by Judy Jones
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
The Stroheim method: How he’d shot the Death Valley scene in Death Valley (in 132° heat); how he’d made the cast and crew live in the San Francisco house they were using as a set; how he kept his actors working till four in the morning; how no detail, no bit of atmosphere, no bow in the direction of verisimiltude was, for this man, too much. (For other movies, he’d demand that a life-sized replica of Monte Carlo be built, that his movie archdukes wear only authentic medals and have crests on their—perforce—silk underwear.) The fact that he’d submitted a forty-two reel (i.e., ten-hour) movie, edited it to twenty-four reels under duress, then sat back and watched as the studio hacked it—and all its subplots, bit parts, symbolism, and narrative continuity—to ten reels and two and a half hours. Also, the subject matter (avarice and human degradation, dirty dishes and unmade beds, à la Zola), which had one popular critic branding the film “a vile epic of the sewer,” another “the sour crème de la sour crème.” The few colleagues who’d seen the original forty-two-reel version were dumbstruck, enthralled; anybody who saw the ten-reel one had a hard time knowing what was going on. A monumental commercial failure.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
The Stroheim legend—the man more than the movie. How he, a hatter’s son, created himself: the aristocratic past, the monocle, the super-erect posture, the extra-long cigarettes. The fact that while the only version of the film we have is the two-and-a-half-hour one, the complete screenplay does exist, along with a few extra stills—a constant provocation to cinephiles, who keep hoping one of Stroheim’s own original forty-two-reel prints, with coins, fillings, picture frames, and a canary, all allegedly hand-tinted in gold, will turn up. How we still don’t know whether a ten-hour movie narrative is aesthetically, let alone commercially, possible. Then there’s the object lesson for young directors: One is overweening at one’s own expense. Finally, for the trivia buffs, the realization that Zasu Pitts hadn’t always played ditzy manicurists.
THE GOLD RUSH (American, 1925)
Director
Charlie Chaplin. Tripped over his own mystique. The product of a Dickensian English boyhood (complete with drunken father, insane mother, orphanages, and floggings), Chaplin never stopped acting out his anxieties regarding food, security, social injustice, ostracism, bullies, and the human condition. Touring America in a music-hall act, he had been discovered by Mack Sennett, who employed him in a series of shorts as a puppet and pratfaller. Within a year, Chaplin had evolved the Tramp persona, with a cane, a hat, floppy shoes, and a pair of Fatty Arbuckle’s trousers as props, and negotiated a contract to make his own pictures. Ahead lay, in addition to enormous popular success, the acclaim of the culturati; his conviction that he was the Little Man, the Tragic Clown; a loss of touch with his fans, who were being provided with fewer and fewer laughs and more and more sentiment; increasingly “heavy” films (City Lights, 1931; Modern Times, 1936; Monsieur Verdoux, 1947; Limelight, 1952) that garnered mixed reactions; several marriages, most notably his last one, to Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona; deportation from the United States as a Communist sympathizer; a couple of less-than-successful English-made movies, à la A Countess from Hong Kong (1966); and official rehabilitation in the form of a special Oscar in 1972. He died in 1977.
