Love Me Tonight (1932)

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.

One Hour With You (1932)

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…

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

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.

Monte Carlo (1930)

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.

The Love Parade (1929)

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…)

Applause (1929)

By now I’ve seen enough early talkies to know that, at least on a technical level, Applause really is kind of extraordinary. The DVD reproduces an interview with director Rouben Mamoulian during the film’s making in June 1929, and it’s interesting to see how this stage director making his first film already had clear ideas of what a film should be, and that the newfangled talking film shouldn’t really be any different from the soon to be dead silent films. Remarkably, it’s still apparent that with Applause he was not only determined to put these ideas into practice, he was also largely successful with them; the film is a damn sight livelier visually and aurally than almost any 1928-32 sound film I’ve seen. In spite of which it still somehow manages to feel a lot longer than its 78 minutes, which I suspect may be down to the actual story, which is a titanic downer, a tale of a has-been burlesque star, Kitty, her convent-raised daughter April, and the leech who lives off the fading Kitty and wants to put April on stage in her place to keep the money rolling in. Needless to say, this cannot and does not end well. It’s a bitter affair, and the film’s fortunes were helped neither by its copious censorship problems, nor the fact that it opened just a couple of weeks before a certain stock market crash changed the world. It’s Mamoulian’s technique that makes the film still watchable; he was determined that his camera should not be restrained (no five-minute static “why a duck” scenes for him!) as was the norm with early talkies, and the resulting mobility of the visuals would’ve been remarkable in a silent film, so it’s miraculous here. The acting is similarly far less stiff than what I’ve seen in a lot of other films of this time. If Applause is perhaps mainly of historical interest now, I still have to grant that it feels like the work of a much more experienced director, not one who’d never made a film before…

The Man Who Laughs (1928)

There’s a nice bit in Roger Ebert’s appraisal of this film where he describes it as “one of the final treasures of German silent Expressionism”, which is about right; even though the film was in fact a fully American production, it’s chock full of early ’20s German style. Indeed, ever since then critics have mumped about the style getting in the way of convincing us that we’re looking at a story set in early 1700s England, which may be fair enough but the style is presumably what Universal expected from director Paul Leni, whose background was Expressionism in Germany after all. Film was an attempt to recreate the hits they’d had with Hunchback of Notre Dame and Phantom of the Opera, but by this time Universal no longer had those film’s key ingredient, i.e. Lon Chaney. As such, the solution they found was Leni’s fellow German, Conrad Veidt… Veidt plays Gwynplaine, a man disfigured with a surgically-devised permanent grin; a boy who should’ve been the heir of his father’s peerage thus finds himself a sideshow performer, and in that world he finds acceptance. And then his noble past comes calling. Tempting as it is to imagine Chaney doing this, it has to be said Veidt is excellent; with his mouth prosthetically frozen in that smile, all he has is his eyes, and it’s fascinating to watch the upper half of his face constantly have to contradict the lower half. Usually ascribed to the horror genre, that’s actually misleading cos it’s not really a horror film, but it has an importance for the genre even so: it set the visual tone of the ’30s horrors, and, importantly, it brough Jack Pierce to Universal to do make-up. I’ve waited a remarkable number of years to see this film, and I’m pleased to say it was worth the wait; and though the Movietone music-and-effects soundtrack is problematic at times, let’s be glad Universal didn’t go the whole hog with converting it to a proper talkie. Some films are best left silent…

Orphans of the Storm (1921)

D.W. Griffith was nothing if not forthright about his view of political revolution, as expressed in this film’s opening titles: that sort of thing was all fine and well for the French, but heaven forfend such a thing should ever happen in the US. (There’s a certain mild irony in the way a nation founded in a revolution should then be so afraid of another one happening there—or anywhere else unless it suits their purposes for it to happen—but I suppose that’s always been the problem with revolutionary politics: no one stays a revolutionary once they’re actually in power…) The badness of pre-revolutionary government is something constantly underlined throughout this tale of two young girls with tragically piss-poor timing. Henriette and Louise are adoptive sisters, who travel to Paris to find a cure for the latter’s blindness; they make the mistake of doing so, however, just before revolution breaks out there, and, funnily enough, complications ensue when the two become separated. 150 minutes of this is an awful lot; it’s unquestionably well-staged (especially the eventual outbreak of the revolution, and the ending is hugely thrilling stuff), but the hammer-handed lack of subtlety (and the floridity of some of the melodrama) is too often an obstruction. Indeed, Griffith’s sneering at the aristocracy struck me as being not far removed from the propaganda of the Bolsheviks he so feared (and whose propagandists learned so much about film from Griffith himself), although in fairness he also recognises the failure of the revolutionaries to avoid becoming worse tyrants than the ones they overthrew (which was a bit more than the Soviets were permitted to do, of course). I can see why this was a hit 90 years ago, but I wonder how many of the film’s original audience found the ending as sour as me, ignoring as it does the way in which Danton ended up a victim of the same revolutionary violence the film shows him quelling, and how the “democracy” that followed was wiped out soon after by the dictatorship of Napoleon, who the film never shows at all…

Erotikon (1920)

Interesting to see this after those Lubitsch films, cos Lubitsch himself claimed Erotikon as an influence upon his own later films. That said, he must’ve seen something in it that I didn’t, cos I don’t know that I see much connection with his films. Indeed, it’s a curious comedy that gives off so few signs of actually being one; even a failed comedy usually behaves in a way that you know you’re supposed to laugh at it even if you can’t actually make yourself do so. This one I didn’t know what to do with. If it were a Peter Greenaway film it might be called The Cook, the Professor, His Wife and Her Lover(s), to sum up the romantic situation depicted; Irene is the wife of the Professor, kind of bored in that situation and so she takes up with a flyboy baron on the side but her heart really seems directed at Preben the sculptor. The professor, meanwhile, seems to have a thing for his niece, Marte. She’s the cook in the above equation (mutton and cabbage casserole?). All the ingredients for a romantic comedy (well, OK, so there’s something more creepy than romantic about the professor’s fascination with the niece), and yet, as a few reviews I’ve read (e.g.) observe, it doesn’t really play like what we’d recognise as a romantic comedy. Much of the film’s surprisingly big budget seems to have been spent on the rather epic “ballet-fantasy” theatre scene, depicting an on-stage drama which comments symbolically on the film’s own romantic… whatever the hell shape it is, and which also kind of shows how the film itself could otherwise be read as a drama. Reviews have complained about the Kino DVD’s score, and I tried playing something more jolly, but it didn’t make the film seem any lighter somehow. An odd beast that I’m not sure I particularly liked, but to be honest I’m not really sure what I thought of it at all…