The Cameraman's Revenge

The Nut (1921): At this point the box breaks the chronological continuity it’s otherwise maintained, and probably rightly so; by this time Fairbanks had already unleashed The Mark of Zorro but was evidently still unsure about pursuing that direction any further, and so produced this one last attempt at his established style. His expectations of it being a hit like his earlier works were unexpectedly dashed, and only confirmed that the Zorro model was what he should actually continue with. I have to say, though I’ve enjoyed this collection by and large, the films haven’t really benefitted from being watched all in a row like this, and The Nut was evidently the point where audiences back in the day had seen just one reiteration too many of the Fairbanks formula. This time he’s an eccentric, not altogether competent inventor trying (and failing) to help his love interest with a project of her own, has to save her from the evil clutches of another very bad man… yeah. It’s minor, though probably not actually bad as such; it actually does have some rather good moments. But after all those other films in which Doug does much the same thing, it probably looks weaker than it actually is on the whole. Fortunately he had enough sense to realise he should call time on his proto-Harold Lloyd character and let Lloyd himself take over while he moved elsewhere…

The Mark of Zorro (1920): Where we finally take our leave of Doug as he embarks upon the second stage of his career. Though what’s interesting is that, to some extent, Don Diego/Zorro isn’t too far removed from his earlier characters, there’s still a kind of “lamb into lion” moment at the end when he finally reveals that the hapless fop Don Diego was Zorro the masked avenger all along… it’s just that this time the lamb seems to be more of a mask for the lion. Whatever way you want to look at it, this is tremendous stuff, to the point where I’m left wondering why audiences in 1920 might have a problem with him changing tack in this manner; he’d clearly let himself get into a rut and his contemporary comedies were evidently starting to wear thin with him and his viewers, and this seems like the best thing he could’ve done to get out of that groove and into a new one. Plentiful action, a nice bit of romance, all of that, no wonder it was a major hit back in the day and kind of invented its own genre (plus, by Bob Kane’s admission, we wouldn’t have Batman without it, so here’s something for the Christopher Nolan mafia to look back to). A suitably triumphant end to the Douglas Fairbanks box.

When the Clouds Roll By (1919): As comedy premises go, trying to drive someone to suicide is, well, an interesting one, I suppose… In this film Doug is the unwitting victim of a (literally) mad scientist’s experiment in seeing how far someone can be pushed before they snap, a project involving filling the poor bastard so full of superstitious obsession he can barely function. When he meets the love of his life, the doctor’s plan is complicated, but not quite thwarted, as he uses this to his own advantage (further tying it into the film’s main subplot). All this action kicks off with a scene that is quite astounding; after a bad night’s dinner (in which we even see the food doing acrobatics in his stomach), Doug retires to a bad night’s sleep and a short but nonetheless amazing dream sequence. I think I may be right in saying this business—which features the original version of the “walking on the ceiling” scene Fred Astaire did decades later in Royal Wedding and has him being chased by his poorly digested meal—must’ve been one of the most technically advanced things shot in film history up to that point. It’s still kind of breathtaking. The problem is, it’s so good the rest of the film couldn’t live up to such a beginning. It’s not a bad film by any means (though it never does quite explain how this surprisingly large conspiracy against Doug actually comes about); Victor Fleming had worked with Fairbanks as a cameraman long enough by then that he knew what to do with Doug in his directorial debut. Maybe that’s the problem, as the film does kind of manifest the Fairbanks-by-numbers feel alluded to here. We’ve seen him do this sort of vaguely-clownish-young-man-wakes-up-to-self-saves-day-gets-girl thing a fair bit already…

