Out of Tune: Murder at the Vanities

“The last thing she said over the phone was, ‘You were going to take me to the opening of the Vanities. Now you want to shove me off on a cheap picture show. Nuts!’ ”

—Bill Murdock (Victor McLaglen), Murder at the Vanities

What happens when you put Agatha Christie in a blender with the Ziegfield Follies and some kind of powerful hallucinogen? 

You’d probably get Murder at the Vanities, a film that offers more proof, if needed, that Paramount was the most head-scratchingly, jaw-droppingly, self-destructively, censor-defyingly cuckoo bananas studio of the pre-Code era.

In fact, if this movie has one virtue, it’s the ability to offer up every major motif of the unbridled early 1930s in one big, flamboyant sampler. It might accurately be retitled Pre-Code-O-Rama or the Hays Capades.

A terrific reminder that egregious mash-ups didn’t originate in the 2000s, Murder at the Vanities combines two popular genres of the 1930s: the backstage musical and the complex murder mystery. “What an intriguing premise!” I hear you thinking. No dice. Unfortunately, nearly all of the characters can only be described as shrill and unlikable. (I strongly suspect that a previous incarnation of Seth MacFarlane had a hand in this movie.) Yep, that’s right, folks. I subject myself to some bad movies, too—and all for you!

Interestingly, this film was directed by the much-maligned Mitchell Leisen who’s behind at least two films that I love (Death Takes a Holiday and Midnight). Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder thought that he should have study to production design, although Wilder didn’t put it quite that kindly. Both of those talented gentlemen decided to direct their own films because they so despised (rather unfairly, I think) what Leisen did with their writing. As Wilder vituperated, “All he did was he f**ked up the script and our scripts were damn near perfection, let me tell you.” Ouch!

(Because I try to be a gallant soul, I do encourage you to read Mark Rappaport’s attempt to restore Leisen’s reputation. Just don’t tell Wilder or Sturges I told you. And maybe don’t watch this movie.)

Well, in this case, Leisen’s Murder at the Vanities lacked even the backbone of a coherent screenplay, much less a script by luminaries like Wilder or Sturges. However, the movie didn’t have to be such a hot mess. A similar musical-murder genre mashup of the 1930s, Charlie Chan at the Opera managed to be much more tautly paced and emotionally involving than Vanities.

Trust me, though, if you can stomach some nastiness, racism, sexism, and general vulgarity, the kitsch value and sheer weirdness of Murder at the Vanities makes it worth watching.

On to the plot—which I found as skimpy as the costumes. The usually huggable Victor MacLaglen plays dim-witted policeman Bill Murdock who decides to investigate some backstage hoopla, such as falling stage lights and potentially lethal bitchiness, at the musical extravaganza Earl Carroll’s Vanities.

The Vanities, as an attraction, aren’t fictional, by the way. They were a real musical review which rivaled the Ziegfield Follies for popularity on the early 20^th century variety/exploitation scene. Many of the dancers, billed as “the Most Beautiful Girls in the World,” were brought over to Hollywood especially for this film. Poor dears.

Anyway, since Detective Murdock couldn’t get tickets to the show for his date, he agrees to do some ineffectual sleuthing on the other side of the curtain in order to leer incessantly at a parade of nubile, virtually naked chorines. He bares his teeth like a gorilla during mating season and exhibits even less grace and charm as he stumbles through the backstage mayhem.

King Leer gets a backstage pass…

You see, a catty blues belter named Rita Ross (perennial pre-Code mean girl Gertrude Michaels) had a thing going with leading man Eric Lander (Carl Brisson). Ross flies into a jealous rage when she finds out that he’s going to marry operatic brunette Ann Ware (played by the golden-voiced Kitty Carlisle who’s wasted in an irksome nicey-nice role).

Why two women are going head-to-head over Lander is anyone’s guess, since smiley, stocky, heavily-accented Carl Brisson doesn’t exactly light up the screen, despite a fine crooner voice. Seriously—where’s Maurice Chevalier when you need him? I think even a Great Dane could’ve filled out Brisson’s role better.

Eric Lander tries to talk reason to Rita Ross—who fully deserves the epithet of “Vanity.”

Anyway, mayhem and murder ensue. Who were the writers kidding with the plot? The insane Murder at the Vanities exists for two reasons—and they may be summarized as follows: T and A. The nutty musical shamelessly flaunts the assets of its girls, girls, girls who wear even less than we’re used to for pre-Code dancers. Unfortunately, these dames aren’t anywhere near as rhythmically gifted as their Warner Brothers counterparts. I mean, a lot of the time they’re just standing there like a magazine centerfold! Paramount tried to cover up the dancers’ lack of coordination (well, not cover up… distract) with the most insubstantial outfits short of birthday suits. We’re talking fronds and fig leaves.

Now, I don’t necessarily object to objectification. For instance, while Busby Berkeley objectified the female body, that genius also abstracted it to the point of sublime unreality and harmony to stimulate a kind of audiovisual ecstasy. Berkeley created the closest thing to avant-garde cinema that Hollywood ever produced. By contrast, Murder at the Vanities is basically a peep show with a few dead bodies.

Art never gets off the runway in its static, unimaginative panoplies of flesh, arranged by Larry Ceballos and LeRoy Prinz. And Prinz—who later worked on Yankee Doodle Dandy and South Pacific—should’ve known better! We watch a bunch of dangerously odd musical numbers transpire on a revolving stage—there’s none of the inventive, dynamic, extradiegetic spaces of Berkeley musicals which tend to flood into sets that couldn’t possibly exist on a single stage.

The musical variety show within the movie opens with a tone-deaf, hammering musical number about the women who perform in these shows. “Where do they come from and where do they go?” Mary Carlisle asks, as a series of poses give us a few ideas. The half-naked girls pose on cigarette boxes, work in artists’ studios, or pop out from perfume containers.

Women bought and sold, women as commodities. Women on display for easy purchase and consumption. Hmm. Where have I seen that before? Oh, yeah, every other pre-Code movie.

Then, for no good reason, a bunch of cowboys show up and there’s a mini-orgy of lassos. So, are you freaked out yet?

The next number takes place on a desert island, swaying to the languorous strains of “Live and Love Tonight.” Whatever my feelings about the movie, I personally adore this wistful tune of the “sweet music” genre. The staging adds to the lulling, dreamy quality of the song. This time, we watch a stage full of recumbent ladies waving feather fans to make the whole floor ripple and undulate.

Meanwhile, Lander, wearing a ripped romper, sings the dreamy song and practically lies on top of his duet partner. That’s right about where I wanted to go all Oedipus on my eyes.

Don’t you DARE splay any more or I WILL turn off my TV set…

Just when the viewer is starting to wonder what the Paramount executives were smoking, we get the answer with the musical number—and, no, I am not making this up—“Sweet Marijuana.”

In this novelty rumba tune, Gertrude Michaels pines away for the wacky weed, actually singing to it, as though it were a person: “You alone can bring my lover back to me, though I know it’s only just a fantasy.” (Kitty Carlisle later claimed that she had no idea what Michaels was singing about. I bet she didn’t inhale, either.)

We also savor shots of a bunch of stationary chorus girls dressed as cactus blooms—naked from the waist-up. And if that weren’t the kicker, one of them suddenly notices something dripping on her shoulder from the catwalk. Blood. She screams just as the number is closing and the cops discover the first body.

The next musical number, “The Rape of Rhapsody,” lives up to the inflammatory suggestiveness of that name, though not as you might think. In the first part of the number, “The Rhapsody,” Lander, in unfortunate Beethoven breeches, plays a classical ripoff melody at a piano as superimposed dancers swirl around him. Okay, that’s standard fare. Nothing too weird there.

Just you wait.

Part two takes place in some vaguely Napoleonic salon, where a classical orchestra is presenting the rhapsody as a dull, plodding march. Suddenly, a bunch of black jazz musicians show up in the orchestra, peacefully hijack the tune, and swing it like mad.

And, out of nowhere, Duke Ellington—yes, really him—pops up, filling the screen with his exuberance and refinement as he jams away, giving us an intimate mini concert. We get to look over his shoulder and watch him tickle those ivories. His genuine performance is, without doubt, the best part of the movie. Duke’s glowing celebrity persona and incendiary talent gives us a moment of respite from the trite flatness and flashiness of the film. It seems that he’s the one living thing in it.

Meanwhile, a bunch of maids of color jump up and start dancing. Gertrude Michaels, in a matching maid outfit, leads the gang and sings the “Ebony Rhapsody,” despite being about as ebony as Snow White. They tap around and everybody has a good time to the new swingin’ tune led by Duke and his ensemble. This might be an uprising, but it’s a fun, friendly one. Jazz babies of the world—unite!

Until the disgruntled white conductor comes in with a prop machine gun and “shoots” them all for taking over his rhapsody.

Um… are we supposed to find that funny? I hope not, but the gleeful laughs of the audience within the movie suggest, horrifyingly, that we are. And the whole idea of black musicians, moreover respectable, widely acclaimed black musicians, “raping” white classical music throws us right back to Birth of a Nation territory—albeit in a symbolic, quasi-humorous fashion.

The question presents itself: if this is supposed to be humorous, at whose expense? Is “The Rape of Rhapsody” a musical spoof of the racial tensions that movies melodramatically portray and exploit, or is it feeding real aggression?

