James Whale | The Invisible Man / 1933

no way back

by Douglas Messerli

 

R. C. Sherriff (screenplay, based on the book by H. G. Wells), James Whale (director) The Invisible Man / 1933

 

By 1933 the savvy, openly gay director James Whale and his closeted gay screenwriter R. C. Sherriff, both at work on The Invisible Man—released in October of that year—would certainly have seen what was soon coming regarding the Motion Picture Production Code and, in particular, the attitudes of the man who would soon be in full control of it, Joseph Breen.  

 

    Earlier that same year, Breen had raved against the performance of Tyrell Davis as Ernest the dancing instructor in George Cukor’s Our Betters, released in February of that year. And the people from the Hays Board had already descended upon Walter Lang’s late April release, The Warrior’s Husband with regard to the fact that it had been reported in Variety, as I mention in my previous essay, that the filmmakers had hired the entire chorus of the BBB Cellar Revue, a gay nightclub show, to play the emasculated men to the warrior women led by Katharine Hepburn. Reportedly, a great deal of the fun of portraying nearly all the men of the film as pansies was cut by the busy scissors of Breen and his board. Breen suddenly announced that the word “pansy” was now disallowed in films, forcing the March release, Raoul Walsh’s Sailor’s Luck to have a lisping bathhouse attendant notify his friends about the approach of a pansy in Pig Latin: “Hey fellas, etgay the ansypay!” to which the ansypay responded, wiggling his five fingers, “Hi, sailors?”

      As Harry M. Benshoff has suggested in his Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, after the Motion Picture Production Code’s crackdown in 1934, directors in the next couple of decades would increasingly turn to monsters and science in which to code and hide their queer figures, turning homosexuality into the true monstrosity that heterosexual society had always believed it to be.          Of course, Whale has long been interested in just such a coding structure, particularly in his two masterworks, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, where the creators behind these monsters were often gay figures, the monsters simply becoming symbols of their dark desires and souls. Even in The Old Dark House, the director had hidden much of his gay message in arcane Biblical passages.

      Yet unlike the werewolves, various vampires, and other monsters of the 1940s and 50s, Whale’s monsters and even their creators seemed to have far more fun than those who later threatened society through their visual differences and strange behavior, something which seems to occur in The Invisible Man as well. Although the scientist, played by Claude Rains as Dr. Jack Griffin, in his insanity later becomes a true villain, before that he is more like a bad boy adolescent threatening the unthinking and crude small town British pub habitues and the equally mindless local police with good reason.

      Strangely, however, this film rarely gets talked about as being a gay film. Even Bernshoff mentions it only it passing. Yet in many respects it is Whale’s most openly gay work.

      It is highly likely that Whale was able to perceive, given Breen’s expressed convictions to rid film of all homosexual figures who, at least had been in the 1930s film as wretched stereotypical types, would soon become “invisible,” H. G. Wells’ metaphor for the character with whom they were now engaged.

 

     If in 1952 Ralph Ellison realized that the same metaphor could be applied to the black community in a majority white society, so did Whale realize that in the primary heteronormative world which had now managed to even wipe out their existence in film, gays had also become invisible. And accordingly, Wells’ monstrously mad scientist, in Whale’s and Sherrif’s hands, was made far more loveable and appealing despite his use of the dreadful drug “monocaine” (clearly a sort of pun on cocaine, hinting at something that is limited to one “mono” as opposed to being shared with others “co”) that he has ingested and that will soon make him thoroughly insane.  

      Early in the work even Griffin’s employer, Dr. Cranley (Harry Travers), in discussion with his daughter Flora (Gloria Stuart), presumably Griffin’s fiancée, describes his young assistant’s disappearance as a “queer thing.”

      Unlike almost any other text of the day, in which such a word would have meant only “strange” or “odd,” we know both the screenwriter and director were fully aware of the other meaning of that phrase, and they employ it here very carefully, Flora herself backing it up with her comment, “He was so strange in those last few days, so excited and strung up” presumably meaning that he was so involved in his experiments that he was no longer paying attention to her. But the added phrase, “excited and strung up” also hints at the behavior of a drug addict or perhaps even a queer man who has just come out, discovering a world outside of the boring stomach experiments of Dr. Cranley.

      Cranley’s other assistant, Dr. Arthur Kemp (William Harrigan), vying for Flora’s attention, summarizes his viewpoint of their affair: “He meddled in things men should leave alone.” Flora immediately wants to know what Arthur means.