The Mollycoddle (1920): …and he does it again here, to be sure, playing the somewhat disappointing descendant of a line of rootin’ tootin’ frontiersmen, raised (unlike them) amidst wealth and luxury in Monte Carlo, with Anglophile affectations that earn him the mockery of his “fellow” Americans. The difference here is that Doug has a rather better story in which to play out his “lamb to lion” transformation (neat phrase copped from the DVD booklet); finding him inadvertently en route back to the mother country after said “fellow” Americans prank him, Doug has to square off against Wallace Beery’s boat captain and diamond smuggler, who mistakes him for a secret service agent. It’s probably not the most dramatically convincing “lamb to lion” moment—just being on his native soil again seems to bring out the atavistic he-man in this product of foreign luxury—but who cares, the whole thing actually adds up to something rather excellent. Still, it’s hard to deny that Doug was starting to look his age in this film (mind you, I’m now the age he was when he made this and I only wish I could do a quarter of the things he could), and he must’ve known the time was passing when audiences would accept this sort of thing. Change of direction was in the air…

Reaching for the Moon (1917): With the benefit of hindsight, again, this film’s been viewed to at least some degree as an indication of things to come for Fairbanks. He’s playing a similar sort of character to the one in Wild and Woolly, a young fellow with what I suppose you might call a reasonably rich fantasy life, or, perhaps a bit more kindly, aspirations to greatness. But, as the film’s opening titles remind us, you should be careful what you wish for in case you get it, and the story is an object lesson in that principle, giving the film a kind of “moral tale” quality the previous film didn’t have. Doug finds himself the king of Vulgaria one day, but being King isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; there’s assassins to dodge, a pretender to the throne looking to bump him off, a not terribly appealing princess to marry, etc… All this business is eventually revealed as a dream, with Doug having learned his lesson thereby, though quite what the lesson is I’m not sure; is the film saying it’s better to be ambitious within your means or to not be ambitious at all and to just settle for what you’ve got? Either way it gives a slightly melancholy if not bitter cast to the happy ending. The Vulgaria stuff is great, though, especially the fête on the canal where he has to dodge multiple attempts on his life; this has some of the best stunt action we’ve seen from him so far.

A Modern Musketeer (1917): As I said earlier, quite a few of Fairbanks’ early films have vanished, including—according to the DVD booklet—six he made after this one, which has itself only recently returned from the land of the lost (only the first half of the film was known to exist for some decades). I’m pleased that it has, cos it’s probably the best film in this set so far, there’s a real feeling of Fairbanks at the height of his powers; and there’s no lesson for him to learn in this one, it’s far more straight ahead “go out there and be heroic”. Here he’s Ned Thacker, born during a cyclone to a mother enamoured of The Three Musketeers, and consequently absorbing both those influences into himself; young Ned’s a tearaway stifled by the confines of his small Kansas town, and so off he goes out west. I listened to the audio commentary, by Messrs Vance & Maietta who also wrote the DVD booklet, and they make a point about Fairbanks’ characters being this sort of out-of-time figure, which is kind of literally illustrated by two short scenes of Fairbanks as the original D’Artagnan; apparently he was already interested in trying his hand at a costume picture, but hedged his bets by sticking these scenes in an otherwise modern picture. They do underscore the nature of Ned, though, who winds up having to save his love interest from both an Indian “chief” and the thorough cad looking to marry her, all against the astounding backdrop of the Grand Canyon (which, as the commentary observes, was still a fairly obscure place to many people in 1917); whereas before Doug has been capable of doing heroic stuff, here he is a hero, which is a different thing. Exuberant, terrific fun.

The Matrimaniac (1916): I often talk about the economy of storytelling in older films, and how much less time they usually take to set themselves up and get going. This is a comparatively extreme example, though; clocking in at just 46 minutes (barely feature-length even by 1916 standards), it quite literally cuts to the chase. I’d almost swear it was missing an opening reel to establish the characters, but no, apparently it does just begin in apparent mid-story. Here, Doug is the young man eloping with the love of his life—in broad daylight through the front door of the house, no less—in the face of opposition from her father and another suitor. Quite what Doug has done to offend the old man (apart from merely existing, perhaps) is never explained; we simply begin kind of in medias res with Doug deflating the tyres on the old boy’s car so he can’t chase them once they begin their flight. Still, he’s not going to let a minor thing like that stop him from interfering in his daughter’s happiness. Fun (I particularly enjoyed the scenes where Doug and the hapless minister he’s roped in to perform the ceremonial duties are hamstrung by an unhelpful mule), although hard not to feel there wasn’t something missing. Like motivation for the plot.