There’s a bare possibility that it’s aiming for an innocuous parody, since, after all, the excellent African American jazz musicians and dancers of color clearly elevate the artistry of the scene—anyone can see and feel that.

They’re part of the attraction and Ellington received prominent billing on the poster, even though he’s only in the film for a few minutes! Nevertheless, the unexpected violence of “The Revenge” leaves a revolting taste in our mouths. It’s deeply disrespectful and disturbing, no matter what the intention was.

But, then again, Vanities is a disturbing film. When we finally discover who the murderer is (SPOILER!), if you didn’t guess in the first reel, like I did, she’s not a self-interested monster, but a victim lashing out against her tormentor. Perhaps the most sympathetic member of the cast, Norma, the maid who scurries around backstage, taking abuse from leading ladies, finally flipped out and killed the tyrant queen of her world.

This demented, simple-minded killer launches into a long speech about how she was glad she killed the wicked Rita (who actually bumped off the first victim—don’t ask). As Norma whips herself into a frenzy with her confession, she looks right into the camera, breaking the escapist confines of the film.

Her gaze creeped me out, I must say, almost as though she were accusing me and the audience of being complicit in her abuse, as if by watching the show, we were ignoring some other big problem.

We feel deeply sorry for plain, put-upon Norma—she only killed a really terrible person who beat her and wanted to destroy everyone else’s happiness. This kind of sympathy for a murderer as a victim, of course, was a total no-no as soon as the Production Code came into full potency. But here, as the police lead Norma away, the lead characters promise to help her with her legal defense and actually call out, “God bless you!” Don’t expect to see THAT after 1934!

Nevertheless, in a way, the excesses of Murder at the Vanities make me (almost) feel as though the end of the pre-Code era may have been due. For every Temple Drake, Scarface, or Black Cat, for every blasphemously brilliant pre-1934 film, there were probably a lot more movies like Vanities: largely mindless, insulting, lecherous spectacles. Ultimately, I would still argue that the impact of the great pre-Code movies outweigh the gratuities of the rest, but Vanities is hard to swallow.

And yet—always I hesitate to condemn a film—because in spite of the painful musical numbers and creaky plot, this movie, perhaps unintentionally, tells us something about the time and the issues churning under the surface of even blind entertainments.

“Cocktails for Two”: the least bizarre musical number in Murder at the Vanities

This crazy musical also gave us an enduringly popular hit, “Cocktails for Two,” and includes (briefly, though) the unusual plot element of a female private eye! Although it fails to develop any kind of engaging conflict, it does scratch at the surface of a lot of economic, sexual, racial, and legal tensions in society.

Like the chorines in Murder at the Vanities, the truth may not be naked, but enough certainly peeps through.

Costume Ball: I’m Hosting #MTOS This Sunday!

This Sunday, May 5, I will have the honor of hosting Movie Talk on Sunday for the second time! In case you’ve never heard of #MTOS, it’s an engaging Twitter discussion for all cinephiles that happens once a week.

People from around the world turn out, so the mix of viewpoints promises a variety of insights and lots of fun. (It was so much fun last time I hosted that I ended up in Twitter jail! Attica! Attica!) I hope that you, dear reader, will join in and add your responses to the conversation.

I chose film costumes as my topic, because, let’s face it, they’re fun to talk about! And, unlike many elements of cinematic language, clothes are something we all know something about, don’t we? We wear our identity in our clothes, our daily version of costumes. We’re also in the habit of decoding other people’s clothing to figure out who they are. (Unless you live naked on a private island, in which case, that too is a distinct fashion statement.)

Too often overlooked in film analyses, costumes shape our perceptions of characters and their relationships. As in the case of the infamous “shopping montage” cliché, whole scenes may revolve around costumes. Iconic articles of clothing help us recognize genres: can you imagine classic film noir without the trenchcoat and the Fedora? Or a Western without jeans and the cowboy hat? Whether we’re aware of it or not, costume colors, textures, sometimes even the sounds they make also enrich the aesthetics of any given movie and deserve greater scrutiny.

So, to slip into something more comfortable, here are the questions: 

1. To get started, which film costume impressed you and stayed with you most vividly?

2. Costumes can be used to transform a character or signify how they’ve changed. Which film has done this well?

3. Which director, in your opinion, has made the best use of costumes to enhance the look and style of his/her films?

4. Costumes sometimes serve to contrast characters through their different clothing styles. What’s a movie that has done this well?

5. The power of costuming can work for comic effect. What’s a movie outfit that added to the humor of a scene or made you laugh?

6. What’s a good example of a costume (or accessory) that serves as a key plot point in a film?

7a. Which male movie character has the best/coolest wardrobe?

7b. Which female character?

8. Which movie star’s image is most associated with their costumes they wear (or wore)?

9. Has a film’s costuming ever really disappointed you? Which movie and why?

10. Have you ever copied a movie character’s style? How did that work out for you?

Put on your Sunday best and join the costume ball on May 5! 

Free Friday Film: The Death Kiss (1932)

Ever wish you could take a tour of a Hollywood studio—in the 1930s? I sure do.

Think about how fascinating it would be to stare at those huge early talkie cameras, to observe the complicated sound recording apparatus, to gape at the actors getting ready for their close-ups, or to sit in and get a sneak preview of the rushes. Hell, I don’t know about you, but I’d even be willing to take my chances sitting next to Darryl Zanuck in a dark studio screening room if I could turn back time and go there.

Unless you’ve got a time machine, perhaps the next best thing to a backstage tour through that bygone era is watching The Death Kiss, a standard whodunit set at a movie studio. Despite a workmanlike overall style, this standard genre flick deserves watching for its sheer documentary value alone. Debut director Edwin L. Marin shot on location at Tiffany Studios, the once-prestigious production company behind Journey’s End and Mamba which went defunct, rather appropriately, soon after the release of The Death Kiss.

Not only are the soundstages real soundstages, but the maze of delivery doors, gates, pathways, and buildings that we see in the film give us a rare travelling “street view” of the old Hollywood experience.

Of course, architectural maps and photographs of studio lots exist. Yet, there’s something truly magical about a camera scanning through and capturing the dimensionality those long-lost spaces, those sprawling miniature kingdoms, or “duchies” as Joseph Mankiewicz called the studios.

Back to the mystery: the plot follows Franklyn Drew, a wisecracking screenwriter at Toneart Studio who’s trying to save the woman he loves, Marcia Lane, a leading actress, from a murder charge. (And in case you never noticed, when screenwriters write about screenwriters, those parts almost invariably turn out to be smartasses.)

In this case, I enjoyed the opportunity to watch David Manners—a pretty juvenile lead whom you probably know best from his startlingly dull performance in Dracula—play a character who doesn’t seem like he’s been cut out from a book of paper dolls.

Speaking of Dracula, this film reunites three male stars from that film: Bela Lugosi, Edward Van Sloan, and Manners. Classic movie buffs like me will certainly relish the chance to watch this trio appear in the same scene without trying to drive a stake through anybody’s heart. Lugosi’s mesmerizing potential as an actor languishes untapped in The Death Kiss—he’s fobbed off on a dull role as the studio manager. The solution to the murder, however, did keep me guessing until the last reel. Quite impressive, since these early talkie whodunnits often pack as few surprises as Hardy Boys novels.

I also strongly encourage you to watch at least the opening sequence of The Death Kiss. It goes like this: a gangland moll is sitting in a car, telling her two goons that she’s going to kiss a guy as the signal to shoot him. Swaying in a glittering gown of sequins and ruff of ostrich feather, she alights from the vehicle and duly smooches the poor sap. Rat-a-tat-tat! He writhes and falls to the ground in a hail of machine gun bullets. A shocked crowd gathers around… as the camera pans 180-degrees to reveal the director and movie crew filming the scene.

All this elapses in one long take, binding together the illusion of film and the revelation of the mechanism that makes cinema possible.

Of course, the studio within the film is itself an illusion, it’s Hollywood as we’d like to imagine it. Nevertheless, that first shot impressed me with the litheness of its camerawork and how it challenges the audience, from the beginning, to see movies as movies, as carefully choreographed ballets of light and movement, as products, as creations.

More interesting still, the man who dies in the movie (within a movie) is actually the murder victim—he died in that opening shot. He wasn’t playing dead. He was dead. So, later on, the characters project the rushes of this scene in studio screening room to scour the print for evidence. Here’s the weird part: when they project it, we get a different perspective of the action from what we saw in the opening shot. There’s no fluid camera movement. Just a boring straight-on take. And it’s really boring—there’s none of the sophisticated jazz in the background and the business around the kiss plays out stilted and stagey. It’s almost as though The Death Kiss were trying to give us a little lesson on film: good talkies versus bad talkies, an interesting use of space versus a boring one. It’s a movie that makes you a little bit more aware of the nuts and bolts of cinema.

Then suddenly a blotch of red, like blood, consumes the screen within the screen! Somebody infiltrated the projection room and burned up the negative, to destroy the murder clue caught on celluloid. The flare of red in a black-and-white film startles you, and it was clearly meant to—somebody went through the trouble of tinting those few frames for a trippy effect. I won’t list the films that have copied this burning nitrate shock effect. I’m not sure about this, but do I believe that The Death Kiss is the first movie to use the plot point of footage being destroyed—and to show it with a theatrically melting strip of film. Film, destruction, the fragility of human life just seem to go together.