      “He worked in secret. Kept a lot stuff locked in a big cupboard in his laboratory. He’d never open that cupboard until he’d barred the door and drawn the blinds. Straight-forward scientists have no need for barred doors or drawn blinds.”

       On one level, of course, he is simply talking about the numerous chemicals and beakers that Griffin works with, reminding us of the laboratory of another such mixed-sexual horror film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But the way he describes it also cannot help but remind us of gay men hiding away their porno, locking the door, and closing the blinds in order to masturbate, particularly given the strange usage of “straight-forward scientists” immediately after, suggesting through the word “straight” the heterosexual confederation of men who openly fuck women without need for a closeted world which is precisely what the barred doors and closed blinds hints at.

       But the text here goes even one step further, as Kemp insists, “He cares nothing for you Flora, he never cared about anything but test tubes and chemicals.” In short, Kemp is telling her that her would-be lover’s interest was not in women but in drugs and whatever else, perhaps the chemical pull of his own perverse desires.

 

     The movie, having begun in a Sussex inn where Griffin, already invisible but fully clothed and bandaged arrives looking something like an abominable snow man with sun glasses, to demand a room and a meal, and after that to be left alone. But, of course, Whale has crowded this corner of the world with the same drunken louts and “cackling” Una O’Connor (the word Whale’s stand-in gives to his star actor in the movie Gods and Monsters) who as the inn-keeper drives the men wild with her screaming hysteria and lights up the screen with comedy where darkness otherwise prevails. In some respects, her character, Jenny Hall, is as queer and agitated as she sees her new boarder to be. But she has some reason for her behavior, having seen part of his face disappear. Moreover, when after a few days he has completely overtaken the room with smelly chemicals, beakers, and tubes without paying the rent, which leads her husband up to tell the intruder to leave, only for him to be thrown down the staircase by the powerful Griffin.

      The police are called, mayhem ensues, and the rude mechanical’s imaginations called into doubt by a police inspector. But after, it is finally established with whom they are actually dealing, a menace who at any moment might disappear into thin air—truly the story of so many gay men who hid their sexual beings by pretending to be straight—they are suddenly absolutely terrified, particularly of his ability to become naked without their ability to see him, in other words, for his ability to engage in sex out of sight. The local policeman expresses it best:

 

“He’s invisible that’s what he is. If he gets the rest of those clothes off we’ll never catch him in a thousand years.”

 

     Nudity and nakedness strangely become the dominant metaphors here, a power that even Griffin is totally aware of. As a naked being he can no longer be seen, so he might do anything, kill anyone, destroy thousands, and even control an army without being able to be found and discovered. When the being of whom you are most afraid becomes powerful because of his sexuality, because of his very nakedness, then there is no controlling his behavior. The very fact that he can disappear into his “closet,” can pull off his clothes with full liberty is what makes him both invisible and such a dangerous being. He does not behave like well-dressed, straight-forward (to borrow Kemp’s words) common folk. He is a monster because he is free and in that freedom lies his power.

     The only dangers, as he himself admits, is in his need to eat, when you can see the food within, and in his footsteps, in the very actions he has made through which he can be traced.

     Critic Eric Langberg, in one of the best non-academic essays I’ve read about this film, reiterates how fun most of this all is, at least in the beginning:

 

“Openly gay director James Whale excelled at making films about outcasts from society, considered horrifying by the local mob but in actuality rather sympathetic. Unlike Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, where I root for the “monster” pretty much the entire time, in The Invisible Man, Griffin is consumed by his ambition to take over the world and becomes truly monstrous. It’s fun to watch, though, how Whale uses the typical mob-mentality conventions of some of his other films and turns the story from comedic to more horrific. The mob following a police officer up to the room to see the Invisible Man is funny.”

 

     Perhaps even more darkly humorous is the fact that in trying to escape the intrusions of the mob of society, in his search for a “way back” to normality, Griffin approaches the straight man Kemp to become his “partner.” “I must have a partner, Kemp,” he announces as if demanding a relationship with the local bully who would rather see him dead.

     But Griffin is now in full control and demands that Kemp give up his own clothing that he might have something to wear over his bandages. And later when it is time for bed, Griffin insists Kemp offer up his own pajamas, again ridiculously insisting upon a relationship between the two that could not possibly exist: “We’re partners, bosom friends.”

     Langberg comments: “Still, though, there are a number of fun little queer moments in The Invisible Man. When Griffin invites himself over the house of fellow scientist Kemp, he insists that he borrow Kemp’s pajamas, because, after all, they’re “bosom friends,” a phrase typically applied to close women. Both men are ostensibly in love with the same woman, too; this is another common device whereby men can work out their attraction to one another.”