Wild and Woolly (1917): Again, Fairbanks plays a part I could easily imagine Harold Lloyd having done in the following decade. He’s the son of a New York-based railroad magnate who’s grown rich off sending his railroads out west, and the son has accordingly grown up a fanatic for the old west. When a business opportunity in Arizona pops up, Doug finally gets his chance to actually head west for the first time in his life, and the folks running the place decide the best way to get him on side is to dress the place up like the 1880s frontier town it stopped being long ago so it lives up to his fantasy of the old west. Little do they all realise some real wild west business is about to go down. Given the film’s intention as a spoof of the “eastern westerner” story, and the way it’s about the distance between the old west and the “modern” world, it’s worth remembering just how far the early movie era overlapped with the old west; Buffalo Bill Cody, after all, died only a couple of months before this appeared, and he did a fair bit towards packaging the idea of the “wild west” as a performance of the sort the townsfolk stage here. By now Fairbanks himself had moved from Triangle, under the aegis of D.W. Griffith, to his own production company, but he obviously retained some lessons from Griffith; the climax of the film plays out not unlike one of his films (maybe if The Battle at Elderbush Gulch had been funnier. We’ll say nothing of how the two films treat their Indians). Apparently this was one of Fairbanks’ favourites, and I can see why; his character may be a bit of a buffoon living a bit of a fantasy, but he can turn on actual heroics when required.

Moving onto another of the numerous DVD box sets I’ve been accruing in recent months… this time the early works of Douglas Fairbanks; the DVD booklet makes a case for him as the comparatively forgotten man of silent cinema even though he was one of the top stars of his age. Insofar as I myself know him, it’s only from a few of his big 1920s actioners, so seeing him start out in small comedy is going to be interesting… As far as I can tell, quite a number of his early films have gone the way of most silent cinema, but there seem to be several more still extant than what’s in the box, so I presume what we have here is supposed to be a representative sample. Let’s start, then…

His Picture in the Papers (1916): His third film, seems like a fair enough place to start. Here he’s the son of a health food magnate whose enthusiasm for the family business is decidedly less than that of his old man; after his two sisters appear in a vegetarian magazine promoting the business, dad insists he find a way to do the same if he expects to inherit it and marry his intended beloved. Once he has actually has to do something the film starts taking off as Douglas has to come up with ideas to publicise himself, and also ultimately defeat the gang of crooks bedevilling his future father-in-law; the action climax is a nice foretaste of things to come.

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916): Curious that Fairbanks began in features and only made this one two-reeler once he was established. He apparently hated this astoundingly odd little number, which was made twice with different directors and the participation of no less a figure than Tod Browning; in it he plays drug-fuelled scientific detective Coke Ennyday, sent to bust a drug-smuggling ring trafficking the very stuff he needs in quantities even Aleister Crowley might’ve thought excessive. It’s eccentric stuff on many levels and I’m not really sure it works (and the twist ending shows, a little sadly, that American audiences in 1916 apparently couldn’t be expected to just accept the plain fucking bizarre on its own terms); somehow I’m happy to know it exists, though.

Flirting With Fate (1916): Doug plays a struggling artist; unlucky at making money or making love, he decides to end it all… equally unlucky at suicide, however, he hires a hitman to bump him off. Suddenly luck comes his way and life is worth living again… but the hitman is still out there. The film was criticised in its day, and I think not unfairly, for taking too long to set up the situation, but once the comic business gets going it’s pretty good stuff (I just wish there’d been a little bit more of it after that buildup), as we watch the increasingly paranoid Doug freak out as he tries to avoid the hitman he assumes is still after him, unaware the latter has undergone his own character arc. It’s this aspect that really gives the film its comic flavour.