For a standard 1930s mystery programmer, The Death Kiss uniquely pulls us into the world of movies and movie making.

So, give it a watch over the weekend. And please leave a comment to tell me what you think of this Public Domain film!

Getting out of the Boat: Black Narcissus and Apocalypse Now

“Never get out of the goddamn boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were going all the way. Kurtz got out of the boat. He split from the whole f**king program.”

I’ve loved Apocalypse Now from the first time I watched that orange feathering of napalm burn through lush tropical forests to the lilting, funereal strains of “The End.” That opening shot spoke to me, whispering the truth of how ugly things can be beautiful and how the camera can charm that beauty forth.

It was like looking through the eyes of another, not through a point-of-view shot, not even through the lens of a different philosophy—but through the eyes of madness, of someone for whom destruction was lovely. I had never felt anything like it. It horrified me, shocked me, inspired me, and changed me. It may have been the first time in my life that I encountered Art, that grand, fearsome, traumatic thing that we hear so much about.

On the other hand, Black Narcissus refused me any such revelation until it was almost over. Having bought a Criterion DVD at a jumble sale (the poor fool who threw it away!), I played it one lazy morning. For the first hour or so, I liked it, thought it was visually pleasing and stimulating in an academic sense. It wasn’t until Sister Ruth revealed her awful, predatory true self that the movie pulled me into the heart of its darkness.

The bottom dropped out of reality. I just didn’t expect a pensive, patient little art film to do that to me—to come at me with a rush of cosmic fury and not relent for almost twenty minutes. “Holy ****!” I exclaimed to myself. “Sister Ruth got out the boat!”

Black Narcissus and Apocalypse Now both won Academy Awards for cinematography thanks to the hypnotic, ethereal camerawork of Jack Cardiff and Vittorio Storaro, in 1947 and 1979 respectively. (Both films should have won Best Picture, but that’s a whole other blog post.)

Above: Jack Cardiff. Below: Vittorio Storaro on location for Apocalypse Now

Apart from the two movies’ shared aesthetic interest in exoticism, they are extremely different. In contrast to the classically trained, crafted acting style of the performers in Powell and Pressburger’s film, Coppola chose a stable of hardcore method actors. While Black Narcissus seemingly fits into the mold of a women’s drama, Apocalypse Now has claimed an immortal place in the annals of cinematic machismo.

Black Narcissus departs utterly from realism by shooting not in the Indian mountains, but in England—against huge blow-ups of aerial photographs of the Himalayas, brightly painted to striking effect. We all know that the production of Apocalypse Now, filmed on location in the Philippines, mirrored its plot. As Coppola lapsed into the Kurtz mentality and actors started to succumb to the harshness of the environment and the strain of shooting, reality bled into fiction.

Nevertheless, I cannot separate these films in my mind. To me, they’ll always be spiritual sisters. I don’t doubt that Cardiff’s vision for Black Narcissus influenced Storaro’s photography for Apocalypse Now, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Fearsome transformations….

I have seen a precious few films that seem to be aware that they’re in color. I mean, yes, the costumes, the sets, the lighting in most non-black-and-white films have all been carefully selected for their hues and tones, but the emotional powerhouse of color remains untapped.

Warpaint of different hues…

Color speaks to us in ways that defy rational thought. Baudelaire once noted that color is the most important element of a painting, because even before we can make out the figures, at a distance, the harmony or dissonance of colors allows us to intuit the essence of the scene.

In my opinion, color needs to “put the zap” on our heads, to paraphrase a few lines of Milius’ brutally insightful script for Apocalypse Now. Seriously—this is why I tend to prefer black-and-white films. Why show me colors unless they’re going to astonish me? Color needs to tell us something, not in terms of symbolism, but in terms of emotion and reaction. Both Black Narcissus and Apocalypse Now define dreamlike, vividly colored places, jungles and mountaintops, which not only magnify our perceptions, but also unleash our inner natures.

Shades of observation: Sister Clodagh and Captain Willard.

Apocalypse Now is not an anti-war film any more than Black Narcissus is an anti-religious film. Both of them transcend such unambiguous messages to tell us something much more vast about the soul of civilization. Sister Ruth certainly isn’t the charismatic genius that Kurtz is, since men have a cultural outlet for their madness—war—whereas women just get neuroticism. However, these two figures both revert to something primal and frightening. (Eventually Captain Willard does, too.) Sister Ruth and Kurtz split from the program of lies and moral rationalizations that govern the minds of their peers. Rather than persisting in fighting the call of the jungle, they give in. Their madness prompts some of the most fantastically beautiful images captured by a camera. 

We watch traditions and codes of conduct plunge into a flamboyant psychosis that wasn’t so far away all along. Seductive, unreal colors, enhanced by sinuous camera strokes, hold us captive and enable us to feel the strength of those impulses towards annihilation, impulses that enthrall those who “got out of the boat.”

As Nietzsche theorized, great tragic art must balance a tendency towards orgiastic self-destructiveness (the Dionysian) and the tonic splendor of appearances and expression (the Apollonian). If Black Narcissus and Apocalypse Now both depict the triumph of the Dionysian, of chaos and entropy, they nevertheless uplift us rather than depressing us. They temper our despair in mankind with our faith in art.

Cardiff and Storaro extensively studied the great masters of painting—the color palette of Narcissus was based in part on Vermeer, and there’s quite a bit of Caravaggio in the way Apocalypse Now uses virtuosic contrasts of color and blackness. The compositional brilliance and luminosity that the cinematographers lend even to scenes of abhorrent violence or confusion strike a balance between these elements to produce cathartic experiences that, for me, have not been equaled by any other films.

From lips to eyes… and from eyes to lips. Contemplating empty faces (Sister Ruth’s and the face of a Khmer statue) with camera tilts.

Jack Cardiff had to campaign to get the sort of surreal, opalescent color contrasts he harnessed for a subliminal effect in Narcissus: “I was always fighting with Technicolor [representatives] because they wanted complete realism, whatever that was.” Instead, in certain scenes, he filled shadows with green light and colored the arc-lights slightly blue to suggest the distracting crystal coolness of the skies. Cardiff reflected that few viewers, perhaps one in ten or fifteen, would consciously notice these things, but that the choice would impact the mindset of the audience and contribute to the story.

In addition to these more subtle manipulations, gathering momentum as the film unfolds, Black Narcissus overwhelms us with exaggerated panoramas of the edge of the world. The screen celebrates the giddy delirium that courses through Sister Ruth as she rings the bell on the edge of the cliff. We experience the rush of that chasm, shown in breathtaking canted angles.

Later, through the translucent deep blues, febrile oranges, and acid pinks of her freak-out, we feel the terrifying release of Ruth’s transformation into a strange, unnatural creature—part modern woman, part painted devil.

Kurtz’ poetic insanity penetrates the eerie iconography of Apocalypse Now. The glowing amber quality of light, the oppressive Prussian blue skies, the sulfuric yellow and psychedelic lilac gas flares, the impenetrable greens of the jungle all exteriorize the jewel-like ferocity of his Zen psychosis.

“We’re all his children, man…”

Kurtz, this faceless demigod, the diamond who cuts through bullsh*t, realizes that those who win wars must fully embrace “the horror.” But that appalling clarity, that knowledge also rots away at him from the inside out. Captain Willard’s voice-over tells us some of this, but such verbal information would be meaningless if Storaro didn’t paint this decay into every lopsided, eclipsed shot of Kurtz.

Storaro, referring to his revolutionary use of color shading in Apocalypse Now, spoke of how he used the visuals, especially rich shades of black, to get in touch with the barbaric, “unconscious side” of humanity that Conrad’s novel conjured up: “The heart of darkness that he was looking at does not belong to another culture, another place, but part of our self.”

Cardiff and Storaro both found intense, wordless ways of representing this slip into a primordial darkness, into a place beyond reason. When Sister Ruth begins literally to “see red” the screen suddenly snaps to pure blue as her rage forces her to lose consciousness.

The first time I saw it, I though there was something wrong with the DVD, it startled me so!

Similarly, Apocalypse Now gives us an amazing shot in which the camera literally turns upside-down and then right-side-up, and then up-side-down again as Kurtz’ acolytes drag Willard through the mud to meet the elusive Colonel for the first time.

Cinematography literally means writing with light and motion. Cardiff and Storaro wrote disorientation and temptation into the screen with shadows, with movements, with delicate shadings of color.

The call of the jungle… Sister Ruth and Captain Willard stalk their prey.

Black Narcissus and Apocalypse Now both dwell in the realm of exoticism, in the amplified Other that’s really just another guise for something flickering within us. These movies let me see Western civilization, the epicenter of my own values and all that I hold dear, transplanted and fragmented into a vibrant nightmare by the prism of madness.

They also take me full-circle back to the primitive psychic engines of that civilization—Eros and Thanatos, sex and aggression—without asking that I transgress, without asking that I myself get out of the boat.

~          ~          ~

This post is part of the 31 Days of Oscar Blogathon, hosted by three of the nicest ladies, coolest movie mavens, and best film bloggers out there, Paula of Paula’s Cinema Club, Aurora of Once Upon A Screen, and Kellee of Outspoken and Freckled. Check out their blogs and this wonderful blog event! Find the blogathon on Twitter by searching the #31Days hashtag.