     I’d argue, however, that by this time Griffin, in his sense of new power, has simply grown delusional, imagining a relationship—and when you demand to put on another man’s pajamas it is also a sexual relationship, I assure you—with a heteronormative nincompoop, who quickly choses to call the police and his impotent father figure Dr. Cranley instead of helping his new “partner,” let alone share his bed. Kemp locks his study door, closeting himself away from this wild “bosom buddy.”

     Langberg notes another remarkable moment, however, before this film finally begins to get more serious:

 

“And, of course, there’s the thrill of watching the Invisible Man strip down to just a shirt, talking about how he’s going to give the villagers a shock. He takes off his pants with his rear end poking toward the camera. Then, when the policeman opens the door, he jumps and leaps around, laughing. Even though Griffin is invisible, Whale still strategically places a table in front of where his crotch would be, just like you would if his junk was actually flopping around in the visible spectrum. (See: the strategically placed flower in front of the male nude in Will’s apartment on Will & Grace, or the whole scene in The Simpsons Movie where Bart skateboards in the buff). Whale is inviting us to imagine it, even if he isn’t showing it.”

 

     Alas, even such remarkably insightful films such as Whale’s demand that a man who has killed several hundreds in a meaningless railroad crash and tossed many a body to their deaths must come to an end and be destroyed by normative society. They catch this gay man by his footprints in the snow, he wailing out his own sense of betrayal about his wishful lover Kemp: “I put my trust in Kemp. I gave him my secret.” It is perhaps any gay lover’s lament after having felt suddenly that he might control the world with the new force of identity he feels, only to crash back to earth with the reality that since he is truly invisible the flesh he desires can never be his to embrace, to kiss, even to touch.

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Raúl Ruiz | Mistérios de Lisboa (The Mysteries of Lisbon) / 2010, USA 2011

the confessions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carlos Saboga (screenplay, based on Os Mistérios de Lisboa by Camilo Castelo Branco), Raúl Ruiz (director) Mistérios de Lisboa (The Mysteries of Lisbon) / 2010, USA 2011

 

Raúl Ruiz’s stunning costume drama of Lisbon, Portugal in the late 19th century was first shown as a series of television dramas before being combined into a 4 ½ hour film in 2011.

    As one might expect for such a long work—although there is no feeling of lethargy in this rather exciting series of tales within tales—the movie begins quite slowly, almost in a kind of catatonic state, after the film’s ongoing narrator sets the situation: an elderly British woman is discovered to be drawing a young boy, who reads nearby as if he didn’t even notice her. The camera follows him into the hall of the church school, housing orphans, where once more, oblivious to his fellow classmates, the beautiful child, named only João (João Luis Arrais)—without a middle or last name, and rumored to be the son of the school’s priest, Father Dinis (Adriano Luz)—continues to read. A young bully pulls out of the group of boys, grabbing the book from João’s hands while insisting that even if his classmate seems different and special, he is, like them, only the son of a thief or horse trader. João responds in the only way he might, offering the bully the book but suggesting it might even teach him how to read. The incident seems to end, but a few seconds later a nun discovers João in the hall undergoing what appears to be an elliptic fit.

     It is at this moment, in its fevered hallucinations depicting the child’s ill mind, that Ruiz’s brilliant film actually begins. And although the child’s mind ultimately stops its spin, the movie seldom does. Indeed, one might describe The Mysteries of Lisbon as a kind of hallucinatory fable in which ultimately it appears that all of Lisbon is interconnected to each other, as in tale after tale in the work devoted to storytelling, we discover its figures living lives that are nested together a bit like Russian dolls, each containing each.

     João’s “fit” and illness after brings him a woman of the nobility, Ângela de Lima (Maria João Bastos), who gifts the child a toy box theater (that reiterates the film’s complex plot) and a portrait of himself, which reveals to the child that he does have a visage beyond the one he has created in his active mind. The woman, so Father Dinis explains, is his mother, who, married to a man other than his father, had to abandon him to protect his life.

     Although Father Dinis confesses this part of the story to the boy, throughout most of the rest of the film, he becomes, like Hitchcock’s famous character, “a man who knows too much,” having been the confessor of nearly everyone else in the complex grouping of characters. And little by little, first through the young boy’s search for his paternity, and later through the interrelationships of other adjacent characters, we grow to perceive the nearly impossible series of coincidences that life often is.