As a parenthetic note, it’s kind of interesting to see Fairbanks doing the sort of thing Harold Lloyd might well have done in the following decade, there’s a certain similarity of character, although obviously Lloyd was still pretty low-level at the time Fairbanks’ star was rising fast. These films certainly give a feeling of being “early”, too, though I don’t know if I’m just reading them from hindsight… obviously in 1916 no one knew where his career would go in the following decade, but from my perspective nearly a century later I suppose hindsight is inescapable. Knowing where he would go, I got a sense from these films of Fairbanks trying to work out what it was he should be doing. Still, like I said, that’s probably just hindsight talking. Going to enjoy the rest of this set, I think.

Theodor Adorno may have denied poetry after Auschwitz, but I aver screwball comedy after Shoah. Almost anything would seem frivolous after Lanzmann’s epic, and with that in mind I decided I may as well do it properly. This is another one of those classics I suppose I really should’ve seen a lot of years ago, indeed I’m sure the library’s got it on DVD, but I haven’t until now (copy downloaded from the Internet Archive)… At any rate, we’re dealing with high 30s Hollywood comedy here, starting from a marvellously tasteful premise… Godfrey is a “forgotten man”, one of the many victims of the Great Depression, and also a designated object in a “scavenger hunt” for the amusement of an assortment of upper-class twits. “Rescued” from the city dump, Godfrey becomes butler to a family of said twits, and it’ll take a fairly special butler to withstand them. As the film unfolds, we discover Godfrey is indeed no ordinary butler. I suppose this is a near perfect example of the sort of thing it is, a comedy built on the sort of premise that could perhaps only have worked in the 1930s and which could never possibly be taken as realistic, and populated by figures as absurd as the situation. And yet somehow there’s a charm to the film that perhaps is also only of its time, and the characters are humanised by the people playing them; there is no denying that the film’s cast is its chief strength, all of the main roles are well played (I particularly liked Mischa Auer’s “gorilla” turn), though obviously the top honours go to William Powell as Godfrey and Carole Lombard as Irene, who adopts him in the scavenger hunt as her “protegé”. A lot of fun.

Yes, I know that’s not the original title, but in this country we know how to spell “aeroplane” correctly and it will only ever be Flying High to me. But never mind that. This is one of my favourite films, which is why it may seem odd that I’ve never actually owned a copy of it. Never even taped it off TV back in the day or anything. And yet if it’s on TV—as it was tonight—I’ll watch it almost every time. (I have a similar relationship to Blazing Saddles, for what it may or may not be worth.) I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, but it must be rather a lot, and it stands up well for me after I don’t know how many repeats… The genius of the thing, of course, is the way in which Zucker Abrahams & Zucker cast actors best known for straight roles and got them to play it as straight as they normally would; accordingly, the best thing the film does is reveal the hitherto untapped comedy potential of Leslie Nielsen (who plays straighter than almost anyone else in the film), paving the way for what I’m increasingly sure was the ZAZ team’s masterpiece, the Police Squad TV series. It’s the cinematic equivalent of comfort food, to some extent, something you’ll watch because you’ve seen it often enough that you know what’s going to happen, although in this case it’s been long enough since I did last watch it that I’d forgotten a few of the jokes (particularly the one where you think Robert Stack is looking at himself in the mirror until he moves forward out of the doorway). One of those films that’s just nice to revisit when you want something familiar and unthreatening; delightful to be reacquainted again tonight.