Pre-Code BINGO!

“Damn. I’m just one square away from Pre-Code BINGO!”

I love the Pre-Code era. I love the style, the wisecracks, the suggestiveness, and, above all, how much credit the movies gave their audiences. Films like Night Nurse and Call Her Savage bare a lot more than souls. Yet, filled with ellipses and double entendres, these movies also draw you in with the sophisticated pleasure of filling in their gaps and imagining what’s not shown or said.

Pre-Codies, from the fluffy to the gritty, pull me into the game of deciphering their webs of connotations, of discovering variations on the motifs of a disillusioned epoch. So, as I thought one night while tweeting a movie with the #TCMParty gang, why not turn the Pre-Code era into a game?

I’d also like to thank everyone who pitched in with suggestions for these bingo cards. I’m touched to know that there are so many cheeky geeks out there. You warm the cockles of my heart.

Without further ado, I give you my Pre-Code Bingo cards.

Card One:

Card Two:

Click on the images to go to their attachment pages and get the full-sized versions. To play, simply watch a Pre-Codie, and see how many squares you can cross off! If you do get Bingo, leave a comment and tell me what movie got it!

If you, dear reader, can think of something that should be a bingo square but isn’t, please tweet it to me @NitrateDiva, and I might make a third bingo card!

As our 1930s friends would say, Abyssinia!

The Party’s Over: Bullets or Ballots (1936)

“What time does the crime picture start?” Al Kruger, notorious racketeer, asks the box office girl of a movie theater. When a gangster film from 1936 opens with a line that self-referential, I’m already glued to my screen.

In fact, a big, unmistakable movie marquee—advertising a crime picture—fills the first shot of Bullets or Ballots before the camera descends with a smooth crane downwards to focus on a sparkly-new car pulling up to the theater.

It turns out that this picture parlor will be projecting a short docudrama about Al Kruger, so of course the gangster had to show up and see how he’s being portrayed on the silver screen.

Point well-taken, movie. Gangsters don’t merely inspire crime films—they can be inspired by them or insulted by them, for that matter. From the first, Bullets or Ballots drolly reminds us that crime may be the ultimate pop culture phenomenon.

Criminals enjoy their status as celebrities and trendsetters… but they also borrow from previous celebrity gangsters and have to worry about how public opinion chooses to look at them. Remember how media-savvy Michael proves himself in The Godfather, spinning his murder of Sollozzo and McCluskey into a public relations coup?

Well, he’s just one in a line of very public enemies, both real and fictional, who cultivated their persona and image in the gaze of the media. For instance, Al Kruger in this film was heavily based on larger-than-life Dutch Shultz. A few years earlier, Al Capone’s henchmen actually visited Ben Hecht to make sure that old Al would get a fair shake in Scarface.

Bullets or Ballots jokes about this chiasmus, this feedback loop: gangsters as stars, and stars as gangsters. But it’s no joke, as we soon learn.

Al Kruger (1930s stalwart Barton MacLane) and his cool-as-a-corpse henchman ‘Bugs’ Fenner (Humphrey Bogart) swagger into the movie theater just as the picture starts. The newsreel trumpet fanfare sounds out, creating a weird echo between the movie within the movie and the real movie theaters where viewers in 1936 would’ve seen Bullets or Ballots.

As Kruger and Fenner plunk themselves down, they gaze up at the screen with deadpan faces that make the situation even more comical. From the perspective of a 1930s spectator, we’re at a movie and we’re watching people watching a movie.

Audiences across America must have giggled at the fact that the stereotypical tough-guys, slouched in their seats, almost appeared to be watching them from a movie theater in a parallel universe. In the 1930s, roughly one in two people in the whole United States went to the movies once a week. Well, these racketeers apparently took enough of a break from their racketeering to go to the flicks. Ah, gangsters: they’re just like us!

I appreciate these reflexive, semi-forth-wall-breaking sequences in old movies not so much because they herald any particular formal genius on the part of the director. I love self-referential moments because of what they suggest about the audiences of that time. Directors and studios expected viewers in the 1930s to be every bit as clever and receptive to meta-gags as we are today. It drives me simply mad when people think that gangster movies started self-consciously alluding to other gangster movies in the 1960s and 1970s.

Nope—long before the film brats rolled into town, viewers had already learned how to decode movies as mash-ups and in-jokes. Which is why I laugh my head off at any declarations that this strange, stupefied, passive state called “absorption” dominated audience reactions to movies until art cinema shook things up. What ridiculous academic claptrap! And that’s said as someone who’s even rather attached to academic claptrap. Bullets or Ballots scored a smash hit at the box office—appropriate since it starts at one—and I think it succeeded in part because of how comically aware the film is of its own relation to other gangster films.

A real New York market in a fictional film.

But, back to the film. The public service message that Kruger and Fenner went to see, “The Syndicate of Crime,” a short film about the evils of racketeering, manages to be both exposition (we get the background on New York rackets) and a genuine public service message, telling us about the dastardly grift that racketeers are earning. There’s real archive footage and a real message about crime—but the segment also propels the plot forward and gets a boost from some parody, since the guy playing Kruger in the short film is woefully hammy and stereotypical.

Phony Kruger (above) is a real hoot… but the original (below) doesn’t seem too amused.

Wait, I hear you saying—is this a comedy? Don’t bet on it.

At the end of the newsreel short, a reformer speaks out and urges the public to use their votes to fight the gangsters (…and we have a title!). This goody two-shoes says that he’ll continue to speak out against crime and corruption. Well, no happy ending for this guy!

He gets gunned down by Fenner in the next scene—fully integrating the part real, part made-up newsreel into the plot. I admire this mixture of fact and fiction, a balance of documentary and illusion that the 1960s New Wave filmmakers, I would argue, didn’t so much invent as steal from 1930s Warner Brothers films. All in all, the opening sequence of Bullets or Ballots packs a punch.

Alas, the rest of the film doesn’t live up to this opening theater scene. I would describe the movie as good square WB entertainment and definitely above average for the mid-1930s—but not great. Bullets or Ballots won’t ever attain classic status in the same league of the gangster-driven dramas made before 1934, like Scarface and The Public Enemy—even if this film can boast Bogie, Robinson, and Blondell among its cast.

Edward G. Robinson, whose Little Caesar tore up the screen with pipsqueak ferocity, makes the best of an unfortunately sappy character. He plays Johnny Blake , a pugnacious, but likable career policeman who decides to help bring down New York racketeers by undertaking a virtually suicidal mission. Pretending to double-cross the police, he embeds himself with the bad guys as an anti-cop consultant.

Sound suspenseful? Well, it would be, but we don’t learn until way into the film that Blake is still working for the police! Evidently, Hitchcock wasn’t around to let the director, William Keighley, know that a time-bomb is only scary if we know it’s there all along and are waiting for it to go off.

We eventually recognize Bullets or Ballots as an early “sting” or “undercover cop” film that benefits from Warner Brother’s hard-hitting style. That’s the problem with Bullets or Ballots: it focuses on crime fighting too much to deliver the thrills of crime or the elegant rise-and-fall trajectory that adds momentum to the prototypes of the genre. Seriously, brace yourself for extra helpings of newspaper montages about raids and smashed criminal rings.

Despite the many fine aspects of this film, it throws me into mourning. Deep, deep mourning. Because it’s a dirty shame that Bullets or Ballots wasn’t made in, say, 1933 instead of 1936—before the Production Code came down.

So, for those of you who may not know, the late 1920s and early 1930s (until 1934), the “Pre-Code era,” constitutes a golden age in onscreen Hollywood decadence, as the industry was left under the lenient watch of Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

I’m not talking about a few bared ankles or some mild Victorian titillation. I’m talking topless women, copious amounts of booze and drugs, and shockingly “immoral” endings—in which criminals get away with murder and bad girls get the rich man… and his chauffeur.

More importantly, films from this period often leverage their sinful onscreen shock value to offer a more realistic, visceral portrayal of human emotions and situations. Their grittiness and maturity contrast with the predominantly escapist, candy-coated stories of classical Hollywood.

Because of the Code coming down, Edward G. Robinson can’t play an unrepentant, gutsy gangster-hero anymore. He has to play a normal protagonist masquerading as a gangster. We, the viewers, still get some of the joys of the gangster hero—but once removed from the hero.

Okay, enough cinema history. Let’s get to the hot stuff and this film which, despite being past the pre-Code expiration date, contains one of the most sizzling onscreen kisses I’ve ever seen.

So, as I’ve mentioned, Humphrey Bogart plays a vicious, up-from-the-streets baddie, Fenner, who just moved up to be number-one-man in the gang by killing his boss. He’s practically drunk on blood at this point.

Joan Blondell plays a female racketeer, a numbers-runner named Lee Morgan who had her racket taken away from her by a long-time male friend—Johnny Blake, Fenner’s chief rival in the gang.

Lee and her fellow numbers-runner, Nellie LaFleur, are dismayed to learn that they’ve been cut out of their own racket.

In the key scene with Fenner, Lee’s hurt, she’s vulnerable, and she’s out for vengeance.

Fenner happens to run across her in a hotel bar (accidentally on purpose) and they get to talking. They agree they can do best by pooling their interests: he’ll muscle in and let her keep the numbers racket, provided that she help him wipe out Blake. The dialogue snaps along, filled with a bizarre combination of sexual tension and mutual distrust.

