don’t think it’s a bad ending—hardly unexpected when earlier in the film Gilbert’s mother wishes she would marry him—but it did strike me that someone at MGM must’ve thought it necessary that Gilbert should get a girl, if not the girl, so that it didn’t look like he’d got the boy instead…

Ah, Greta. Looking back, the erstwhile Ms Gustafsson was one of  Hollywood’s less likely success stories; despite having wanted to be an actress, all she wound up really wanting was to be left alone. The making of this, her second Hollywood film, was so fraught with horror for her it’s a wonder she made any more films after it; her sister died during the shoot, her mentor Mauritz Stiller was fired as director just ten days into filming, which then dragged on for four months, and in the end she seems to have hated the result as much as the experience of making it. But MGM had a hit on their hands, whatever their rising star may have felt. Story comes from that Blasco-Ibanez fellow and is full of the rip-roaring melodrama and slightly ponderous sentiment of the other two 1920s films I’ve seen taken from his novels (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Mare Nostrum), Garbo as the vamp who leaves a trail of death in her wake and Antonio Moreno as the man trying to resist her temptations. I watched the DVD with the commentary on, which I don’t usually do on a film I haven’t seen before, but on a silent film it’s easy to get away with; commentator Mark Vieria is inclined more to discuss technical particularities like film stock, lighting, that sort of thing, but he offers some other good points like his belief that, contrary to what some say, none of Stiller’s footage is in the finished film because Antonio Moreno has a moustache throughout the film which Stiller hated and made him shave off, and also a statement about how what MGM were really about selling beautiful images of beautiful women. If we disregard the frankly overcooked story, it’s otherwise hard to deny that The Temptress sells in spades. Though for me the highpoint is the whip duel between Moreno and Roy D’Arcy (once again letting his moustache and his teeth do most of the work); the blood may be fake but it’s still startling, and the fight itself involved no stuntmen or anything like that. It’s terrific, even if the film as a whole isn’t.

I’m going to reserve judgement on this, cos although I couldn’t say I liked it at all I don’t think the film was served at all either by First Run Features’ rather shabby DVD treatment—non-anamorphic transfer, kind of average source print, and mediocre at best sound… there were times I wondered if they hadn’t used a VHS master rather than the laserdisc master they apparently did use (or, rather, the one the company who originally released the thing on DVD back in 1997 used; First Run basically seem to have just cloned that version), especially right at the very end once the credits were finished and the MPAA R rating thing appeared, which seemed strange cos I’d have thought people might’ve worked out the film was R-rated by that point, and all of a sudden what looks like a trailer for something else plays but then stops abruptly and it goes back to the DVD menu. Curious. Anyway, as I said, I didn’t find the film that enjoyable (and I really didn’t like Tim McIntire’s voice for the dog, it didn’t work for me at all), but I will concede a better DVD presentation might not make it look so poor. I will, however, ask this about one particular aspect of the film, i.e. Harlan Ellison’s loathing of the film’s “moronic, hateful chauvinist last line”, not actually written by him: one, why didn’t he insist upon its removal, and two, if he thought that line, which he didn’t write, was hateful and chauvinist, what about the rest of the film which is based on what he did write? All that last line actually does is make kind of explicit the ending of the original story, which implies the same thing as the film shows us. And Vic, the hero, is still a predatory rapist who’ll apparently fuck anything with a vagina and a pulse (well, as one scene implies, maybe not even the latter) and uses Blood the dog to sniff females out for him to have his way with, much as Ellison wrote him. Mind you, it wouldn’t be Harlan Ellison if he couldn’t find something to be a total shitcock about…