Story
The Lone Prospector (Chaplin) joins mass trek to frozen Alaska gold fields; that’s him looking out at you from the lower left-hand corner of the group picture. Arrives pursued by bear, and with frying pan spanking buttocks at every step. Is isolated in tiny cabin in blizzard with two larger and hungrier prospectors; eats own shoe. Meets dance-hall girl and falls in love, but is stood up on New Year’s Eve, in course of which he dreams he spikes two hard rolls with forks and causes them to do variety of dances (famous sequence, this). Cabin almost falls over cliff. Strikes gold. Boards ship for San Francisco. Runs into dance-hall girl, who, it turns out, loves him back.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
To a degree, comedy in general. Chaplin was simply the favorite in a ragtag, anyone-can-play segment of the industry that boasted Langdon, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and—the only one now regarded as being in Chaplin’s league— Buster Keaton. Primed, the public applauded. To a degree, Chaplin in general, too. The first movie-spawned personality to be widely regarded as a genius, as well as the first international movie star, Chaplin fueled an icons-and-memorabilia industry that compares favorably with those of Mickey Mouse and Harry Potter. The Little Man confronting power and wealth, less hostilely than ambivalently, appealed to the little man in everybody; the only difference was they couldn’t use every last body part to convey the pathos, whimsy, and acuity of it all. As for The Gold Rush itself: Great moments (the bear, the shoe, those rolls, the precipitously placed cabin), with a nice thematic unity that critics had not yet started complaining was undermined by too episodic a structure.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
Most of it’s in the backlash. Chaplin hasn’t been artistically discredited, exactly, but he’s been made to seem self-serving, even circumscribed. The big beneficiary is Keaton, whose The General has replaced Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Modern Times on all-time ten-best lists, as critics rushed to prefer the former’s athletic naturalness and sense of film’s “possibilities” to the latter’s balletic self-consciousness and solipsism. Not that anybody’s denying Chaplin’s genius—only his modesty, sincerity, and devotion to the art form. Flashiest critical line for the undecided to take: that Chaplin, unlike Keaton, put the exterior world behind him—at the expense of his popularity—and lived out of “the interior, almost schizophrenic relationship between director and actor.” (That’s Andrew Sarris, by the way.) A saner tack: Be moved by the grace, the eloquence, the expressiveness of Chaplin’s fingertips, and appreciate how he, like Griffith and Orson Welles, bridges the gap between movies as art and movies as entertainment. POTEMKIN (Russian, 1925)
Director
Sergei Eisenstein, to movies what Freud is to psychology: the theoretician who’s never been surpassed, the practitioner who’s never been entirely superseded. Also, like Freud, the right man in the right place (in this case, Russia) at the right time (the fifteen turbulent years following the revolution, during which Soviet films were the most exciting in the world). You may feel he’s manipulating you, and he is: Eisenstein subscribed to Lenin’s belief that art could influence politics and that “the most important of all the arts, for us, is cinema”; saw that it could not only capture reality, but transmute it, less through the stories it told than through bold imagery, stylized compositions, and, most of all, rhythmic editing. Only twenty-six when he made Potemkin (Russians and purists pronounce that “po-TYOM-kin,” by the way), Eisenstein would live both to employ his genius and to suffer for it. Under Stalin he was alternately purged and reinstated a couple of times a decade until his death in 1948; as personally devastating was his sojourn in Hollywood in the early Thirties, during which he made conversation with Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, posed for press photos with Rin Tin Tin, collaborated unsuccessfully with Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, and watched his dream of filming an epic about Mexico from Toltec days to the present be sandbagged by the capitalists. Other seminal Eisenstein: Strike (1924), Ten Days That Shook the World (a.k.a. October; 1927), the two-part Ivan the Terrible (1942–1946).