Fenner: You don’t trust me?

Lee: I don’t trust anybody.

Fenner: Me neither. We oughta work fine together.

Finally, when she realizes that Fenner is proposing to take her former racket away from Johnny Blake, she looks Fenner straight in the eye and declares, “Well, go ahead and take it!”

And take it he does… he leans over, closer and closer. He wants to seal this deal with a kiss and Lee makes no attempt to stop him. He finally kisses her and just when we think he’s going to break away he grabs her waist and stays a bit longer! This is a very drawn-out affair.

When Fenner finally, ahem, disengages, Lee pauses for a moment, then hauls off and slaps him so damn hard that you can see Bogie’s face flap!

If this were a pre-Code movie, these two would probably become an item and we’d get a lot more uncomfortably smoldering scenes between the wonderful performers (and real-life lovers, from what I’ve heard). Really, the whole movie would’ve been much more thrilling had it played on a love triangle between good guy Blake, bad guy Fenner, and sassy, independent Lee. Bullets or Ballots could also benefit from a few scenes of Blondell in something silky and almost absent. Just sayin’.

Personally, I think the movie smooch gets overused in big, gooey love scenes, so I really enjoy a filmic kiss that’s about something other than love. This kind of pre-noir kiss of the damned exposes the aggressive impulses that bring people to succumb to their urges. In this case, it’s about getting back at someone else, about power, about an unholy partnership. The subtext is stifling. I wish there were more scenes between Fenner and Lee. They ignite the imagination. But we can thank chief censor and morality man Joseph Ignatius “Bloody Buttinski” Breen for taking that away from us. Oh, well.

Bullets or Ballots still offers Louise Beavers in a far too small and subservient but delicious role as a fabulously stylish, opinionated Harlem numbers-runner, Nellie LaFleur—who came up with the racket in the first place. I love seeing women, especially women of color, running their own affairs and taking care of themselves in 1936!

Joan Blondell has seldom worn sexier clothes in any of her many, many sexy parts.

I also award points for a gripping shoot-out climax at the end (I won’t give it away!) that does effectively build tension and suspense with some taut intercutting… and leads to a surprising and moving dénouement.

The dialogue impresses with its snappiness, for instance:

Random gangster: I don’t like your face.

Johnny Blake: Well, I’ll be ’round tomorrow to give you a chance to rearrange it.

Robinson, surprisingly, pulls off both the charming and pugilistic sides to his disillusioned cop character—flirting with Blondell one minute, slugging a guy in the next.

The deco set designs will certain give you an eyeful of pleasure, if you, like me, dream of someday living in a Bauhaus hotel.

Ah, who am I kidding? You should see this for Bogie. Savor his magnificent performance as one smooth operator.

Whether he’s putting out a cigarette in his morning coffee or filling his enemies full of lead, you shouldn’t miss this delightfully psychopathic role from the days before Bogie’s characters acquired a sense of guilt and conscience.

Even if it’s not everything I want it to be, Bullets or Ballots holds up and serves as a masterclass in the crime genre’s iconography that carried into the New Hollywood and beyond. You haven’t really seen a movie like Mean Streets or The Godfather until you’ve seen movies like Bullets or Ballots.

Oh, and by the way, you mugs, I’m working for the #scenesofthecrime racket now, see? And if you wanna read about cool crime films, you’ll check it out, see?

The Suspense Is Killing Me

“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.”

—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

I’m very honored to announce that I will be hosting #MTOS (Movie Talk on Sundays) for the first time this Sunday, December 2nd.

For my topic, I’ve chosen suspense. I made this selection because good suspenseful situations force the cinematic medium to fire on all cylinders. Compelling characters, dramatic stakes, careful unfolding and witholding of plot information, atmospheric mise-en-scène, rhythmically on-target editing—suspense demands a harmony of all these elements. The challenges of gripping and holding the audience in suspense have often spurred filmmakers to new heights of creativity.

I also think that the anxiety, tension, and perplexity rooted in suspense represent some of the most powerful responses audiences can have while watching a movie. There’s a definite and palpable “payoff” when suspense is well-executed. However, I’d argue that many innovative suspense films get comparatively little critical respect in their own times.

In any case, I won’t leave you hanging—let the puns begin!—so, here are my questions:

1. How do you define suspense in the cinema? As a viewer, do you consider suspense a desirable trait in a film?

2A. What is the greatest “suspense film” you’ve ever seen? Why?

2B. What’s the best, most suspenseful movie scene or sequence you can think of?

3. Who are some of the most adept suspense directors? What would you say is their approach to or method of suspense?

4. Which actors convey and cultivate suspense best? Which performances in particular?

5. What do you think of movies that end on cliffhangers with no resolution? Which movies have done this well? Which have done it badly?

6. Suspenseful films—especially, though not exclusively, low budget films—often take advantage of constrained locations to create a claustrophobic atmosphere. Which movie has done this most successfully?

7. Which horror film creates suspense most effectively?

8. Suspense isn’t limited only to serious or scary movies. What’s your favorite comedy film (or comedy scene) that builds suspense for a humorous payoff?

9. How does suspense function differently in television? What television show (past or present) handles suspense best?

10. Danny Boyle has said in the U.K. Guardian that, “suspense [and] twists are almost impossible these days. People are blogging your endings from their cinema seats.” Do you agree? Have we reached the end of suspense? Discuss.

I hope to see you all on Sunday on the #MTOS hashtag at 20:00 GMT. In the meantime, I’ll be biting my nails, on the edge of my seat, white-knuckling it.

Until we tweet again, dear friends!

Portrait of the Artist as a Madman

“My professor as a painter drives me to look attentively at the faces, the physiognomies, that present themselves in my path, and you know what a pleasure we draw from this ability which makes life more living and more meaningful to our eyes than to those of other men.”

                                                                                        Charles Baudelaire,

“La Corde”

 

 

 

[Abandon hope of spoiler-free reading all ye who enter here!]

A man hangs, his arms twisted over his head which lolls backwards. We cannot see all of him and it takes a moment to discern what we’re actually looking at.

The image crackles in distressed shades of sepia, sometimes overexposed and light, sometimes darker, but always fizzling, grainy, unstable. The figure, just shoulders and a jaw, bob in slow motion. It reads as a shot from a hand-cranked silent film.

And then the man screams. Thus begins Pupi Avati’s La Casa Dalle Finistre Che Ridono (The House of the Laughing Windows), a movie that opened up hitherto unsuspected realms of subtleness in the giallo canon for me.

The trauma of hearing that image—redolent of 1920s silent era textures—howl in agony shocks the viewer on a truly primal level. It’s as though you could hear a painting or smell a sound. Avati makes us feel like the image were extending across another dimension. The warped, distant sound of the scream heightens the impression not so much of hearing the man moan, but of hearing it in our minds. If you look at Edvard Munch’s The Scream long enough, you start to be able to hear it. Avati simulates this kind of artistic mind-meld that the most profound and morbid of paintings can produce.

Protracted, lyrical, and reminiscent of other times—the Renaissance as well as the 1920s—this opening credits sequence slaps us across the face with one of the key questions at the heart of horror as a genre. Should horror be beautiful? In other words, what are the moral implications of aestheticizing violence and death? It’s a tour-de-force introduction even before the obsessive, rumbling voice, that we later learn is the mad artist Legnani, begins to rant about his colors, the colors in his veins, the living colors…

The buoyant, undulating movements of this torture victim remind me of the surrealist short films, like Un Chien Andalou. The mismatch of beauty and brutality, visual lushness and moral ugliness generate a conflict collision in the mind of the spectator before we even dip a toe into the plot of the film. The dying man’s cries are also spaced out so that the spectator is allowed to linger in contemplation of the various shots of the body in agony before being brought back to the pain.

This kind of sequence practically traps us with the imminence of cinema. Even with letters of actors’ names appearing over these shots of stabbings and cries, we feel as though we are watching a man suffering before our eyes, at this instant. On the one hand, the look of the scene suggests that it occurred sometime in the past, but, on the other, the power of the image ensures that, on some level, it’s always happening now, right now.

This introduction etches itself so powerfully upon the brain that it takes a while to really concentrate on the plot, which concerns a young art historian, Stefano, called in to restore a mural of Saint Sebastian in a rural church in Italy.

Of course, the mural was painted by a deviant called Buono (should’ve been Cattivo, if you ask me…) Legnani, known as the “Painter of Agonia,” which means “death throes” not just agony in Italian. Along with his two sicko sisters, Legnani liked to be around dead people. However, his sisters actually like killing them, too, but I’ll get there soon.

Nevertheless, the mural will serve as a vital tourist attraction for the town—which is ironic, since so many shots in this movie look like they came right out of a 1970s tourist guidebook of Italy, only enhanced by slow pans and gliding shots from within classic cars. The film positively reeks of beauty and we, as audience members, have been trained to know that something evil lurks beneath that bucolic splendor—prepared by both giallo conventions and the indelible opener.

Don’t trust this travel-guide-worthy beauty!

We also recognize, in static form, the torment of the opening credits victim as soon as Avati shows us the mural. The director discloses the picture at the end of a long take which builds moment as a priest and Stefano walk down the nave of the church, when, with a graceful crane lift, the camera rises to focus on the picture.