There are certain films where it doesn’t matter how widely acclaimed as a classic, best film of all time, etc are: you just have no particular inclination to see them. There may or may not be any good reason for this; you may just have seen one too many glowing reviews, you may not care for other work by the people involved, or there may be something entirely irrational involved that defies explanation. When it comes to Goodfellas and me, it was probably a bit of all three, particularly the consideration that I’ve never been a Scorsese fan… but beyond that I seemed to have a special antipathy towards Goodfellas that I don’t understand myself. I mean, I recall one time years ago it was showing on TV and thinking to myself “hmm, suppose I should actually watch that”… sat down to do so, got to the end of the opening bit where they shoot up the guy in the boot of the car, and gave up on the attempt. I really have no idea why. Anyway, as part of the ongoing exchange program with Brendan, I got a loan of it from him and finally watched it today. Now Brendan has a special antipathy towards Ray Liotta that may have coloured my own reception of the film, but I don’t think so. The problem’s not Ray Liotta so much as it is Henry Hill, the character. He’s not actually that interesting, and for the most part Liotta doesn’t make him so; he never looks entirely a part of the crowd he runs with somehow, and I know that’s partly the point (he makes it explicit later in the film how he will never be a “made man” because he’s not 100% Italian, he will always be something of an outsider), but it’s distracting. I was surprised by how secondary Robert De Niro was in the film, and his character was far more interesting, responsible for the 1978 Lufthansa heist. Frankly I’d much rather have seen a film about him than Henry Hill.

And so we come to the short-lived reign of Timothy Dalton. One of the more interesting facts I’ve learned from reading up on the history of the Bond films is that Dalton was actually first offered the role as long ago as 1968, turning it down then cos he thought he was too young, and then he turned it down again in 1980 or so cos he feared having to make films like Moonraker. Cubby Broccoli was obviously determined, though, and finally secured him for the first post-Moore Bond film… was it worth the wait? I’d seen the film only once before (I never saw Licence to Kill, which situation should finally be rectified next week) and I don’t recall liking it much back then. While I enjoyed it more tonight, to be sure, it was kind of instructive actually seeing it in its correct place in the sequence, cos I realised just how poor Dalton was at delivering the attempts at humour that either Connery or Moore would’ve delivered with aplomb. It’s like the script was written to give him things to do that he knew he’d be uncomfortable doing, and unfortunately that discomfort registers. The Living Daylights was an attempt to try and make the Bond films a serious affair again, and Dalton pitches his performance accordingly; it’s bereft of the wit Moore found in it. It was a noble attempt, of course, to harden the series up, but perhaps too much of a change… I don’t know. Paradoxically, Dalton almost seems too young in the role after we’ve seen Moore grow old in it; Dalton was the same age Connery was when he quit but looks a lot younger than he did by that point. I’ve said nothing about Maryam D’abo cos, well, there’s nothing much to say about her really. On the whole, though, it seemed like a better film than I remembered it being, and seems to have been pretty well received. Little did anyone expect, I suppose, that both Dalton and the series as a whole were just one film away from early retirement…

We go from a film that’s partly lost to a film that was thought almost entirely lost for decades. As this article observes, MGM’s contract with author Rafael Sabatini stipulated that they either had to renew the rights they owned to his book within ten years or else destroy the film, and in 1936 they decided to take the latter option. Why they didn’t think the film might be worth remaking is a question for the ages now, but at any rate the film went unseen again until a print turned up in France a few years ago… the third reel is still missing (as the article indicates, it probably always was missing from that print), but has been neatly bridged with stills and footage from the trailer (which must have turned up somewhere as well). Happily, it’s one of those rediscoveries that was worth being made; it’s not a million miles away from that year’s Don Juan, with Bardelys being one of the great womanisers of his age (if perhaps not quite on the Don’s scale) and mixed up with a bit of court intrigue. But where Juan’s troubles come from the court of the Borgias, Bardelys’ comes (at least in part) from without the court of Louis XIII of which he is a part; challenged to win the love of Mademoiselle Roxalanne de Laverdan (whose family are enemies of the King), he sets out to accept the bet and in the missing reel encounters a young man who’s the leader of the opposition, who inconveniently dies and for whom Bardelys is mistaken by the Laverdan family. Complications ensue, etc. It’s not exactly a lost masterpiece but it is a lot of fun while it lasts, and the star of the show is surely Roy D’Arcy’s moustache; combined with the smile below it, it just radiates badness in a way that John Gilbert’s moustache comes off as roguish but essentially good-natured and fit for a romantic adventure hero in the 1920s’ version of the France of Louis the Just.