Story
It’s 1905. Sailors on the tsarist battleship Potemkin, anchored off the Black Sea port of Odessa, grow tired of, among other things, maggots in their meat. Group of them rebels and is ordered shot by firing squad made up of their mates. “Brothers! Who are you shooting at?” shouts rebels’ ringleader, and rebellion becomes shipwide mutiny. As it happens, the citizens of Odessa— workers, mothers with baby carriages, bearded university professors, plus an amputee and an unforgettable old lady with pince-nez—see rightness in all this, and gaily assemble on the broad white steps in the middle of the town, where, within five minutes
, they are gunned down and trampled on by a couple of hundred Cossack soldiers. But the spirit of revolution lives on. In the final segment, the Potemkin races toward an imperial squadron, prepared to do battle. Guns are drawn on it, but, in the nick of time, it runs up flags spelling out “Join us.” The fleet does not fire. Everybody cheers.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
First off, that Potemkin didn’t look like a movie, didn’t look staged (as the high-artifice films that were coming out of Germany did) or even acted; in fact, it read as a newsreel. Second, that it was such powerful stuff: Nobody who’s seen the Odessa Steps sequence will ever forget it (or admit that he has, anyway). Of course, that’s not to say that he’ll be aware of what went into it: on the one hand, of Eisenstein’s commitment to “actuality,” to using real people rather than actors (a furnace man as the ship’s doctor, a gardener as the ship’s priest, and sailors as the sailors) and shooting on location rather than in the studio; on the other, of his clever and intense use of montage, a kind of hyper-rhythmic editing in which Image A (shot of boots of soldiers marching relentlessly toward top of steps) is juxtaposed with Image B (shot of woman protesting soldiers’ butchery) in such a way that the audience anticipates and becomes psychologically involved with a third, as yet unseen Image C, resulting from the “collision” of the first two. Thinkers pointed out that this was really just the application of the principles of dialectical materialism to art, but that wasn’t what had Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Cecil B. De Mille making pilgrimages to Moscow, or young American intellectuals sitting night after night in Eighth Street movie houses. This movie seemed to be ushering in the twentieth century, taking up where Griffith had left off. With Potemkin, cinema had at last given up the theatrical, and the literary, and spoken in its own language. And, in just five reels and eighty-six minutes, it blew you away besides.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
The montage is still right in there: How, without it, is any true cinéaste going to go on to deal with, say, Godard? An even bigger come-on: the fact that this exciting, dynamic, idealistic, ideological, brave era of Soviet moviemaking didn’t last; that Eisenstein and his colleagues would, within five years, be branded formalists and decadents by Stalin and company and that Soviet film would take a nosedive into banality. (Of course, the same thing was taking place in Germany under Hitler, but at least the Germans—producers, directors, actors, screenwriters, cameramen, and, for all we know, hair and makeup people—got to relocate to LA.) Finally, there’s the sheer power of it all. Even if the story seems a little cartoonish, the idea of Eisenstein defining an art form, seizing the moment, defying hubris and Hollywood is very Promethean. For those who prefer the statistical angle: With Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu and Welles’ Citizen Kane, Potemkin is one of the three movies guaranteed to show up, decade after decade, on every international critic’s all-time ten-best list. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC
(French, 1928)
Director
Carl-Theodor Dreyer, a Dane then working in Paris. And that’s not all: The set designer was a German (Hermann Warm, from Caligari days), the cameraman a Pole, and the star, Maria Falconetti, an Italian, but the picture, from subject matter to aesthetics, is strictly French. Spoken of in the same hushed tones as Griffith, Eisenstein, and Renoir, but for most of us, even harder to get down with. Three possible ins: the supernatural angle (Dreyer’s obsessed with witches and vampires, even if he does see them as all-too-human martyrs), the Bergman connection (having learned to tolerate one Scandinavian’s bottomless guilt and pain, you shouldn’t have too much trouble plugging into another’s), and the old sympathy ploy (Dreyer, unappreciated in his own lifetime, could pursue his art only by dint of the money he made as manager of a Copenhagen movie theater, never got to make a movie about the life of Christ, never got to work in Hollywood like his mentor Griffith, etc., etc.). Other vintage Dreyer: Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), and Ordet (1955).