We also get lingering, studious shots running over this mural, as a kind of visual imperative, “Look! See!”

Similarly, once the murders start (well, duh, it’s a giallo), Avati examines every hanging, bloody victim from multiple angles and shot lengths, cut together in a deliberate, pensive pace. He seems intent on giving us a class in anatomy—and in our own varied reactions to different parts of the same overall picture. The film resembles a painting, too, with its rich Rembrandt lighting, meticulous compositions, and abundance of frames within frames.

Art lives (and dies?) at the core of this film which forces us to become conscious of where our eyes travel and what they bring back. For instance, take the scene in which Stefano visits the town Mayor and surveys his collection of Legnani paintings, including one of the artist’s head on a woman’s body.

As the Mayor explains that the artist took to painting himself because no woman could satisfy him, we get a cut to a gauzy flashback (whose flashback, though, is not clear). The bare-chested artist smears paint on his arm, in a gesture reminiscent of a junkie shooting up heroine, and turns to a canvas.

I had to watch this sequence twice before I realized that we’re not actually looking at the artist, but at the artist’s reflection in a mirror. We see him looking at himself… looking at himself. It’s part of our own apprenticeship in looking.

Stefano, like many a hapless giallo protagonist, dies. I’m sorry, but I think pretty much anyone would see that coming. This likelihood allows the viewer to taste the bitter irony of every shot of Stefano restoring the mural. As he pulls away the plaster to reveal two wicked hags and adds life to the picture of Saint Sebastian’s death, he’s participating in his own demise as well. His act of restoration and creation engenders his destruction.

If art both gives life and takes it away, drawing from the subjectivity and the life force of a painter, what are we to make of recording, of mechanical ways of preserving life? It turns out that Legnani’s cuckoo sisters believe Norman Bates-style that they’re keeping their brother alive. Buono Legnani immolated himself in a final act of depravity and macabre fascination.

However, his elderly sisters keep his charred body preserved in formaldehyde and play his gravelly, heavy-breathing voice on a tape recorder.

In the top shock-horror scene of Laughing Windows, Stefano discovers the witchy sisters stabbing a victim to death when they proceed to show them their “brother,” the corpse and the recording.

The camera, from Stefano’s perspective, looks shakily from the one to the other twice, as if to ask, “What insane person could call this anywhere near a representation of life? Or even of death?” This facsimile strikes me as a grotesque parody of a person—it’s skin and bones and it speaks, what more do you want? A repeated voice recording and a husk of a body. It also reminds me of some of the intensely gross medieval depictions of death as the utter defeat of the flesh. By preserving their brother, the sisters totally miss the point of his art—capturing fleeting glimpses of human life slipping away, not worshipping cadavers.

This corpse-revelation launches a deeply disturbing scene. It could’ve been played for humor, but it’s not. The sisters are hacking up another sacrifice in hopes of reviving their brother. A lot of very stirring horror films revolve around this idea of preserving something (The Mummy, DeToth’s House of Wax, Psycho, all come to mind) and I think in this way that they’re attempting to cope with the cinema as a form of embalmment. Laughing Windows pokes fun at hollow mechanical or technical means of merely preserving or even of reanimating a dead person. Avati instead hints that the only things that truly live forever are those which have been strained through the filter of human creativity. Legnani may have been a nutso great artist—his sisters are just nutso.

Stefano is too dizzy, judging by the waffling of the handheld camera, to protest when they urge him to take a look at the slaughter. He doesn’t resist and his somnambulist pliability in the situation gives the whole thing the fuzzy, unreal vertigo of a nightmare. And then a blade flashes into him. We could’ve seen it coming, but somehow, we just don’t expect it when it comes.

And so, to the final sequence.  Stefano manages to flee with his open chest wound to a local church where he hopes to ask for help from the kindly priest. Well, the priest turns around, smiles, and begins to speak in a female voice. “He” is actually one of the hooded sisters. Stefano stares wide-eyed, unable to respond as the other sister waddles in, ready to finish the job. Avati cuts back and forth to the painted hags torturing Saint Sebastian in the mural and the film comes full circle.

Stefano is about to meet the fate that was right under his nose the whole time. We brace ourselves for viscera and more struggling torture.

We get a cut away to the façade of the church. Is that cut merciful or cruel, though?

After all, we can still hear the Legnani sisters twitter and giggle as Stefani moans. We don’t see it, but it’s there for us on the soundtrack. Now, there are actual “laughing windows” in the film…

But the windows of the church really laugh at us, a laugh of complicity, because we know what they conceal.

Seriously, now, you can try and tell me that Martin Scorsese didn’t totally think of this ellipsis when he came up with that terse, horrifying last shot of the Lighthouse in Shutter Island, but I won’t believe you.

With the final shot of The House of Laughing Windows our apprenticeship in looking is complete. We, the spectators, now occupy the position of the painters of horror, having been trained to look at ugliness, beauty, surrealist spectacles, details, life, and death. And as those witchy cackles and cries punctuate the soundtrack, we can imagine, we can make the image in our minds, although we might not want to fill the ellipsis. We can conjure up the fuzzy tormented elegy of the beginning (since that credits sequence is an accurate depiction of what’s going to happen to Stefano) or we can mold a new vision.

We become the painting, we become the cinema. It’s not the first time I or anyone else has made this observation, but great movies often invite audiences to “remake” or to participate in them. They’re constructed as partnerships, kept fresh and living by the disgust, pleasure, and, above all, the creativity of the viewer.

Preservation is not art, Avati tells us. Nor is cinema mere preservation, capturing living things as they are—soon to be were. The cinema dwells in gaps, lacunae, death in life. Truly knowing how to look and how to fill in those gaps renders us capable of seeing things as alive. And something alive is always on the edge of death. Perhaps the greatest art always flirts with death, absence, non-meaning and needs something else to complete it.

When we learn not only to look, but also to see, we are art, which is the intersection of life and death. And that should scare the hell out of us. I give a lot of credit to La Casa Dalle Finestre Che Ridono for pulling all these threads together in a giallo.

Morality Play: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)

It’s one of my absolute missions in life to get more people to watch silent films. Really, if, on my deathbed, I can say, “Well, I got more people to realize that The Phantom of the Opera is better without duets and Sarah Brightman,” I will consider it a small victory against the forces of darkness.

Which is why it’s kind of a disappointment to me to have to say that I do not consider Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a great silent film.

“I’m deeply hurt by your critique, Nitrate Diva. You wound me to my core.”

First off, Jekyll’s a bore. He doesn’t have to be, as Fredric March proved, but here, the part, as written, comes across as such a saint that we, as audience members, almost want him to slip into degradation.

We get it. He’s a nice guy. Could we please move onto the bordello now?

This is a problem since he takes frustratingly long to go over to the dark side. Then, once the transformation to Hyde finally occurs… the degenerate immediately takes the potion *again* and flips back to Jekyll. Um, yeah right. Once you’ve unleashed Hyde, he’s going to go paint the town red. I don’t buy for one moment that he’d say, “Gee, this is nice and all, but I better make sure that the process is reversible.”

However, like many, if not most, of the movies I write about, this 1920 Barrymore vehicle, directed by John S. Robinson, harbors shining moments that redeem it from the dustbin of history and make it worth watching. Stay with me, folks.

So, Barrymore does oblige and scares the Hell out of us with that famous no-cut transformation scene. His facial contortions evoke fear, not in spite of, but rather because of the fact that there’s no intervening makeup in that first shot. He’s still recognizable, but evil has some how entered him. We get the feeling that his body is nothing more than a suit of clothes—it all depends on how it’s worn, and by whom.

I would be very surprised if Kubrick’s vision of Jack Torrence hadn’t been shaped by this famous personality switch, in that it’s the person behind the face, not so much the face itself, that we see warp before our eyes.

Even so, one does get the feeling that it would all work more effectively on a stage. Barrymore spooks us onscreen, but he could hold us totally captive if we were right there, watching it imminently happening. The cinematic medium numbs the visceral reaction, for this viewer at least.

For me, Nita Naldi’s performance, not Barrymore’s, stands out as the enduring, outstanding one. Something about this Irish-American gal from Harlem (born Nonna Dooley) combusts onscreen, in contrast to the static beauty of The Great Profile.

Okay, so Naldi slightly overplays Gina, the exotic Italian dancer, but every time I watch Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I think about how much she could have run wild with the part. She really offers a subdued portrait of a woman on her way down—a dancer on the verge of prostitution who finally falls and doesn’t get back up.

She’s temptation incarnate, yes, but doesn’t take it too far. She comes across as a full person who wants to make a living and have a bit of fun, but still has a sense of decency that can be violated. In the scene when she’s first asked to vamp Jekyll, you can see several subtle emotional shades.

 Left with Barrymore’s older libertine friend, Gina broods. 

 At first, she’s skeptical about the “assignment,” then amused, then genuinely attracted (It’s Barrymore, for Heaven’s sake!), then hurt and ashamed when he spurns her. She also appears in perhaps the best scene in the movie: we find Gina after Hyde’s discarded her and is already buying his next victim…

We’ve only seen the back of Gina’s head at the other end of the dive, then she goes up to the bar, turns and glares at Hyde. In the close-up reveal, she looks like death.

I don’t know what we expect at this point. Probably not any kind of repentance from Hyde, but we don’t think it’s possible for him to get worse. And then he does.