    João (whose real turns out to be Pedro) is the offspring of another figure of the aristocracy, D. Pedro da Silva (João Baptista), who like Ângela, alas, is a second-born child, which means in this hide-bound world of traditions, that neither shall inherit any money, and that both, accordingly, must marry into wealth. The fact that they fall in love can only be perceived as an unfortunate tragedy that must be righted by their parents by marrying them off to others, and, when it is discovered that Ângela is pregnant by da Silva, by the murder of her baby. Enter Father Dinis before his saintly avocation, a gypsy who convinces the would-be assassin, Alberto de Magalães, The Knife, to abandon his intentions by paying him a large sum of money. So does he take on the responsibility of the young boy, but, obviously, this is only the beginning!

 

    If one were to recount all the dozens of miraculous—and yes, still hallucinatory, in Ruiz’s almost always surprising camera work—interrelationships I am sure it would sound much like an outsized soap opera. Indeed, it is, in terms of plot. But in terms of the fierce loves, hates, jealousies, gossip, treacheries, lies, and political machinations of the world in which these figures live, the inter-connected stories seem almost inevitable, as each tale swallows up the others, so that we lose track of the original figures only to have them reappear at unexpected moments, drawn back into the overall landscape as they age. In the process Father Dinis, also an orphan, discovers his own paternity, and the now older João-Pedro reencounters the man that might had taken his life at birth, challenging him to a duel. Fortunately, the now dashing pirate Alberto (Ricardo Pereira), cannot shoot well—a fact which we long ago witnessed in his attempt to kill Pedro’s father years earlier—and settles the matter, somewhat comically, by himself confessing to the much younger man (who indirectly changed Alberto’s life) how he came to love and abandon the beautiful Elisa de Montfort (Clotilde Hesme) before marrying Eugénia, formerly the mistress of Ângela’s husband, the Count of Santa Bábara! You see what I mean?

 

     Ruiz, brilliant director that he is, does not at all attempt to maintain that these almost claustrophobic interrelationships are anything near realism. And besides, the figures themselves behave as if they were living in a grand theatrical work, women fainting on the spot for being called gossips, married women bawdily bedding any handsome man who comes their way. Men are killed and saved upon whims of fate and higher-ups. And children are tortured by the incompressibility of the world into which they have been born. The director maintains a Brechtian distance by simultaneously playing out these remarkable events in the child’s theater box. In fact, when he again returns us to the sick boy’s bed at the end of the film, we may even wonder whether the entire “mysteries” of Lisbon have been truly been a hallucination of the young boy, lost in the imaginary adventures of his beloved books.

         Has the child not only recreated a slash-buckling past for himself, but a future that resolves all that he cannot currently comprehend? Does it matter? Did the world of Scheherazade have to be true to enchant her listener night after night?  

 

Los Angeles, November 4, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2013).

Alfred Hitchcock | Rear Window / 1954

the prisonhouse of love

 

John Michael Hayes (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Rear Window / 1954

 

For many of the years since I first saw Alfred Hitchcock’s brilliant film, Rear Window, I had concluded—along with most of the commentators on that film—that the work was primarily about voyeurism, about a society of voyeurs, about a particular voyeur (L. B. Jefferies/James Stewart), and about the way voyeurism plays a role in the making and watching of films themselves. There is a kind of perversity about the work, and the fact that, as some commentators had noted, the “murderer” suddenly turns the tables, crashing out of the frame to attack Jefferies for the invasion of his privacy, allows one easily to characterize Hitchcock’s film, like his later Vertigo, as a study in psychosis: that of character and audience alike.

    Of course, everyone recognizes that there are important aspects to the film that take it in adventuresome and comic directions—such as the strangely distant relationship of Jefferies and Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and Lisa and Stella’s (Thelma Ritter) involvement with Jefferies’ voyeurism. But the film long seemed to me a frightening statement on society’s passive psycho-sexual propensities.

     Increasingly over the past few years, however, I have felt that I was missing something in perceiving the movie only in this way. The writing by John Michael Hayes, for example, is quite remarkably clever. And, despite the darkness of its overall concerns, there is more comedy in this work than in almost any Hitchcock film other than The Trouble with Harry.

     Recently in revisiting the film, I observed that, despite Jefferies’ vocation as a photographer—an accident in connection with his photography is why he stuck in the two-room apartment—he does not actually use his camera for the usual purposes. We do discover that he has taken photographs (he has pictures of the garden and comments on having taken “leg art” of the young woman across the way), but as audience we see him use the camera only as a kind of telescope—and, later, as the murderer comes calling, as a flash device to temporarily ward off attack.