We’re not quite done with Chevalier and MacDonald yet, though… After seeing those Lubitsch musicals, it was interesting to see another director using them, particularly when said director is Rouben Mamoulian, who we saw making his first film a few days ago. How would it compare, particularly given what Jonathan Rosenbaum says about the critical debate over whether it was imitation Lubitsch or pisstake Lubitsch. The idea that it might be its own beast apparently doesn’t occur… either way, with all due respect to uncle Ernst, his Armenian counterpart outdid him on this one; much as I liked Lubitsch’s musicals, the music was, to be sure, often the weakest part of them. Mamoulian had no such trouble; apart from his film being more actually “musical” than Lubitsch’s (particularly those last two), he had Rodgers & Hart on his side. Not only more, but better. The story is not a million miles away from what we saw in Monte Carlo, except this time it’s Chevalier’s humble Parisian tailor inadvertently forced to play a baron when he goes to collect a debt from one of his noble customers and arrives in the middle of a gathering of “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible”. If Applause often felt like Mamoulian saying “fuck you” to the Hollywood technicians struggling with sound in 1929, this is much more relaxed and genial, the most obvious examples of overt technique being the stag hunt (which begins with comical fast motion and ends with even funnier slow motion) and the handling of the song “Isn’t  It Romantic”, passed among various characters like “Wise Up” in Magnolia but with far less pretension. I’ve said before that I wished I’d known some films would be so good or I would’ve seen them years before I did, and this is one of those (although years ago I just couldn’t get my hands on the thing to watch it); it really is kind of tremendous.

We end this tour of Lubitsch’s middle period for now with probably the best and funniest film in the Lubitsch musicals box. That said, if The Smiling Lieutenant wasn’t the happiest production, this one was positively fraught… while working on Broken Lullaby (his last drama film and a big flop), he was also assigned to oversee the then up-and-coming director George Cukor, who was making another Chevalier/MacDonald musical; he began by throwing out the script and changing the film to a remake of his own 1924 film The Marriage Circle, then started directing scenes, then gradually the whole thing, until it all ended in a lawsuit over who should get directorial credit. You would never guess any of this from the film itself, of course, which presents us with another love triangle, or a love shape of some sort; unusually for this set, Chevalier and MacDonald actually begin as a perfectly happy married couple, Andre and Colette, but marital bliss finds itself shaken up by a visit from Colette’s old friend Mitzi. When the latter has an unexpected encounter with Andre in a taxi, it sets a nice bit of infidelity drama in motion, made all the more amusing by the fact that Andre doesn’t really want an affair with Mitzi and that Colette suspects he’s having an affair with another woman entirely. Meanwhile Colette also has unwanted attention of her own to face from Adolphe (subject of perhaps the funniest scene in this entire collection: when Adolphe asks his butler why he lied to him about Andre and Colette hosting a costume party, the latter replies about wanting to see his master wearing tights). At 78 minutes, it’s the shortest of these four films, and bears witness to everything I’ve ever said about the superior storytelling economy of older films. A successful conclusion to a generally successful box set from Eclipse…

Given that this film was thought lost for decades (I read conflicting stories of where and when it was rediscovered), it’s scrubbed up remarkably well. Similarly, just as it bears comparatively few scars from decades of disappearance, it shows few signs of having been the not entirely happy production it apparently was; both Lubitsch and Maurice Chevalier were having off-screen problems, and there were “issues” with the film’s two leading ladies, the reasonably established Claudette Colbert and newcomer Miriam Hopkins. (The latter was apparently not a popular figure in Hollywood, and Lubitsch was one of the few people who got on well with her.) It does, however, show signs of the abrupt decline of the musical genre after its equally abrupt birth with the sound film; by 1931 American audiences had tired of the hundred-odd musicals Hollywood had unleashed in the previous two years and many films shot as musicals found themselves being released minus their songs. The Smiling Lieutenant kept its songs, but they’re noticeably fewer in number than in the last two films. This time we’ve got a love triangle again, this time with Chevalier as the victim; he’s the Viennese lieutenant of the title, who falls in love with Colbert’s violin-playing women’s orchestra leader, but who inadvertently insults Hopkins’ princess when she and her father the Kaiser of Flausenthurm (with an “h”, most definitely) are visiting Vienna, and winds up married to her rather than the actual love of his life. I see other reviews of the other two films we’ve seen sigh about them ultimately ending by reasserting traditional male dominance of the relationship and similar attitudes, etc, and Smiling Lieutenant kind of does that, but it’s interesting to see the love rivals uniting in the end as Colbert shows Hopkins how to modernise herself to retain “their” man. It’s a markedly more bittersweet ending than I’d anticipated.