He grabs the young whore and Gina and drags them both over to a mirror, as if to say, “Well, duh, Gina, she’s hotter. You can see for yourself!” This action chills us because we weren’t anticipating it. Normal guys dump girls when their, ahem, needs are met, but Hyde’s viciousness goes beyond selfishness. He shows that true evil isn’t indifference, but outright sadism.

 

If March’s Hyde (in the adaptation that came along just 11 years afterwards) gained anything from Barrymore’s (although ol’ Freddy was quite careful about taking it in a different direction), I would argue that the 1931 performance displays the same mocking politeness and deliberate desire to wound his victims in every way. For instance, after kicking Gina out, Hyde makes a little bow as gentleman would to a passing lady. March’s Hyde also parodies the airs and fine manners of his kind counterpart as a way of showing how hollow these gestures of politeness are—when wickedness lurks beneath.

The really sad part of the scene I’ve described above, however, arises from the fact that the new girl goes with Hyde in spite of enough red flags to read as an S.O.S. to any sensible woman.

I applaud that realism. I mean, what’s she going to say to the Madame? “But he seemed like a jerk!” I doubt that would fly. She’s made her bed and now she’s got to lie in it.

The film circles back multiple times to the idea of prostitution and of the woman in decline: consumed and then thrown away.

Right before Jekyll goes into the dance hall where he meets Gina, this shot of a random, grizzled streetwalker suddenly fills the screen. Robinson, the director, clearly wants us to cherish no illusions. No matter how prostitution starts, it ends up really ugly.

Now, this focus on vice was nothing new for cinema in 1920. In fact, the plot trope of young girls ruined by white slavery featured in several popular “problem pictures,” such as The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (1913) and the much more ambitious feature, Traffic in Souls. Yet, these dramatizations morally hedged their bets.

On the one hand, they warned young girls not to put themselves in bad situations and exposed a social ill. On the other, they procured the kind of titillation that vicariously invading forbidden spaces like brothels or shady dancehalls automatically provides—without implying unnecessary sin on the part of the viewer.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde plays on the same double code. For instance, consider this shot, of elegant men crowding into a doorway to watch Gina shimmy in her scant shawl.

Not only do we get the sense of the male gaze, but also of a cold, dehumanized, upper class male gaze. We can’t see their faces. They stand as vaguely sinister icons of pleasure-seeking gentleman slummers. They visit the underworld, yet remain untouched by its cheapness.

They don’t pay the real price of what goes on here, although they fuel the wickedness with their appetites and their money. And yet, aren’t they just slightly more hands-on versions of the movie audience that’s come to savor the spectacle of degradation—once removed?

A preachy, muckraking quality dates Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and infuses it with somewhat distasteful hypocrisy. Nevertheless, what I appreciate about the film resides in how it engages a tactile revulsion in its viewers. The emphasis on Hyde’s hands stands out thanks to a close-up during the transformation…

Just looking at these hands, we can easily imagine what it feels like to be touched by them. They’re scabby, scratchy, leathery, and all-round gross. Second only to Barrymore’s obscene conical head, these hands translate the sexually predatory nature of Hyde. When he finally has his freshest filly alone, he pulls off her shawl and immediately palms her chest.

It’s disgusting—because that tactile sensation has been cleverly foregrounded. We can practically feel Hyde’s hands. The twitchy, avid motions of his fingers draw the eye to wherever his hand goes in a haptic manner—that is, his hand makes the eyes “touch” the screen and feel as though they’re being touched. Skeeved out yet?

There’s also another scene, which I would usually file under silly, if not for how much it resonates with me. Jekyll’s sworn off the potion, but the potion hasn’t sworn off him. It comes back to him in the form of a huge spider that crawls into his bed and re-injects him with its wicked venom. He spontaneously merges back into Hyde.

Hm. Addiction metaphor, anyone? Detox hallucinations? Perhaps because it’s Barrymore and we all know how alcohol destroyed him, but this superimposed spider conveys the creeping violation of compulsive behavior that always comes back, whether you want it to or not, whether you can resist another moment or whether it vanquishes you. I also suspect that this scene inspired Ray Milland’s bat hallucination DT’s sequence in Billy Wilder’s addiction picture, The Lost Weekend.

Again, the spider calls up a cinema-triggered indirect tactile sensation. I shudder, almost as though I can feel a spider scuttling along my skin.

In the end, I do recommend this silent—not because it’s a brilliant horror film, but rather because it does interject some gritty realism and consciousness of self-abuse into horror. Many scholars have remarked that the genre works out hidden social and moral issues. Well, this one never gets too far away from them in the first place.

Under Wraps: The Mummy and His Complex

From the first, Karl ‘Papa’ Freund’s 1932 The Mummy almost slaps you across the face with its audacity.

It’s actually so bold that I daresay a lot of people (me, for about 21 years, included) mistake its stylistic flourishes for primitiveness. In terms of the sheer patience that the film assumes on the part of the audience, it equals Hitchcock, in my humble opinion. After all, Frankenstein opens with a grave robbing and Dracula quickly gets to ghostly coachmen and bats. The Mummy, instead, aligns the viewer with the overly eager British archeologist Norton (Bramwell Fletcher) whose cavalier spirit dispairs over the “bits of broken pottery” he has to catalog before getting to the fun stuff, like the unopened blasphemous casket containing a necromantic scroll and the preserved dead guy. Although, in all fairness, who can blame him on that?

So, the senior archeologists leave the young assistant alone with the loot (I’m an intern—believe me, this is never a good idea). We know what’s going to happen. Casket opened. Ancient curse called down. It’s ALIVE!

But it’s amazing how long Freund toys with us. Norton looks at his work. Gets up. Walks to the casket. Sits back down. Gets up again. Slowly, slowly opens the casket, pulls out the scroll. I can’t stress this enough: it’s a really long time, although it doesn’t feel heavy. It feels leisurely, but taut, I think. When I last watched it with an eye towards this, though, I almost couldn’t fathom how long it is. It reminds me a lot of the famous scene in North by Northwest before the cropduster comes, when Cary Grant is waiting by a bus stop for about six minutes and we’re still riveted.

But the key to the suspense of this opening sequence resides in the way it’s filmed. I lost track of the jump cuts. The camera leaps back and forth from different sides of the young archeologist. These cuts mostly don’t threaten to disorient the viewer since we know the layout of the small hut. Instead, the editing aims to perturb the audience, just slightly. They make you uneasy without you totally understanding why. (Seriously, Jean-Luc Godard, Papa Freund called and he wants his technique back.)

And then the key shift comes after this shot, when the young man finally opens the casket.

And then there’s a cut to this.

WTF is THAT, do I hear you ask? The entire audience has no idea. It’s almost totally abstracted. Cutting to something completely out of scale in order to shock, confuse, and to suggest a seismic shift. The universe is out of balance. It’s a formalistic uh-oh. (Now you, Michelangelo Antonioni, Papa Freund called, he wants his technique back.)

Then, slowly, the head of the archaeologist bobs back into the frame and the camera tilts quickly down to the breeched casket and to Norton’s hands poised over the scroll.

It’s a vertiginous shot, full of bravado and discreet discomfort (on the part of the audience members). It bears the hallmarks of genius for me. And the mummy hasn’t even come to life yet.

Once Norton starts to read, Imhotep does promptly reanimate. Again, you have to appreciate how minimalistic and patient this moment seems in contrast to the theatrics of the other Universal pictures. No histrionic music wailing over the soundtrack (Freund didn’t care for the score that was written for the movie, something I learned via Richard Freeman’s article “The Mummy in Context”). We just hear the faint whisper of a chant as the mummy awakens.

Cliff Alberti’s Immortal Ephemera blog also does a nice job of explaining the admirable restraint of the trailing bandages and the off-screen monster, so I won’t repeat it, but I would like to give a shout-out (pun intended) to Bramwell Fletcher’s terrific shriek, perhaps the best non-female scream in the classic horror pantheon.

I’d also like to express my admiration for the first sight of the risen mummy. The camera pans from the working archeologist to the hand of the undead thing, reaching for the scroll.

Suddenly, the living and the dead, two things that should always be separate, are joined together by a simple turn of the camera. Shudder, shudder. A masterful opener.

A scene later, Karloff’s terrific entrance as the Ardath Bey is also troubled with jumpy cuts. These shots occur in rapid succession.

First, I imagine that Freund was having a little in-joke here. Frankenstein’s monster’s first entrance in Whale’s 1931 film resembles this one very much, with a flurry of jump cuts following the monster’s appearance in a door. However, here again, the cuts serve a pattern. They disturb the default continuity of time and space that we’ve come to expect as viewers. What you think you know about everything—Freund seems to say—forget it all. The dead are walking. And I’m going to show you a thing or two…

Bazin and his Mummy

“For the first time, the image of a thing is bound up with its duration, like a mummy of change.”

These are the words, or rather my translation of the words, which André Bazin, the insanely influential French film theorist, used to describe motion pictures. Like a death mask or a fingerprint, movies are existentially tethered to the things they portray.

In terms of semiotics, the science of signs, fingerprints, death masks, and photographs are indexical signs because they refer back to their original, the thing that they’ve preserved. In other words, we don’t say, “Wow, that picture looks like Boris Karloff.” It is Boris Karloff we’re seeing and we know that the image is proof of his existence. (I’m totally indebted to another great critic, Peter Wollen, for this, BTW. I didn’t cook this up on my own!)