Story
Based on actual trial records that, in 1928, had just come to light: A series of five grueling cross-examinations, culminating in the execution, at the stake, of Joan (Falconetti), but not before giant close-ups have told us everything we ever wanted to know about Joan and her accusers (among them Antonin Artaud, pre- “Theater of Cruelty,” as the only compassionate one). But plot isn’t the point here. Go instead for the passion, in this case almost equal parts eroticism and religious persecution.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
The camerawork, especially as it fixed on faces (not to mention Joan’s dirty fingernails) rather than action and events, faces that fill the screen and come complete with sweat, tears, wrinkles, warts, and spittle, and are thrown into even higher relief by the starkness of the sets and the dead whiteness of the sky. And, equally, Falconetti’s performance as Joan: the way she managed to emanate sainthood, sorrow, and suffering, all without benefit of makeup—or, for that matter, much in the way of hair. (As one of Dreyer’s assistants remarked later, “It was a film made on the knees.”) An enormous success with the critics, who hailed it as the ultimate silent film, the distillation of a decade of creative filmmaking in Europe; the man from the New York Times, for instance, announced that it made “worthy pictures of the past look like tinsel shams.” Banned in Britain, by the way, for its depiction of English soldiers stealing Joan’s ring and sticking their arrows in her arm.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
Ignore the comparisons of Passion to various musical forms (most often an organ fugue); what you really have to grasp is the fact that this, of all the standard masterpieces of world film, is the one that separates the sheep from the goats, the aesthetes from the philistines, the devotees from the hangers-on. The former have largely shut up about Falconetti, who was so drained by this film she never made another. But they still can’t get over those faces. Ditto the wild blend of fleshiness and spirituality. If you must find fault, cite the title cards—so disruptive, so unnecessary, and so emblematic of the silent film’s increasing frustration at not being able to speak. By all means, point out that sound had already arrived in France as Dreyer began Passion, and that, had he succeeded in obtaining financing, the last great work of silent film might have been the first great masterpiece of the sound era. Then finish your espresso and go home. L’AGE D’OR (French, 1930;
English title, THE GOLDEN AGE)
Director
Luis Buñuel. The Spanish maverick who, yoking the outrageous with the matter-of-fact, the blasphemous with the banal, managed to parlay one of the least flashy—and, frankly, least cinematic—of directing styles into a career that, a half century later, was still going strong. In 1930, though, Buñuel was just getting started, having arrived in Paris five years earlier with his friend and fellow surrealist Salvador Dalí. The year before, the two had collaborated on Un Chien Andalou, the seventeen-minute manifesto-on-film, having nothing to do with either dogs or Andalusians, in which a girl’s eye gets slashed with a razor, a man’s hand is shown crawling with ants, and dead burros lie sprawled across two grand pianos. Now they undertook something more ambitious: an hour’s worth of denunciation, obsession, and mania, financed by the famous French “angel,” the Vicomte de Noailles. Dalí, who wasn’t the easiest man in the world to work with (he’d try to convince you, for instance, that his waxed moustache served as an antenna for his muse, then turn around and expect you to buy a painting from him), had gotten that much worse since all the Chien notoriety, and lasted only a day on the L’Age set. Despite the credits (and with the exception of one gag, in which a man walks with a large stone on his head), the film is pure Buñuel.
Story
May as well begin with the documentary footage of the scorpions. Not that it prepares you for the bandits, or the Majorcans, or the fellow kicking a violin down the street. In a way, it does prepare you for the man and his mistress, though not necessarily for the mud they’re rolling in. Things are a little more upbeat at the marquis�
�� party (ignore the kitchen fire and the gamekeeper who shoots his little boy), especially once the man and mistress get out to the garden, where they try to have sex while seated in two wicker garden chairs. Try, that is, until he is summoned inside to take the minister’s phone call and she busies herself with the toe of the statue. At some point somebody throws a Christmas tree, an archbishop, a plough, a stuffed giraffe, and several pillowfuls of feathers out a window. Then, before you know it, we’re leaving a chateau in the company of four worn-out orgiasts; look for a cross, covered with snow and festooned with a woman’s hair. The End—accompanied by a happy little Spanish march, the kind you might hear at a bullfight.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
Le bourgeois wasn’t just épaté—he was livid. A funhouse mirror full of the pressures and postures of the day, L’Age pilloried Church, State, and Establishment, and monkeyed with morals, manners, and bodily functions. To get it past the censors, Buñuel had to position the film as “the dream of a madman”; now he billed it as “a desperate, passionate appeal to murder.” Although it took a few weeks for the news to get around, eventually gangs of Fascists, Catholics, and anti-Semites broke into the theater, threw stink bombs and purple ink at the screen, and slashed the paintings by Dalí, Max Ernst, and Man Ray hanging in the lobby. Then the right-wing press got in on the action, along with the police chief. The film was banned, and Buñuel was branded a subversive. He went back to Spain and made a scathing documentary called Land Without Bread, likewise banned; he wouldn’t direct another movie for fifteen years.