     It is obvious, indeed, that Jefferies is nearly impotent with his leg in a cast: he cannot, metaphorically speaking, use his “tool,” the tool of his trade. Similarly, he cannot be sexually stimulated by one of the most beautiful and well-dressed women in the world—Lisa Fremont. As Stella observes, he can’t even get a temperature—he is symbolically and, apparently, literally frigid, despite the heat wave disturbing all the other tenants and his visitors.

    Moreover, he himself is in camera, trapped in a room not unlike a judge’s chambers—where he is judged as a failure by both his nurse and would-be lover. Like the camera he uses he now exists in a kind of black box from which he cannot escape, and which, in turn, forces him to look outside of his own self and space.

    It becomes quite apparent early in the film that L. B. Jefferies has no life other than that of nomadic observer of things. Like many American boy-men (a phenomenon on which I have commented elsewhere) he finds any suggestion that he “settle down” to be an unpleasant alternative he has no intention of accepting. His and Lisa’s witty discussion of “here” and “there” is almost a treatise on the kind of meaningless life he has lived: she, the healthy sexual beauty, ready to offer up her body as a “free mount,” is all “here,” while Jefferies is only “there,” anywhere but where love and social engagement exist.

    Through the accident of his being laid up, Jefferies is forced to view what is around him; and that consists of various sexual and societal possibilities. Rather than focusing, as do most critics, on the window of the “murderer”—which takes the movie in the direction of the murder mystery genre which, argues one critic, Hitchcock settled on after presenting the possibility of others—it might be useful if we were to first consider the various tableaux presented to his major character.

     There is the single, hard-of-hearing sculptor, a creative spirit who lives rather nicely by herself. But Hitchcock and, by extension, Jefferies presents her as a busybody. In this rear window tableaux, her satisfaction is the exception.

     The woman living above her, Miss Torso, a shapely young girl who parties each evening, is seen by Jefferies as offering up, almost like a prostitute, her sexuality. Lisa perceives her, rather, as “juggling wolves,” not at all interested in any of the men surrounding her each night. Ultimately, we discover that Lisa is right, for Miss Torso is delighted upon the return of her rather unattractive soldier boy.

      Nearby lives “Miss Lonelyheart,” a middle-aged woman who, unlike the sculptor, is not at all happy being alone; she sets the table for two and play-acts a visiting guest. At one point, when she actually brings home a stranger, his sexual advances force her to demand he leave, and she is left unhappily alone again. Both Stella and Jefferies are terrified that she may attempt suicide.

    A composer, whom both Stella and Lisa admire, is described by Jefferies as a man living alone who “probably had a very unhappy marriage”; later he describes him as “getting it” (the topic is inspiration, but the subtext is sex) mostly from his landlady.

    Also across the way a couple, to escape the heat, sleep on their balcony in full view of all, which clearly suggests that they do not have much of a love life; their major activity centers around hoisting their dog up and down into house and yard by means of a small basket, and when the dog is killed by the murderer, their grief is broadcast to all the neighbors.

    A young married couple who briefly appear at another window spend days in bed apparently enjoying the sexual bliss of new matrimony. Jefferies similarly scoffs at their behavior.

     Indeed, Jefferies is almost prudishly critical of all these individuals and their relationships with others.

     But it is the “murderer” Lars Thorwald and his wife who most clearly represent what the observant prisoner perceives as the standard condition of a relationship—a nagging and bed-bound wife driving her seemingly patient salesman husband to distraction—and ultimately, of course, to murder.

     In short, because of his enforced entombment in his “plaster cocoon,” because of his temporary “imprisonment,” (Stella claims in the very first scene to know that there is going to be “trouble” and that her patient will wind up in the New York state prison Dannemora), Jefferies, locked in a prison of his own making, is forced to encounter the “here,” the world of societal and sexual interrelationships. Despite the difficulty Lisa has in getting him to “mount,” and to climb the symbolic mountain of her love, the “adventurer” must give up all action before he can discover how to behave. If he has previously lived only as a voyeur, as someone who clicks and snaps images of reality, he is now forced to truly observe and encouraged to involve himself in the world.