Back to Bazin and the mummy. Bazin believed that movies perfectly realized and attained what humans had always craved to do through art: to defeat death by preserving something forever through its appearance. This need for a “victory over time” is what Bazin called the “mummy complex.”

Holy Isis and Osiris! Doesn’t this sound familiar?

What is the monstrous Imhotep trying to do literally, if not defeat time by creating a copy, a very, very lifelike (or deathlike) representation of Princess Ankh-es-en-amon? Unlike Dracula, who basically wants nourishment (and sex), our Imhotep wants true, enduring, eternal love which he can only attain by mummifying the woman he loves. Reunion isn’t enough. It’s preservation he wants. He doesn’t just want companionship. He wants a companion of his own creation yet somehow representative of the woman he adores, lovingly embalmed.

To this end, let’s look at the introduction of Helen Grosvenor which includes another of Freund’s clever touches. One of the movie’s roving tracking shots trundles around the museum exhibit of the Princess’s belongings until we finally see Karloff, as Ardath Bey, looking down at the mummy of his dead lover.

 

The back-and-forth shot reverse shot stresses his need for a connection with the relics. He bitterly wants for this husk and this garish portrait to be the woman he loves, magically preserved by the customs of his culture in their attempts to cheat time and death. And they do come painfully close. She’s there, but really, she is elsewhere. And this is when the camera swish-pans to the right. This cut, in turn, brings on a strange scrolling panorama of Cairo, which whooshes by before stopping on a close-up of Helen by some ornamental palms (after another disguised cut).

Some special bond, transcending space and time, does connect the mummy case to this girl, we know at once, thanks to this elaborate “scrolling” panorama shot, which I consider a pretty creative visual manner of representing something like reincarnation. But, what a poor likeness! The crude sarcophagus portrait pales in comparison to the real thing, the human face that cinema can deliver to us: Zita Johann palpitating and forever alive.

The movies can embalm time, as Bazin would say. However, I suspect that Bazin would not have totally dug The Mummy as a film. It’s far too invested in expressionism and illusion, in clever tricks of make-up and fantasy, and in the Méliès school of cinema to win his unequivocal good graces. Yet, The Mummy does deal adroitly with the idea of cinema as the mummy, the preserved shell of time and space.

That long, long scene at the beginning makes you really feel time, just as the film’s many roving tracking shots force you to scan and explore the film’s diegetic space as a fully three-dimensional world. Cliff Alberti pointed out that Imhotep walking out of the hut takes place off-screen. So do several of the most crucial horror moments of the film (the murder of the museum guard, Helen’s dog being killed). These spatial ellipses enhance the all-encompassing atmosphere of Freund’s film. It is a total space, a place, a world unto itself, not just a set with a camera plunked down in it.

There are hints of what would come to be known as the Bazanian realism, respecting the integrity of space and time. In fact, Freund later worked with cinematographer Gregg Toland on Mad Love. According to Scott McGee at TCM, Pauline Kael attested that this later film was key in helping Toland develop the techniques he’d employ in Citizen Kane, which Bazin singled out for the intelligent ambiguity of its deep-focus shots. We’re really not all that far away.

Nevertheless, how The Mummy blends this kind of grounding in space and time with the occasional magical, unreal manipulation of these elements intrigues me most. Freund’s camera becomes almost like Imhotep, wiggling around in reality one moment, and, in the next instant, jumping to the past or into some mystical, symbolic abstraction of time or space, like the rolling city panorama or the sudden emptiness of the archeologist’s hut.

The classic example of this shift from real space to a fantasy space occurs during the famous gazing pool scene.

A stunning tracking shot swirls above the characters…

…and then plunges right into the pool, as a seamless dissolve transports us to the past.

And, from here, the flashback takes on the look and feel of both silent cinema and Egyptian scroll paintings (Hmm. Emulating the aesthetics of another era to intensify the philosophical implications of the work? Ingmar Bergman, your turn! Papa Freund called and he wants his technique back!)

People have remarked that this scene symbolizes the unconscious. That’s a slight stretch for me, but the sequence does subtly reveal that the past is never fully past. The tracking shot provides an ostensibly “continuous” movement into the past. Again, the camera is the bridge over time, slipping in and out between registers of reality.

Cinema is a mummy of change, reality embalmed, but it’s a mummy that can also call up quite a few incantations, too. Spells only become cheap tricks when they lose their impact and I think that this camera “trick” is still spellbinding. It makes me wonder what parts of the past are still haunting me—and all of us, on some level.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

The Mummy is a pretty kinky movie when you ponder it. The most warped moment, however, arrives not when the undead creature is present, but rather when Frank Whemple is flirting with the barely conscious Helen.

By talking to her about dead people. Smooth!

He goes on and on about how he dug up the Princess and handled all of her stuff and “her toilette things,” and how, upon unwrapping the lady mummy, he “sort of fell in love with her.”

The Princess’s Toilette Things.

Awfully fetishistic stuff, really.

Apparently, even affable, shaving-cream-ad-good-looking 1930s fellows like David Manners’s Frank harbor a secret necrophiliac bent! And we were condemning Imphotep as strange?

“Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall in love with?” Helen wryly asks. This single line of dialogue makes us truly appreciate Helen as a person for the first time. The sassy comeback renders her modern and amusing—not just some brooding reincarnated chick who’s susceptible to hypnosis. I also consider it a very important line in terms of the movie’s meaning.

Déjà vu?

It’s a deceptively deep question. How and where do we look for love? And why do we fall in love with somebody? Well, a lot of psychoanalysts have suggested that it has very little to do with the person we love and a lot more to do with our own issues. To grossly under-sell the theories of the French analyst Jacques Lacan, we love a certain “something” in that other person that makes us feel complete, since we humans are constantly split-up and divided inside. We’re not so much interested in that other person as we are in the part of ourself that we feel is embedded in that other person.

Frank even admits that one of the reasons he loves Helen is because she reminds him of the dead Princess. His “pure” desire for Helen therefore translates into a need for a victory over death, again. Yes, I’m psychologizing, but he has a crush on a corpse, for crying out loud! By having the woman who reminds him of the Princess, he can feel as though he’s conquered death and time. Wait, isn’t that what Imhotep wants, too?

Of course, Imhotep takes it a little farther. He actually wants to kill her and make her a living mummy whereas Frank seems content with the fantasy. So, in at least two forms, one extreme, the other acceptable, love is inscribed in the mummy complex.

“Love and crime and death” blend together in the all-consuming yearning for immortality. Which is kind of ironic, since all of these actors are dead, yet also undead silver screen mummies, embalmed in celluloid and now in DVD plastic, who dance for us at will.

In closing, I’d just like to make one more observation. I’ve already touched on how cinema is like a fingerprint (courtesy Peter Wollen!). So, I find it significant that the only “proof” that Imhotep came to life when his mummy went missing… is his handprint.

The transcribed hieroglyphs on the paper at left are meaningless if you can’t read them, but the image, connected to the mummy’s physical being, instantly tells a tale.

This handprint motif returns when when Imhotep grabs Helen’s arm towards the end of the film.

Now, that’s creepy because clearly it’s hinting at what she’ll become: a hideously embalmed monster. The dusty, macabre handprint tells us that there is no such thing as eternal life, except if you’re willing to give up some of what we consider to be essential to “life.”

Another aspect of what makes the handprints so eerie consists in their uncanny contradiction: a dead thing isn’t supposed to be able to grab, to touch, or to leave its mark on the living… but this one can. Even the narrator of the original trailer for the film got caught up in this contradiction. “The mummy: is it alive or dead? Human or inhuman?”

At the risk of sounding redundant, I’ll say it again: the film of The Mummy is itself a mummy. It’s the fingerprint of reality, keeping the players in a place between life and death. If Imhotep’s pool is a metaphor for the unconscious, it’s also a meta-phor for cinema. Freund troubles the gazing pool and sets before us strange dreams that are both real and unreal, both forever past and forever present. Both dead and alive.

As Bazin pointed out, every living thing put before the camera has become a mummy of change, a strip of time preserved forever intact. Now, that sounds pretentious when I write it, but it sure looks great when Freund shows it.

Sources and Resources:

Bazin, André. “Ontologie de l’Image Photographique.”  Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Vol. 1. Ontologie et langage. Paris: Cerf, 1958.

McGee, Scott. “Pop Culture 101: Citizen Kane.” Read the article at TCM.

Mulvey, Laura. “Death 24x a Second.” Reaktion Books, 2006.

Wollen, Peter. “The Semiotics of the Cinema.” Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972.

I did my thesis on Jacques Lacan, so what I say in this post is sort of a condensation of what I got from reading a lot of his essays, too many to cite in a blog, I think. However, if you’d like me to share some Lacan resources and point to a few essays, go ahead and contact me.

I’d also like to recommend Richard Freeman’s “The Mummy in Context,” an excellent review of the literary, cultural, and historical background of Universal’s The Mummy. This is chock full of great insights for anyone who loves this movie or movies in general!

I likewise definitely encourage you to read the Immortal Ephemera blog post on The Mummy, too, which is both personal and insightful and makes some very neat observations about the film. Eye-opening.