One of David Bordwell’s top films of 1919; when I spotted it on a recent excursion to Abbey’s, I thought I might give it a go. Director Robert Reinert appears to be one of the forgotten men of German cinema, seemingly the combined result of his relatively early death (1928), neglect within his own lifetime and loss of most of his work since then, his own propensity for making overblown box-office disasters, and the simple fact that he peaked just before Caligari was released only a couple of months after this film. Nerves is on DVD from Edition Filmmuseum, who’ve restored the film to around 110 minutes. At that length about a third of the film is still lost, but apparently that’s still a big improvement over what had been available hitherto. Elsewhere Bordwell calls it one of the strangest films of the silent era, which judgement I’ll concur with. In 1919 Germany had not only just lost a war, it had undergone a series of uprisings that would continue for years (Adolf Hitler’s 1923 beer hall putsch was just one of them), and Reinert wanted to show the “nervous tension” of the age. This filmic illustration was more than a little mad itself, both in terms of technique and narrative; the latter concerns a far-right aristocrat who is opposed by a populist teacher, plus various relatives of same, all mixed up in a saga of lust, madness, arson, suicide, “hereditary taints”, rioting, etc. The pacing of all this is rendered strange enough by the swathes of missing material, but let’s face it, if the film were intact it’d only be even more excessive. Reinert’s forte was apparently the over-the-top melodrama, and this is nothing if not a striking example of same, so superheated you could warm your house with it for the whole of winter. I’m only sorry the other 50-odd minutes of it is still missing. Must try and find Reinert’s Opium from the same year now…

Another library loan. As I said a while ago, I’ve managed to see almost everything Chaplin made from his Essanay shorts up to The Great Dictator (the exception being The Kid), but somehow I never caught up with any of the handful of films he made after 1940. Tonight, therefore, was about at least partly rectifying an omission… Difficult if not impossible to discuss the film apart from the position Chaplin himself occupied upon its release in 1952; infamously he was locked out of the US upon leaving it to attend the film’s premiere in London, his leftist sympathies making him not exactly welcome at the height of McCarthyism. In the film he is Calvero, the aging formerly great clown of the English music hall who has lost his audience along the way, much as Chaplin himself kind of did with his last film five years before this (Monsieur Verdoux). While you couldn’t say Chaplin was exactly washed up like Calvero, he was certainly conscious of Limelight possibly being his last bow (even though it wasn’t), and there’s a certain irony involved in setting this story of an old performer making his lastt stand in the music hall environment that spawned Chaplin himself but further setting it in 1914, the year Chaplin’s film career suddenly erupted and he himself left the stage behind. Alas, the film’s basic seriousness (it’s a drama rather than a comedy like A Woman of Paris, except Chaplin stars in it this time), while noble and well-intentioned, gradually overwhelms the thing, and by about the halfway point I was begging it to end; 137 minutes of it is only about 10 more than The Great Dictator, but that didn’t drag anywhere near as mercilessly as this film did. If only it had been about three quarters of an hour shorter, I’d be acclaiming it as one of his masterpieces; it’s awash in sentiment, yes, but it’d be far more palatable at much shorter length. Granted, though, it is worth sitting through for those precious few minutes he shares with Buster Keaton near the end.

Hockey politics, a Nazi invasion of Canada, sleepwalking, strange municipal laws, seances, B-grade melodrama reenactments of childhood events that may not have happened performed by actors including one who the narrator claims is really his mother, frozen horses, a daily soap opera whose action over the 50 years  it’s been on has consisted entirely of a man threatening to jump off a building ledge… it’s Guy Maddin’s “docufantasia” My Winnipeg, and it could be described as strange to say the least. My experience of Maddin has hitherto been limited to seeing The Saddest Music in the World (which I recall being kind of befuddled by) and reading more about his fascination with silent cinema and his attempts to try and recreate that style in his own films, fondness for what his IMDB bio calls “lo-fi” techniques like Super 8, that sort of thing, and I knew he had some sort of reputation as an interesting artist among your hardcore cinephile crowd. As such, though I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by the other film, when I found My Winnipeg at the library I thought I should check it out, maybe see if I liked it better, which I probably didn’t. The narrative thread, if you can call it that, concerns “Maddin” trying to escape Winnipeg, the town he’s spent his whole life in, while trying to erect a somewhat absurdist myth about the place. This is done in somewhat fussy style, involving an assortment of period newsreel footage, reenactments, backprojected slides, and Maddin’s own narration (which he sometimes performs live at showings of the film), itself a curious mix of portentous semi-poetry, seemingly genuine anger, and so forth. It’s not uninteresting but something about it never entirely clicked with me so that it never seemed more than mildly amusing, the surrealism felt forced, and even at just 80 minutes it seemed to wear out its welcome well before the end.