     Of course, there is also a price to be paid for that involvement. Since he cannot function and cannot enter the world, Lisa enters it for him, endangering her own life. Lisa’s illegal entry into the Thorwald’s apartment and her discovery of the wife’s wedding ring forces Jefferies to perceive his failures. As Lisa slips on the ring to prevent Lars Thorwald from discovering what she has found, she has, symbolically speaking, married him. And in that act, Jefferies is made to recognize another alternative to the possibilities of social involvement he has witnessed.

       Observing Lisa and Jefferies’ rear window communication, however, Thorwald, like Thor, the ancient god of thunder (Jefferies first observes his neighbor behaving suspiciously during a thundering downpour), takes action, threatening the very body of the observer-witness, an act that ends in Jefferies’ defenestration, his literal fall—a fall not just out of his isolation and into the “here,” but a falling into love and sexual being. The movie ends with Jefferies comfortably asleep (something he has been unable to do throughout much of the movie) aside Lisa who, reading an adventure-travel book, puts it aside to pick up a fashion magazine.

     Given these perceptions about this movie, I see Rear Window now less as a study in cultural psychosis than as a comedy of social interrelationships, a comedic playing out of various sexual-social combinations that allow our “hero” to move from his child-like isolation to an adult social and sexual being.

     Most of the perversity associated with this film, accordingly, seems to have less to do with the major character’s careful observation of his neighbors—something he points out, that they also can do to him—than it does with a failure to recognize that the often frightening but essentially comic sexual and social encounters he watches are those of normal human beings—of us all.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2005

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2005), and My Year 2005: Terrifying Times (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006)

Jean Renior | Elena et les hommes / 1956, USA release 1957

the theater of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Renoir (screenplay, adaptation with Jean Serge, and dialogue), Jean Renoir (director) Elena et les hommes / 1956, USA release 1957

 

The third of Renoir's trilogies about theatrical life, is subtitled a "musicale fantastique," and indeed, Elena et les hommes plays out, this time using the background of pre-World War I French politics, as a kind of fantastic series of musical interludes, dominated by a street song tribute (sung by Marjane) to Paris and French life.

      At the center of this farce is a beautiful Polish Countess, Elena Sokorwska (a stunning Ingrid Bergman), who, despite her poverty, pretends a life of great wealth. She is about to marry a wealthy boot-manufacturer, Martin-Michaud (Pierre Bertin), but a few days before the event, lured into the streets by the celebration for Général François Rollan (Jean Marais), she encounters Le comte Henri de Chevincourt (Mel Ferrer) who clearly wins her heart. 

     He, in turn, introduces her to Rollan, whereupon, a love triangle is immediately established, continuing a few days later in the country house of Martin-Michaud, whose son, also about to be married, carries on with the servants while Elena shifts her lovers from room to room—a hilarious series of frames that immediately recalls Renoir's earlier film, Rules of the Game. While that satire, however, had serious consequences, Elena, although occasionally suggesting the state of the nation is at stake, represents more a theater of the heart than a theater of war; and Renoir seems determined to move entirely out of the realm of realism by ultimately encamping the three in a whore house, surrounded by the police, gypsies, and Rollan's adoring public.

     In order to help Rollan escape, Henri must stand in for Elena's lover, as they kiss before a window with the crowds watching below. Elena is, at first, angry with his behavior, but gradually she warms up to his amorous embraces as the crowd is transformed, like beings out of A Midsummer Night's Dream into a kissing and embracing tangle of bodies.

      Some critics, particularly The New York Times's Bosley Crowther, were outraged by what they saw as an inferior Renoir film. Crowther blamed Warner Brothers executives as having interfered with the cutting: "How this fiasco could have happened is difficult to explain." The work, alternated, he declared, between a romantic drama and a slapstick farce. Jack Warner himself had complained that he found Renoir's plot incomprehensible.*

      In fact, Elena et les hommes is a farce from beginning to end; like the films that came before, it is a work that embraces the love of all things theatrical, realities larger than life. Accordingly, the film is also movingly romantic; "Was there ever a more sensuous actress in the movies?" asks Roger Ebert of Ingrid Bergman. Jean Marais is a dashing hero, Henri a handsome lover, and the two of them keep the forceful Elena from having to deal intensely with the reality of her existence. Together they help her rush bravely forward into territory where angels fear to tread, and ultimately reward her with a fabulous life of fiction as opposed to a shabby existence with a venal businessman.

      Once again, Renoir celebrates romance over the ordinary, the fantastic over the real, sex over frozen commitment.

 

*To give Crowther his due, the version he probably saw was the American editing, Paris Does Strange Things, which Renoir disavowed as his own work.

 

Los Angeles, April 29, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (April 2010)