The Cameraman's Revenge

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.

Love Parade was fine, but 109 minutes of it was slightly much. Monte Carlo improves on it by being 20 minutes shorter, and an improved sense of pace is definitely apparent. Also, the music this time round is markedly better, “Beyond the Blue Horizon” becoming a particular hit in a way that I don’t think any of the songs from the previous film could’ve done… Anyway, we begin with Jeanette MacDonald fleeing marriage this time rather than trying to get into one, ending up in Monte Carlo with not a lot of money in her purse and not much luck adding to that sum at the gambling tables; she attracts the interest of a visiting count but doesn’t reciprocate it, so he hits upon the novel idea of posing as a hairdresser to get close to her. The credits list Booth Tarkington’s Monsieur Beaucaire as a partial source for the film (otherwise mostly taken from some German play), which leads to one of the funnier examples of the play-within-a-play device commenting on the action of the play it’s embedded in I’ve seen when the countess goes to an operatic rendition of the tale near the film’s end. The DVD notes reckon Jack Buchanan’s not exactly a match for the unavailable Maurice Chevalier, and he’s not exactly the world’s finest singer here, but I thought he was OK generally; anyway, MacDonald’s countess is really the main figure and she’s fine at this sort of thing. Unlike the previous film, there’s no secondary couple, although Claud Allister is good as the cloddish duke the countess flees from marrying (this is her third such attempt to escape him, and with good reason). Like I said, though, the film’s comparative brevity is what serves it best; I don’t know if Lubitsch set out to make it shorter than Love Parade, but it was a good move anyway. Not terribly consequential, but good fun.

Breaking new ground here with what is, technically, the first musical reviewed on the blog* (That’s Entertainment being a compilation documentary). More Lubitsch over the next day or two, this time from the Eclipse box of his early Paramount musicals, so we’ve leapt quite some way in time and space from those German films of his we saw recently… by this time he was established in Hollywood, just signed to Paramount, and ready to tackle the new sound technology (the silent The Patriot apparently had talking sequences in 1928 but I don’t know if they were done by him or not). Apart from making pretty much instant stars of its two leads (Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette Macdonald), it also apparently pioneered the operetta style of musical where the songs are part of the story, as opposed to the revues and stage-based stories that otherwise predominated in early musicals. Interesting to see this again after Applause; I first saw this some 12 years ago in one of David Stratton’s classes, at which time it seemed about as advanced as a 1929 talkie was likely to get (especially by comparison with Alibi, which we saw the week before), and I suppose it was, though next to Mamoulian’s film you can see a degree of comparative stiffness, some quite lengthy static takes… IMDB says it was actually shot silent and completely post-dubbed, but I call bullshit on that, it doesn’t look silent-shot to me. Story is a nice little battle-of-the-sexes job, Chevalier’s womanising count marries MacDonald’s queen but he’s really the “housewife” in the arrangement as he has nothing to do except just be the Prince Consort until tables turn in the last act. Songs didn’t strike me as terribly interesting, but they’re pulled off nicely enough by the film’s stars (Lupino Lane and Lillian Roth, his and her servants respectively, also get to do good stuff as the film’s other couple), and the whole thing works quite well as a successful transition into post-silent Hollywood for Lubitsch.

(* Whoops! Guess which fuckwit forgot until two days after writing this that The Cocoanuts was actually a musical as well…)

When your New Year’s Eve plans unexpectedly fail, what more can a poor boy do except be left agog at the mind-boggling camp of Esther Williams’ swimming sequences? (To say nothing of Mickey Rooney in blackface!) That was how I saw in 2011, in a fairly bad mood that was, admittedly, transformed somewhat by a bit of alcohol and this famous bit of Golden Age nostalgia after the midnight fireworks… This celebration of MGM’s 50th anniversary will itself turn 37 this year (it’s about six months older than me) and offers a certain insight, I suppose, into its own time; interesting to see that minstrel show bit from 1941 not only included but included without any comment, as if MGM thought that 1974 audiences might not be, you know, bothered by it or something. But not only did they celebrate a past era, they marked the end of their own, with all the linking introductions being shot on the old MGM backlot which would be demolished once filming was over; I did like that the various hosts didn’t hide how shabby the backlot was by this time, it kind of enhanced that end-of-era aspect. As for me, with a literal handful of exceptions, the musical genre isn’t one I’m normally attracted to, but it was NYE, I was at home and in the mood for something light, this suited ideally… Nostalgia always sells well and fuelled this film’s success in the Watergate era, but now it carries a further nostalgic charge in the digital age, with its celebration of some quite amazing athleticism, and the necessity for possessing certain skills and talents that couldn’t be compensated for by technological enhancement quite as readily as they could now. Astaire had to be able to actually pull off those moves in long shot and long takes; Berkeley’s dancers had to be actually able to arrange themselves in those shapes. If That’s Entertainment does amusingly admit there weren’t many differences between the various Rooney/Garland films, it also pointed out the fact that some sort of real artistry was involved in making these things, and I can appreciate that if I don’t always appreciate the films themselves.

I’m surprised quite often by chance DVD discoveries, with the local availability of The Cocoanuts being a recent one. Universal have started a new budget line called Studio Classics, a fairly random assortment of titles by the look of things, with this being the most random; even for a $10 budget release this is hardly an obvious choice, neither their best nor their best-known film… I didn’t realise until tonight that, owing to the limitations of early sound technology, every bit of paper in the film had to be soaking wet to stop the rustling overwhelming the microphones (now that I know this, of course, it’s blindingly obvious on screen, particularly at the start of the “why a duck” scene). But the film is a victim of the time of its making in other ways, though, not least its propensity to visual stasis (most of “why a duck” plays as a single unbroken shot lasting nearly five minutes) and generally uninventive camera work; the film began life as a stage musical and pretty much remained one on the screen too. And, of course, it suffers the same problem that most of the brothers’ films did, i.e. it’s only particularly interesting when they themselves are on screen, meaning it’s kind of bitty; parts of it are screamingly funny, the rest (which amounts to most of the film’s actual plot involving a jewel theft and romance between the supporting characters) isn’t. I wonder if it’s not just as well that a large chunk of the film may in fact be lost; the existing print itself is apparently missing a few minutes (the DVD print is very obviously patched together from multiple sources of visibly and audibly varying quality), but the preview print apparently ran nearer to 140 minutes—the lost footage may have included scenes in which the ironically top-billed Zeppo was actually given stuff to do—and, on the basis of the existing film, another three-quarters of an hour of it would’ve been ludicrous. Hard to recommend except for historical reasons, really, but if you want a cheap PAL standard DVD of the film then the Australian one is obviously hard to beat…